🔍 Why Your Pillar Scores May Not Be Moving
Deploying OTTO recommendations is the right first step, but pillar scores won't improve unless the right types of issues are resolved on the right pages. Each of the four Holistic SEO Pillars — Content, Authority, Technical, and UX Signals — is fed by a distinct set of OTTO issue categories. Fixing issues that do not map to the lagging pillar, or fixing low-impact pages, will have little visible effect on your scores.
🗂️ Understanding Pillar Scores and OTTO Issue Categories
Each of the four Holistic SEO Pillars is influenced by different types of issues surfaced in OTTO. In general terms:
- Content Score — is affected by on-page content issues such as missing or duplicate metadata, heading structure problems, thin content, and internal linking gaps.
- Authority Score — is affected by issues related to your site's backlink profile and external link quality.
- Technical Score — is affected by crawlability and indexation issues, broken links, redirect chains, sitemap errors, canonical conflicts, and structured data problems.
- UX Signals Score — is affected by page experience issues such as Core Web Vitals failures, mobile usability errors, and image optimization problems that impact load performance.
Because the exact issue subcategories and their pillar assignments can vary based on your site's configuration and the version of OTTO you are using, the most reliable way to identify which open issues are suppressing a specific pillar score is to contact our support team directly. A teammate can review your account, confirm which issue types map to the stalled pillar, and advise on prioritization.
📋 What to Have Ready When You Escalate
To help our team diagnose your stalled pillar score as quickly as possible, please have the following information ready:
- The name of the project affected and the domain it is connected to.
- Which specific pillar score is stalled (Content, Authority, Technical, or UX Signals) and approximately how long it has been unchanged.
- Whether you have recently deployed OTTO recommendations and, if so, which issue categories those recommendations belonged to.
- Any error messages or warnings visible in your OTTO dashboard related to the affected pillar.
- The timestamp of your most recent deployment, so the team can check whether a score recalculation has been triggered.
Providing this detail upfront will allow the team to identify the root cause without needing to ask follow-up questions, and get you to a resolution faster.
If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.