Crawlability and Indexability Come First
Before a page can rank, it has to be reliably crawled and indexed — which means checking the basics first: is it blocked by robots.txt, does it return the right status code, is it actually linked to from somewhere a crawler can find it. These fundamentals rarely make for exciting audit findings, but a page that search engines can't consistently reach won't rank no matter how good the content is.
Site Speed Matters, But Don't Chase Perfection
Site speed and Core Web Vitals get a lot of attention, and for good reason — a slow, janky page hurts both user experience and, to some degree, rankings. That said, chasing a perfect performance score on every page is rarely the best use of time; the bigger wins usually come from fixing pages that are meaningfully slow, not shaving fractions of a second off ones that are already reasonable.
Not Every Audit Flag Is Equally Urgent
Structured data and mobile-friendliness matter for how a page is understood and displayed, but they amplify good content rather than substituting for it. A common mistake is treating every flag in an audit tool as equally urgent — in practice, a short list of fixes that affect crawlability or a genuinely broken experience will usually outweigh a long list of minor technical nitpicks.