Glossary

Definitions for the terms used across SEO Triage.

Decision Tiers

Quick Win: High-impact keyword you can rank faster than your competition. Already close to top-10 with weak competitors — move on it first for the fastest ROI.
Opportunity: Solid ranking potential but needs more work. Further from top-10 or stronger SERP — plan for next sprint, not this week.
At Risk: You're losing ground on a keyword that was performing. Investigate and recover before the decay accelerates and you lose the position entirely.
Severity: MinorAt Risk severity: Small ranking slippage. Monitor and address if it worsens.
Severity: MajorAt Risk severity: Meaningful ranking decay. Prioritise a recovery pass soon.
Severity: CriticalAt Risk severity: Severe ranking loss. Investigate immediately — likely technical issue or content deprecation.

Create: No page exists yet on your domain for this keyword. Publish fresh content targeting it — typically a new article, landing page, or category.
Update: A page already exists and ranks, but not at its full potential. Optimise title, content depth, internal links, or on-page signals to push higher in SERPs.
Fix now: Urgent decay detected. Technical (indexing, canonical, crawl) or content issue is blocking your ranking — address before the drop gets worse.

CTR OpportunityWeight 25%: Gap between your current click-through rate and the expected CTR at this SERP position. A wide gap means your title/description is underperforming and easy clicks are on the table.
Search IntentWeight 15%: How closely the query matches the type of content you publish. Informational, transactional, navigational — a mismatch means you will struggle to rank no matter how good the page is.
SERP WeaknessWeight 25%: How beatable the current top-10 competitors are on this query. Weak domain authority, thin content, or outdated pages mean the SERP is contestable.
Position AccessWeight 25%: How close you are to top-10. The closer you already are, the less effort needed to break through — page 2 rankings are the most actionable.
Effort RequiredWeight -10%: Estimated work to move the needle (content depth, technical fixes, links). Lower effort scores higher because it means faster ROI.