Severity is the level that describes how large the impact of a problem is. In SEO monitoring it is used to rank issues and alerts, so that a page-wide noindex ranks above a missing alt text. Priority is related but separate, because it states how urgently something is handled.
What severity levels are common?
IT incident management has the best-documented schemes. The Splunk guide describes five levels, SEV 1 to SEV 5, from a critical incident affecting a large number of users down to a low-level deficiency that causes minor problems. The incident.io guide recommends three levels (minor, major, critical) and says each level should be summarized in one or two sentences. Splunk advises measurable criteria, such as the share of affected users, and the same definitions across an organization.
Splunk also separates the two ideas. Severity measures business impact, while priority indicates urgency. In Splunk’s example, an embarrassing typo in a mobile app is low in severity but high in priority.
How does this apply to SEO issues?
The transfer to SEO is an adaptation by this glossary, not an established standard. SEO tools classify findings in a similar way. Screaming Frog assigns high, medium or low priority to each issue, based on potential impact. A severity scheme for SEO can combine several factors:
- how many URLs are affected
- how important the URLs are, for example by traffic or revenue
- whether crawling or indexing is blocked
- how long the problem has existed
The exact levels and cutoffs are a decision for each team.
Example
Three findings appear after a release (invented example, numbers are illustrative).
| Finding | URLs | Level |
|---|---|---|
noindex on all product pages |
18,000 | Critical |
| Duplicate title tags on filter pages | 2,300 | Medium |
| Missing alt text on blog images | 140 | Low |
The first finding triggers an immediate alert. The others go into the weekly review.
Sources
- Understanding incident severity levels – Atlassianatlassian.com
- Incident Severity Levels 1-5 Explained – Splunksplunk.com
- Severities – incident.io guideincident.io
- Over 300 SEO Issues & How To Fix Them – Screaming Frogscreamingfrog.co.uk
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