You paid for a website. Months later you search your own business name and it is not there, or it is below a directory listing you never created. The usual advice is to buy an SEO package. Before you do that, it is worth finding out which of eight specific things is actually wrong — because the fix is often free.
We audit sites for a living, and these are the causes we find, roughly in order of how often they turn out to be the real problem.
First, find out what Google actually thinks
Search this, replacing the domain with yours:
site:yourbusiness.cm
That lists every page of your site Google has indexed. Three possible outcomes:
- Nothing at all — your site is not indexed. Causes 1 to 4 below.
- One or two pages — partially indexed. Usually cause 3 or 5.
- Everything is listed, but you still don't rank — indexing is fine; it is causes 6 to 8.
1. The site is blocking search engines
Visit `yourbusiness.cm/robots.txt`. If you see `Disallow: /` your site is telling every crawler to stay away. This happens most often when a site is launched from a staging environment and nobody removes the block.
The related version is a `noindex` tag left in the page source. Both are one-line fixes that can cost a business a year of invisibility.
2. Every page claims to be the same page
A canonical tag tells Google which URL is the real one for a page. Set correctly, it prevents duplicates. Set wrongly — pointing every page at the homepage — it tells Google that your services, portfolio and contact pages are all copies of one page, and it drops them.
This is invisible to visitors and devastating to search. We have found it on live commercial sites more than once, including one where every page canonicalised to `localhost`. View the page source and look for `rel="canonical"`; each page should reference itself.
3. Your pages have no titles, or all the same one
Open two different pages and compare the browser tab. If they read identically, Google is seeing near-duplicate pages and will choose one to show, if any.
Every page needs its own title and description, written for the search result rather than for you. "Web Development Company in Douala" is a title. "Home" is not.
4. There is no text for Google to read
Some sites build their entire visible content in the browser after the page loads. Google can run JavaScript, but it is slower to and less reliable about it. If your headline exists only after a script runs, you are relying on a best effort.
Right-click, choose "View page source", and search for your main heading. If it is not in there, that is worth fixing.
5. The site is too slow on a phone
Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights. In Cameroon this matters more than in most markets: the majority of your visitors are on mobile data, and a page carrying six uncompressed photographs behaves very differently on 3G than it does on your office Wi-Fi.
Common culprits, in order: enormous images, an intro animation that delays the content, and fonts or scripts loaded from several different third-party domains.
6. You have no Google Business Profile
For a local business this is frequently the single biggest gap, and it is free. For searches like "IT company Douala", the map results appear above the ordinary ones. No profile means you cannot appear there at all.
It also demands consistency: your business name, address and phone number must match exactly between your profile and your website. Two versions of your address is a weaker signal than one.
7. Nothing links to you
Google treats links from other sites as evidence that yours is worth showing. A site with no inbound links has nothing vouching for it.
You do not need a link-building campaign to start. Your suppliers, your professional association, the local business directory, your own social profiles, and — if you build things for clients — a credit on the work you deliver. Real links from real places.
8. Your pages do not answer any question
A page saying "We offer quality solutions tailored to your needs" matches nothing anyone types into Google. A page titled "How Much Does a Website Cost in Cameroon?" matches something people search every day.
This is the slowest cause to fix and the one that compounds. Every page should answer a question a customer actually has, in the words they would use.
How long a fix takes to show
| Fix | When you'll see movement |
|---|---|
| Removing a crawl block or noindex | Days |
| Correcting canonical tags | 1 – 3 weeks |
| Per-page titles and descriptions | 2 – 6 weeks |
| Google Business Profile | Days to weeks after verification |
| Speed improvements | Weeks, and helps conversion immediately |
| Content and links | 3 – 6 months, then compounds |
Anyone promising page one in thirty days is selling something. But if the cause is one of the first four, the improvement can be genuinely fast, because you are not competing harder — you are removing something that was blocking you.
We will run these checks against your site and tell you plainly which ones apply. No obligation, and if the fix is a one-liner we will just tell you what it is.
Request a site audit