What does an SEO audit check? Start with indexing in Search Console
An SEO audit of a Kuwait website checks, in order, whether Google has indexed your Arabic and English pages, whether it can crawl them, how they perform on phones, whether titles and content match what people search in each language, and whether hreflang, structured data, your Business Profile and links support them. An SEO audit is a structured review of what stops a site being found, ending in a ranked list of fixes. Start in Google Search Console, Google's free tool that reports how Search sees your site.
Check: the Page indexing report. It lists which pages are indexed and gives a reason for each page that is not, such as Crawled - currently not indexed, Duplicate without user-selected canonical or URL blocked by robots.txt. As of September 2026, Google's help says not to expect every URL to be indexed, only canonical pages, but that every important page should be. Open the examples under each reason and look for your Arabic URLs, especially if the Arabic version was added after launch.
Check: URL Inspection on the pages that earn money. Google's help also says a site with fewer than 500 pages probably doesn't need the Page indexing report. If your site is that size, inspect the ten or twenty pages that bring enquiries instead. The URL Inspection tool shows whether a URL is indexed, the canonical you declared, the canonical Google selected, and crawl details. Bad looks like an Arabic page whose Google-selected canonical is its English twin, which means Google is treating the two as duplicates.
Check: the Sitemaps report. Submit your sitemap and read its status: Success, Has errors or Couldn't fetch. One sitemap can hold up to 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed, and Google notes that listing a URL does not mean it will be crawled or indexed; the same goes for requesting indexing in URL Inspection. Look for both language versions in the file, and for old URLs from a previous platform or an old .com.kw domain. Close indexing gaps on revenue pages first.
Crawlability and robots.txt: can Google reach every page?
Check: robots.txt. A robots.txt file tells crawlers which parts of a site they may request. Google's documentation says it is not a way to keep a page out of Google, because a disallowed page can still be indexed if other sites link to it, usually without a description. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and read every Disallow line. Bad looks like a leftover Disallow: / from the build, a rule blocking the /ar/ folder, or blocked scripts and styles that pages need in order to render.
Check: stray noindex tags. A noindex rule tells Google not to index a page; it suits thank-you pages, internal search results and test copies. Google notes that noindex only works if the page is not blocked by robots.txt, because Google has to crawl the page to see the rule. The Page indexing report lists these pages under URL marked 'noindex'. Bad looks like product or service pages in that list, which happens when a site is hidden during the build and nobody reverses it at launch.
Check: links Google can follow. Google says it can only reliably crawl links that are HTML a elements with an href attribute, and that every page you care about should be linked from at least one other page on your site. Bad looks like a language switcher built from script buttons, so Arabic pages can only be reached by tapping it, or an Arabic menu that quietly links to English pages. Click through the Arabic version from the homepage and make sure each menu item stays in Arabic.
Check: redirects, errors and old addresses. The Page indexing report also lists server errors, redirect errors, pages not found and pages with redirects. Fix server errors and broken redirects on pages with traffic first. Then trace the addresses customers still use: links in Instagram and TikTok bios, links sent in WhatsApp broadcasts, the website field on your Business Profile, and any old .com.kw domain. Each should reach the live page in one redirect and in the right language, not a 404 or the homepage.
Speed and mobile: what are the Core Web Vitals thresholds?
Check: the Core Web Vitals report. Core Web Vitals are Google's three measures of real-user experience: Largest Contentful Paint for loading, Interaction to Next Paint for responsiveness and Cumulative Layout Shift for visual stability. As of September 2026, web.dev sets good at 2.5 seconds or less for LCP, 200 milliseconds or less for INP and 0.1 or less for CLS, at the 75th percentile of page loads, for mobile and desktop separately. Search Console rates LCP above 4 seconds, INP above 500 milliseconds and CLS above 0.25 as poor.
Check: the mobile version carries everything. Google indexes and ranks the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with its smartphone crawler. So the mobile page needs the same main content, structured data, titles and meta descriptions as the desktop page. Bad looks like an Arabic mobile template that drops the product description, or main content that only loads after a tap. If most of your customers arrive from Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok on a phone, the mobile report is the one to read first.
Check: which templates fail, not which pages. The report groups similar URLs and gives each group the status of its worst metric, so a Poor group usually points to a template: every product page, every blog post, or every Arabic page. A smaller Kuwait site may see No data available, which Google says means the Chrome UX Report does not hold enough real-user data. In that case, test your main templates in PageSpeed Insights and treat the result as a lab estimate rather than what customers experienced.
Check: what to fix first. Start with the template that carries the most revenue and has the worst metric, usually product or service pages on mobile. Compare the Arabic and English versions of the same template, because Arabic pages sometimes load an extra font family or a different slider that the English pages don't. Test on a mid-range phone using mobile data, not office wifi. The fixes themselves are covered in why your website is slow on mobile.
Titles, headings and content quality in Arabic and English
Check: a unique title on every page, in the page's language. Google's title link guidance asks for a descriptive, concise title element on every page, without keyword stuffing or the same boilerplate repeated across pages. Google may also build the title link from other sources, including the main visible heading and anchor text. Export your titles and sort them. Bad looks like Arabic pages carrying English titles, dozens of pages sharing one title, or the brand name repeated three times. Preview rewrites in the SERP preview tool.
Check: one clear main heading. Google recommends making the main title of a page visually prominent, and it may use that heading when it builds the title link. Bad looks like a logo marked up as the main heading, an Arabic headline baked into a banner image that search engines can't read as text, or a page with no heading at all. On a bilingual Kuwait site, check that the Arabic heading says what an Arabic searcher actually typed, not a literal translation of the English one.
