The next fixes worth doing, in order

Every site has more SEO work available than anyone has time for. The useful question isn’t “what could we do?” but “what should we do next?”. The Opportunities page answers that by reading a site’s Search Console data and tracked keywords, finding the pages closest to earning more clicks, and ranking them by roughly how many visits each could bring. Then, after you act, it measures whether the change worked.

Who this is for: anyone with Search Console connected who wants a short, ordered to-do list instead of a long audit. It works best for sites that already get some traffic from Google. A brand-new site with no impressions will see few opportunities, and the Site Audit is the better starting point there.

The five kinds of opportunity

Open a project and go to Overview › Opportunities. The page lists up to 150 items in one table, each labelled with its type.

“Close to the top” is the classic striking-distance list. Pages on page two get a bigger multiplier, because moving from position 14 to position 3 is a far larger jump in clicks than moving from 5 to 3. If Google showed you rarely or never for that search last month, no estimate is given rather than a made-up one.

“Seen, not clicked” is often the quickest win. Google already shows the page; people just don’t choose it. That is almost always the title tag or meta description, and fixing those takes minutes.

What “visits a month” means

The estimate is rough, on purpose. The page says so: it is for ordering the list, not a promise to a client. It uses a standard click-through curve and your own Search Console impressions, so the numbers are grounded in how often Google really shows you. Treat a 40 against a 12 as “do this one first”, not as “we will get 40 visits”.

What you see on screen

At the top, four tiles: open opportunities, possible extra visits, changes measured, and a breakdown by type. Filters let you show one type at a time. Each row shows the opportunity, the page and the estimated visits per month, with actions on the right:

• Fix writes a new title and description for the page, for you to review.
• Open article jumps to the article in the content editor when the page is a RankThat article.
• Why shows the evidence: the searches, positions, impressions and clicks behind the item.
• Mark done if you fixed it another way, or dismiss if it isn’t worth doing.

Dismissed items stay hidden. Items marked done are hidden for 90 days, which is long enough to see whether the work moved anything.

Writing a title that earns the click

For “Seen, not clicked” items, the review screen gives you a drafted title, but it helps to know what a good one does. It names the thing searched for in the first few words, adds the detail that makes your result the obvious choice (a price, a place, a guarantee, “same-day”), and ends with the brand. “Colombian Supremo” says nothing; “Colombian Supremo Coffee Beans, Medium Roast | Bean & Barrel” answers the searcher before they click. The free SERP snippet preview shows how a title will look in Google.

Improving titles and descriptions in bulk

The header has a button called Improve all titles & descriptions. It takes up to 25 pages per run and rewrites each one’s title and description once, aimed at the single search that is worth the most to that page. You review the list, edit or untick anything, and apply. On WordPress the changes go straight into the site’s SEO plugin through the Bridge plugin; if a firewall blocks outside connections, Bridge picks them up within five minutes. It needs a completed Site Audit first, because the audit knows each page’s current title and content.

Results of changes: the part most tools skip

Every change made through RankThat is recorded: fixes from Opportunities, fixes from the Site Audit, changes made through the Claude connector, and items you mark done. Starting 14 days after the change, RankThat compares the page’s Search Console clicks and position over the 28 days before with the period after, scaled to the same length. It keeps measuring up to day 120.

A change is marked better if clicks rose 15% or more (with at least five clicks to start from) or position improved by two or more places, and worse if they moved the same distance the other way. Everything else is neutral, which is a perfectly common result.

This matters for two reasons. You learn which kinds of changes work on this site, which is the closest thing to SEO feedback you will get. And the results go into the monthly report as “Results of Earlier Work”, so the client sees outcomes, not just activity.

A worked example: Bean & Barrel Coffee

Bean & Barrel’s Opportunities page shows 38 items. The top five:

1. Seen, not clicked: the “Colombian Supremo” product page gets 2,400 impressions a month at position 6 with a 1% click rate. Its title is just “Colombian Supremo”. Estimated 50 visits a month.
2. Close to the top: “best beans for cold brew” at position 12. Estimated 35.
3. Pages competing: two posts both target “french press ratio”. Estimated 15.
4. Losing clicks: the espresso guide lost 40% of its clicks month on month. Estimated 30.
5. Not in Google: a new gift set page isn’t indexed.

The owner spends one afternoon. She uses Improve all titles & descriptions for 18 product pages, including the Colombian one (“Colombian Supremo Coffee Beans, Medium Roast | Bean & Barrel”). She merges the two French press posts and redirects the weaker one. She sends the espresso guide to Content Refresh. She checks the gift set page in Search Console and finds it was accidentally set to noindex.

Four weeks later, Results of changes shows the Colombian page as better (clicks up from 24 to 61 for the period) and most of the other title changes as neutral. That is a normal pattern: a few pages move a lot, most move a little.

Related pages: cannibalization and internal links

Two pages under the SEO menu go deeper on specific opportunity types.

Cannibalization shows every search where two or more of your pages split the impressions over the last 90 days, ignoring branded searches. Each row has a suggestion: consolidate into one pillar page when three or more pages compete, redirect the weaker page when one ranks below position 20, or otherwise give each page a different focus keyword. Read keyword cannibalization for why this costs rankings.

Internal Links lists orphan pages and suggests links between related pages based on shared words in their titles, with HTML you can copy. To have links added automatically, use the orphan-page fix in the Site Audit, which places links only on words already on the page.

What Opportunities doesn’t do

• It needs Search Console. Most items come from Search Console data, and so does measuring results. “Close to the top” also needs tracked keywords in the Rank Tracker.
• One-click fixes cover titles and descriptions. Merging posts, refreshing content or fixing indexing are steps you take, with the item pointing you to the right place.
• Estimates are rough. They order the list. They are not forecasts.
• It can’t credit changes made outside RankThat unless you mark the item done.

A weekly habit

The data behind all of this is the same Search Console data shown in Search Performance.

Tip: start with “Seen, not clicked”. It is the only opportunity type where Google has already done the hard part.