How to Use the Points to Improve Option in DefiniteSEO

The “Points to Improve” option in the DefiniteSEO WordPress Plugin serves as a central dashboard for evaluating your website’s SEO performance. It analyzes every corner of your site, from individual posts and pages to site-wide configurations, and breaks down findings into three clear categories: Critical Issues, Recommendations, and Good Points. This makes it easy to spot what needs fixing, what can be improved further, and what’s already set up correctly.

Rather than leaving users to guess what’s working and what’s not, this feature presents an actionable and organized overview. Each issue or success is grouped by area, such as posts, taxonomies, schema markup, sitemap settings, and more. Users can expand each group to explore detailed results. For convenience, every item is paired with a direct link to fix the problem or review the setting. This structured layout helps users move through fixes efficiently, without bouncing around the admin panel blindly.

What the Plugin Analyzes

DefiniteSEO’s “Points to Improve” feature performs a complete scan of your site’s content and configuration. It doesn’t just stop at checking blog posts or product pages. It also dives into structural settings, taxonomy terms, social metadata, schema markup, and even breadcrumbs. This deep-level analysis ensures that you’re not overlooking anything that might affect search performance.

The tool evaluates both the content and the settings applied across different areas of your site. That includes whether your social tags are filled in, if canonical URLs are being used properly, whether schema is set up for each post type, and if images are prepared for SEO. The plugin also checks technical elements like sitemap structure and breadcrumb paths and so on.

Here’s what it typically scans:

• Posts and pages
• Custom post types (like products or testimonials)
• Categories, tags, product brands, and other taxonomies
• Schema markup configuration
• Sitemap content and structure
• Social metadata (OpenGraph and Twitter tags)
• Local SEO settings
• Redirects and 404 logs
• WordPress preferences and global settings
• And everything that matter in SEO

The SEO Score: What It Means

After scanning the site, DefiniteSEO calculates a website-wide SEO score out of 100. This score offers a quick summary of how optimized your site is. It is prominently displayed alongside three labeled indicators: Critical Errors, Recommendations, and Good Points. Each contributes to the overall score based on severity and quantity.

Importantly, this score only reflects pages and posts where a focus keyword has been assigned. This helps prevent inaccurate reporting on content that hasn’t yet been optimized. If some of your posts or product pages don’t show up in the analysis, you’ll want to add a focus keyword to them first.

The score is made up of:

• Critical Errors: High-priority issues that can significantly harm SEO performance
• Recommendations: Areas where improvements are advised but not urgent
• Good Points: Confirmed SEO best practices already implemented

By improving critical errors and addressing recommendations, you can gradually increase this score and move your site toward stronger visibility in search engines.

Critical Issues

Critical issues are the most urgent problems detected on your website. These are flagged when something essential is missing or misconfigured. Left unresolved, they may reduce your visibility in search results or cause user experience issues. This category includes a wide range of problems that span from missing metadata to broken redirects and schema errors and so on.

DefiniteSEO presents these issues grouped by context. For instance, errors found in posts are grouped separately from those found in category pages, product tags, or site settings. Each individual issue lists which content it affects and provides a clear link to go directly to the editor or settings screen where the issue can be corrected.

Common types of critical issues include:

• Missing or empty meta titles and descriptions
• Social sharing titles not set for Facebook or Twitter
• Schema markup missing or improperly assigned
• Missing canonical URLs or duplicated canonical links
• Pages returning 404 errors with no redirect rule
• Sitemap missing key post types or not being generated
• OpenGraph or Twitter image tags not set
• Breadcrumb structure not present or misaligned
• And a lot more

In many cases, the plugin will identify issues at scale. For example, if all your product categories lack schema markup or your post tags are missing canonical URLs, those will be grouped together for easy access and bulk fixing.

