An SEO issue is a problem or weakness on a website that an audit or crawling tool detects, such as a broken link, a missing title or a page blocked from indexing. Each tool defines its own list of checks, so the number and names of issues differ between tools.
How are issues classified?
Tools usually sort issues by severity and type. Screaming Frog’s documentation distinguishes three classes:
- Issues are errors that should ideally be fixed.
- Warnings are findings that should be checked and possibly fixed.
- Opportunities are potential areas for improvement.
Each finding also has a priority of high, medium or low, which the vendor bases on potential impact. When the page was read on 2026-10-06, it listed over 300 issues in about 20 categories, among them response codes, page titles, canonicals, directives, hreflang and sitemaps. Semrush’s Site Audit uses errors, warnings and notices, with errors named as the most harmful, and mentions over 140 issues.
What is the difference between an issue and an alert?
An issue is a finding about the state of a URL or a group of URLs. An alert is a notification that something relevant has happened, often when an issue is new or when numbers change. Monitoring tools turn issues into alerts only when they pass a rule, so that the team sees changes and not the full list.
Example
A crawl reports 1,200 URLs with the issue “Canonical points to a redirected URL”. The affected URLs all use one product template. Fixing the template resolves the issue for all of them in the next crawl.
Common mistakes
- Fixing issues in the order of their count and not of their effect on important pages.
- Treating a tool’s warning as a certain error, since the vendors themselves describe warnings as findings to check.
- Comparing issue totals between tools that run different checks.
Sources
- Over 300 SEO Issues & How To Fix Them – Screaming Frogscreamingfrog.co.uk
- 33 Technical SEO Issues Affecting Most Websites – SE Rankingseranking.com
- SEO mistakes: Common SEO issues – Semrushsemrush.com
- Site Audit overview – Semrush Knowledge Basesemrush.com
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