Technical SEO Audit: Finding and Fixing Hidden Problems

You can write the best content in Kenya and build perfect backlinks, but if Google cannot properly crawl, understand, and index your website, none of it matters. Technical SEO is the infrastructure layer that enables everything else to work. When it breaks, your rankings break with it, often silently and without any obvious warning signs.

This guide walks you through conducting a technical SEO audit of your own website, identifying the most common issues we see on Kenyan business sites, and fixing them before they cost you traffic.

Crawlability: Can Google Find Your Pages?

Google discovers your pages by following links and reading your sitemap. If pages are orphaned with no internal links pointing to them, blocked by your robots.txt file, or missing from your sitemap, Google may never find or index them.

Start by checking your robots.txt file at yourdomain.co.ke/robots.txt. Make sure it is not accidentally blocking important pages or entire directories. Common mistakes include blocking CSS and JavaScript files which prevents Google from rendering your pages, blocking image directories, or having a blanket "Disallow: /" that blocks the entire site typically left over from a development environment.

Next, submit your XML sitemap to Google Search Console and check the Coverage report. This shows you which pages Google has indexed, which pages it tried to index but encountered errors, and which pages it has excluded. Any page you want ranking should appear in the "Valid" category. If important pages are in "Excluded" or "Error," you have problems that need attention.

Indexation: Is Google Using Your Pages?

Being crawled and being indexed are different things. Google may crawl a page and decide not to index it because the content is too thin, it is too similar to another page, or it has a noindex tag preventing indexation.

Check the "Discovered - currently not indexed" section in Google Search Console's Coverage report. If important pages appear here, it means Google found them but chose not to include them in search results. This typically happens when pages have insufficient unique content, when there are too many pages competing for the same topic, or when pages load too slowly for Google's crawler.

Also check for accidental noindex tags. We have seen cases where a developer added noindex during staging and forgot to remove it before launch, effectively hiding the entire site from Google. A quick check of your page source code or HTTP response headers can confirm whether this is happening.

Site Speed and Core Web Vitals

Google's Core Web Vitals are three specific metrics that measure user experience: Largest Contentful Paint measures how quickly the main content loads and should be under 2.5 seconds. First Input Delay measures how quickly the site responds to user interaction and should be under 100 milliseconds. Cumulative Layout Shift measures visual stability and should be under 0.1.

Use Google PageSpeed Insights to test your pages and identify specific issues dragging your scores down. The most common problems on Kenyan websites are uncompressed images that should be in WebP format, render-blocking JavaScript and CSS that delays the main content from appearing, slow server response times from cheap hosting, and excessive third-party scripts from analytics, chat widgets, and social media embeds.

Mobile Usability

Google Search Console's Mobile Usability report highlights specific issues that affect how your site performs on mobile devices. Common problems include text too small to read, clickable elements too close together, and content wider than the screen requiring horizontal scrolling.

Fix every issue flagged in this report because Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning the mobile version of your site is what it primarily evaluates for rankings. If your mobile experience is poor, your desktop rankings will suffer too.

HTTPS and Security

Your entire site should be served over HTTPS with a valid SSL certificate. Check for mixed content issues where some resources are loaded over HTTP while the page is served over HTTPS. Browsers display security warnings for mixed content sites, which destroys user trust. Also ensure all HTTP URLs properly redirect to their HTTPS equivalents with 301 redirects.

Broken Links and Redirects

Broken internal links that lead to 404 error pages waste crawl budget and create dead ends for users. Crawl your site using a tool like Screaming Frog to identify all broken links and fix them by updating the link destination or removing the link if the target page no longer exists.

Check your redirect setup as well. Redirect chains, where page A redirects to page B which then redirects to page C, waste crawl budget and slow down page loading. Every redirect should point directly to the final destination. And ensure you are using 301 redirects not 302 redirects for permanent page moves, as 301 redirects transfer SEO authority while 302 redirects do not.

Structured Data Errors

If you have implemented schema markup, validate it using Google's Rich Results Test tool. Errors or warnings in your structured data can prevent rich snippets from appearing in search results and may indicate problems with how Google understands your content. Common issues include missing required fields, incorrect data types, and URLs that return errors.

A thorough technical SEO audit can uncover issues you never knew existed. If you would rather have professionals handle it, our SEO team at Cyril Creatives conducts detailed technical audits with prioritised action plans. Get in touch to schedule your audit.