Run any free SEO checker and you’ll get a list of “issues” — sometimes twenty or thirty of them, colour-coded red and orange, looking like the site is falling apart. Most of it isn’t that serious. Here’s a rundown of the flags that come up again and again, and a straight answer on whether each one’s actually worth your time.
”Missing meta description” — matters, easy fix
Genuinely worth fixing. The meta description is the couple of sentences under your title in Google’s results — without one, Google just grabs a random chunk of your page text, which often reads badly. Five minutes per page, real payoff.
”H1 tag missing or multiple H1 tags” — matters a little, easy fix
Every page should have one clear heading that says what it’s about. Multiple H1s or none at all rarely tanks a page on its own, but it’s a genuine (if small) signal, and it’s usually a one-line template fix rather than a rewrite. Worth doing, not worth panicking about.
”Low word count” — depends entirely on the page
A checker flags any page under some arbitrary word threshold (often 300). For a contact page or a simple confirmation page, that’s completely normal and not a problem. For a service page that’s supposed to be convincing someone to book a Marlborough builder, a thin page really is a real issue — but the fix is “write more, better,” not “hit a number.” Judge this one by what the page is for, not the flag itself.
”Too many/too few internal links” — usually noise
Checkers love a number here, and it’s rarely meaningful for a small brochure site. A five-page business site with a sensible nav menu doesn’t need to hit some arbitrary internal-link count. Ignore this one unless a specific page genuinely has no way to reach it from anywhere else on the site — that’s the real problem, not the count.
”Missing alt text on images” — matters, easy fix
Worth fixing properly. It’s not just an SEO nicety — alt text is what a screen reader reads aloud to a visually impaired visitor, so a site full of blank alt attributes is a real accessibility gap, not just a missed ranking signal. Also genuinely quick to fix in most site builders.
”No SSL / not HTTPS” — matters a lot, should already be handled
If this one fires, fix it immediately — browsers actively warn visitors your site isn’t secure, which kills trust instantly. In practice this almost never fires on a site built any time recently, since most hosts (including Cloudflare Pages, which we use) issue SSL automatically. If you see this flag, it usually means a DNS or hosting misconfiguration, not a content problem.
”Slow page speed” — matters, but check what’s actually slow
Speed genuinely affects both rankings and whether people wait around for your page to load. But the fix depends entirely on the cause — a huge unoptimised photo behaves very differently to bloated third-party scripts (chat widgets, ad trackers, embedded video). Our website speed test breaks down the specific cause rather than just giving you a single score to worry about.
”Duplicate title tags” — matters if it’s real, common false positive
Worth checking, but read carefully — some checkers flag this across an entire site when really only two or three pages genuinely share a title (often an old test page or a leftover draft). A real duplicate title splits ranking between two pages that should be one signal; a single stray page from years ago is a quick delete, not a redesign.
”Keyword density too low/high” — mostly outdated advice
This one shows up on older-style checkers and is largely a hangover from how SEO worked over a decade ago. Modern search engines read for meaning, not for how many times a word is repeated. Stuffing a page with a keyword to hit some density percentage reads badly to an actual customer and does little for ranking. Safe to ignore.
The pattern across all of these
The flags worth acting on are almost always the technical, binary ones — missing tags, broken security, genuinely broken links. The flags worth questioning are the ones based on an arbitrary threshold — word counts, link counts, keyword percentages — where the honest answer is “it depends on the page,” not a number a crawler can judge on its own.
The honest answer
A long list of flags looks worse than it usually is. Fix the handful that are genuinely binary and quick — missing descriptions, alt text, broken security — and treat the threshold-based ones as a prompt to look at the actual page, not an instruction to hit a number. If you want to see your own site’s list and aren’t sure which flags are which, our free SEO check gives a plain-English report rather than just a score.