Content and links get most of the attention in SEO conversations, but a website with technical problems can undo all of that work quietly, in the background. Here's what to check first, in the order it usually matters most.
Indexing: is Google seeing your site at all?
Before anything else, confirm your pages are actually indexed. A page that isn't indexed can't rank, no matter how good it is. Search Console's coverage report will show pages that are excluded, and why — often a blocked robots.txt rule, a stray "noindex" tag, or a canonical pointing somewhere unintended.
Site speed & mobile performance
Most searches in Nigeria happen on mobile, often on slower connections. Large uncompressed images and heavy, unnecessary scripts are the most common culprits for slow load times, and both are usually fixable without a full rebuild.
Broken links & broken paths
Internal links that 404, or assets referenced with the wrong file path, are more common than most business owners expect — especially after a site has been edited by more than one person over time. A page can look fine at a glance while its stylesheet or images are silently failing to load in the background, which hurts both user experience and crawlability.
Missing or duplicate metadata
Every page needs a unique title tag and meta description that accurately describes it. Duplicate or missing metadata across pages confuses both users scanning search results and Google's understanding of what each page is actually about.
Schema markup
Structured data — schema markup for your business, articles, FAQs, or breadcrumbs — helps Google understand your content more precisely and can unlock richer search result formats. It's not a ranking shortcut on its own, but it removes ambiguity that could otherwise work against you.
How to prioritize
If you can only fix one thing this month: confirm indexing first, since nothing else matters if Google isn't seeing the page. After that, broken links and site speed usually give the most noticeable improvement for the effort involved. Want someone to check all of this for you? A full SEO audit covers this and more, starting from ₦80,000.