Check: Arabic pages are written, not mass-translated. Google's spam policies, updated in August 2026, define scaled content abuse as generating many pages mainly to manipulate rankings rather than help users, and list automated transformations such as translating among the examples. Google also works out a page's language from its visible content, not the lang attribute or the URL. An Arabic URL wrapped around English template text, or hundreds of machine-translated product pages published without review, is a risk. Arabic SEO in Kuwait covers writing the Arabic properly.
Check: each page answers a question someone in Kuwait asks. Open the Performance report in Search Console, filter to one page, and read the queries in both languages. Bad looks like a set of area pages for Salmiya, Hawally and Jahra with identical text and swapped names. Google's guide to generative AI features, published in May 2026, advises against creating separate content for every variation of a search. One strong page with real delivery times, prices in KD and answers in Arabic usually beats ten thin ones.
Hreflang, language versions and structured data
Check: hreflang annotations point both ways. Hreflang is markup that tells Google which URLs are language or regional versions of the same page. Google's guidance, last updated in December 2025, says each version must list itself and every other version, and if two pages don't both point to each other the tags are ignored. Codes use an ISO 639-1 language, optionally followed by an ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 region, so ar or ar-KW is valid but a country code alone is not. URLs must be fully qualified, including https.
Check: separate URLs, no forced redirects, and a fallback. Google recommends a different URL for each language version and warns against redirecting people based on the language you assume they speak, since that can stop users and Google reaching every version. Bad looks like a Kuwait site that sends every visitor with an Arabic phone to /ar/. Offer a visible language switch instead, and consider x-default, the reserved value Google describes for users whose language matches none of your versions. Recheck pages in URL Inspection after any change.
Check: structured data is valid, visible and a supported type. Structured data is code that describes a page's content in a standard vocabulary so search engines can understand it. Google's search gallery, updated in June 2026, lists the features it supports, including Article, Breadcrumb, Local business, Organization, Product, Review snippet and Video. Google's general guidelines say not to mark up content readers can't see, and that correct markup may still not produce a rich result. Test your key templates in the Rich Results Test and in URL Inspection.
Check: markup that no longer earns anything, or never could. Google deprecated the FAQ rich result in May 2026, saying it would stop appearing from 7 May, and removed its documentation in June, so don't count FAQ markup as a Google win. Review markup has a trap too: Google says LocalBusiness or Organization pages can't get review stars when the business controls its own reviews, and a July 2026 guideline bans fake or undisclosed incentivised reviews, such as one given for a discount on the next salon visit.
Local signals, links and visibility in AI answers
Check: your Google Business Profile. Google says local results rest on relevance, distance and prominence, that more reviews and positive ratings can help, and that there is no way to pay for a better local ranking. Its guidelines ask for your real-world business name, without taglines or extra keywords, and the fewest categories that describe the core business. Bad looks like a name such as Best Abaya Shop Kuwait Salmiya, or a home-based Instagram business showing its home address instead of hiding it as a service-area business.
Check: hours, website link and profile language. Make sure regular hours are current, and use special hours, which Google describes for short-term changes such as holidays and events, for Eid and National Day. Point the website field at the page in the same language as your profile, with a UTM tag so those visits show up in analytics. Then search your business name in Arabic and in English on a phone, and check that both searches find the same profile with the same phone number.
Check: who links to you, and why. Google's spam policies treat buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam, including exchanging goods or services for links, and Google's link guidance says paid links should carry rel=sponsored. Bad looks like a batch of links from unrelated foreign blogs, or a paid influencer article linking to you without a sponsored tag. Good links come from places a Kuwait customer might actually read: local news sites, suppliers, industry associations, event organisers and partner businesses.
Check: visibility in AI answers. Google's page on AI features, updated in December 2025, lists no extra requirements for AI Overviews or AI Mode: a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. Its May 2026 guide adds that llms.txt files aren't needed for Google Search and structured data isn't required for generative AI features. Search Console's Generative AI performance report, showing impressions in those features, had reached all sites by 31 August 2026, Google says. Other assistants are covered in getting cited by AI answer engines.
Frequently asked questions
How do I do an SEO audit on a Kuwait website myself?+
Start in Google Search Console. Check which Arabic and English pages are indexed using the Page indexing report or, for a small site, the URL Inspection tool. Then read robots.txt for rules that block pages, check the Core Web Vitals report for mobile problems, review titles and headings in both languages, test hreflang and structured data, and review your Google Business Profile and links. Fix indexing and crawl problems on the pages that bring revenue before spending time on new content or links.
What are the Core Web Vitals thresholds in 2026?+
As of September 2026, web.dev defines good Core Web Vitals as Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads and split between mobile and desktop. Google Search Console rates LCP over 4 seconds, INP over 500 milliseconds and CLS over 0.25 as poor. If most visitors to a Kuwait site arrive from social apps on their phones, read the mobile figures first.
Do FAQ rich results still show in Google?+
No. Google deprecated the FAQ rich result in May 2026, saying the feature would stop appearing in Google Search from 7 May 2026, and removed its documentation in June 2026. FAQ markup on a Kuwait website therefore no longer earns an expandable question-and-answer result in Google, and an SEO audit should not count it as a visibility win. Clear questions and answers written on the page can still help readers, and other structured data types Google supports, such as Product and Local business, still apply.