Every Action Recommendation in the My Actions table has a Difficulty and a Score:

The Action Score indicates how impactful we think completing that Action will be for your website's rankings. A high score means that an Action 1) addresses a very important and/ or severe weakness in your website, and 2) will result in a meaningful improvement in that weakness.  Sometimes, however, an Action that is unlikely to have much of an impact is given a high score because it needs to be completed before another Action which will be very impactful, kind of like prerequisite courses that you need to get out of the way so you can take that really cool Advanced Astrophysics class. Although we usually recommend Actions with the highest scores, sometimes we'll shuffle things a bit in order to ensure that your website's link profile remains diverse, which reduces the risk of triggering a search engine penalty.


An Action's Difficulty is our subjective assessment of how much time, knowledge, and experience is necessary to complete an Action. A Difficulty under 20 or so means that even someone new to SEO and online marketing should be able to complete the Action in 15-20 minutes. Actions with a higher Difficulty may take more time or more familiarity with online marketing techniques to execute well, and generally will only be recommended after you've completed the most impactful easy Actions.