Recommendations

Not every issue on your site will be critical, but even small imperfections can weaken your content’s performance in search results. The Recommendations section is where you’ll find these suggestions. They point out areas that may not be broken, but could be better optimized. These recommendations are based on SEO best practices and writing quality metrics.

This section is useful for refining and polishing your content and settings. It might show that your sentences are too long, your keyword usage is imbalanced, or your social previews are too generic. While these issues won’t necessarily cause ranking penalties, addressing them can enhance the user experience and improve engagement metrics like click-through rate and time on page.

Typical recommendations include:

• Meta title is too generic or lacks a focus keyword
• Keyword density is too low or exceeds natural limits
• Sentences are long or hard to read
• Missing internal links between related content
• Social previews need stronger titles or custom images
• Breadcrumb prefix is missing for certain post types
• Category base in URLs is disabled and should be enabled

Each recommendation comes with a clear explanation and a “Click here to fix” option. These links help you jump straight to the editor or plugin setting that needs adjustment, saving time and guesswork.

Good Points

The Good Points section highlights what you’ve already done right. It recognizes areas of your site that follow SEO best practices. This feedback is important because it confirms that your hard work is paying off and provides reference examples you can model other content on. It also ensures that well-optimized pages don’t get overlooked when assessing your site’s overall SEO health.

Good points are also grouped by category, such as post types, schema configuration, sitemap inclusion, and social metadata. Each point is listed clearly and reflects settings that are properly configured. Even smaller optimizations, like including the homepage in your breadcrumb structure or enabling structured data for author archives, are acknowledged here.

Some examples of good points:

• Meta titles and descriptions are present and optimized
• OpenGraph and Twitter titles are configured correctly
• Proper schema markup is enabled for all content types
• Sitemap includes all relevant post types and media
• Breadcrumbs are active and point to appropriate paths
• Canonical tags are accurate and avoid duplication
• Social sharing images and previews are properly set

Reviewing these good points can help you ensure future changes do not break existing configurations. It’s also a great way to monitor progress as you optimize more content.

Navigating the Interface

The layout of the “Points to Improve” option is intentionally designed for clarity and workflow. It uses a tabbed interface with three main categories: Critical, Recommended, and Good. Within each tab, issues or findings are organized into collapsible sections based on their type or the area of the site they affect.

This design keeps the interface clean while still offering access to detailed insights. Users can expand or collapse sections to focus on one area at a time. Whether you’re working on fixing product categories or reviewing social metadata settings, this interface keeps things manageable.

Navigation highlights:

• Collapsible groups by post type or setting category
• “Click here to fix” links for direct access
• Clear icons indicating type of issue
• Tab switching for focused optimization workflows

This setup makes it easy to build a regular routine around site audits. Instead of being overwhelmed by a long checklist, you can handle SEO tasks one section at a time.

Tips for Ongoing Use

To get the most out of the “Points to Improve” option, it’s helpful to check it regularly, especially after publishing new content or making changes to your site structure. Regular reviews allow you to catch errors early and stay on top of SEO maintenance.

Here are some best practices:

• Set a focus keyword for each new post or product before publishing
• Begin with Critical Issues, then move to Recommendations
• Use Good Points as a benchmark for other posts
• Schedule a biweekly SEO review using this feature
• Don’t ignore site settings like social tags, breadcrumbs, and schema

Since SEO is an ongoing effort, this tool helps you adapt as your site grows. Whether you’re adding new blog posts, launching product pages, or installing new plugins, you can rely on this option to spot SEO gaps in real time.

Final Thoughts

The “Points to Improve” option is more than a diagnostic tool. It’s a practical guide that gives clarity and direction to your optimization efforts. Whether you’re managing a personal blog or a large e-commerce store, this feature simplifies the complexity of SEO into clear, actionable insights.

By addressing the critical issues, fine-tuning recommended areas, and learning from the good points, you can steadily improve your site’s performance in search results. The built-in fix links, organized layout, and transparent scoring system make it accessible to both beginners and advanced users.