I Ran an SEO Audit on My Own Site — Here's What Was Actually Broken
Written by Ayoub Zinani, Founder of Fikrago
I built Fikrago myself. Every article, every page, every fix. So when the audit report came back, part of me expected it to be clean. It wasn't. My homepage had four duplicate meta descriptions, six duplicate title tags, and two canonical links pointing at the same page like it couldn't make up its mind. Missing alt text on five images. Multiple H1 tags stacked on top of each other like nobody told the page it only gets one.
None of it was catastrophic. All of it was quietly costing me.
Why this happens even when you're careful
Here's the part that surprised me: I didn't write any of this broken code myself. The duplicate title tags, the extra canonical link — those came from my Blogger theme and an SEO script I'd installed months ago and forgotten about. I was writing clean, single titles and single meta descriptions for every article. The theme was quietly stacking a second copy underneath, invisible unless you go looking for it.
That's the trap with self-built sites. You fix what you can see — the content, the headlines, the images — and assume the invisible parts of the page are fine because nobody told you otherwise. An audit is the only way to actually know. Not guessing. Not "it looks fine." Actually checking the code Google sees, not the page you see.
What each issue actually meant
Duplicate title tags and meta descriptions — Google doesn't know which one to trust, so it sometimes picks the wrong one, or worse, writes its own summary of your page instead of using either. That's your click-through rate quietly leaking away in search results you never see.
Multiple H1 tags — every page is supposed to have one clear "this is what this page is about" signal. Mine had six competing for that job on a single page. That confuses both search engines and, honestly, real readers scanning the page.
Duplicate canonical tags — this tells Google there are two "official" versions of the same page. Best case, it ignores one. Worst case, it splits ranking signals between them and neither version performs as well as it should.
Missing alt text — small on its own, but it's lost accessibility value and lost image-search traffic, multiplied across every image without it.
None of these are content problems. They're plumbing problems. And plumbing problems don't show up when you're proud-reading your own article — they show up in a technical audit, which most solo builders never run until something forces them to.
What I actually fixed
I went theme-first, not article-first. Checked the Blogger template for where the duplicate title and canonical tags were being injected, and cleaned that at the source instead of patching each article individually — fixing it once at the theme level instead of fighting it on every single post. Went back through recent articles and made sure each one shipped with exactly one title, one meta description, one H1, and full alt text on every image. It's slower than writing content, but it's a one-time fix, not a recurring tax.
What I'd tell anyone running their own site solo
If you built your website yourself — Blogger, WordPress, Wix, whatever — run a technical audit even if your content feels solid. Content quality and technical health are two completely different systems, and being good at one tells you nothing about the other. I write daily and I still had six duplicate title tags I didn't know about.
This is honestly the kind of thing I now offer as a service, because I've hit it firsthand — auditing and fixing a site's technical SEO isn't glamorous work, but it's the difference between content that has a real chance to rank and content that's fighting its own foundation.
If your site feels like it should be performing better than it is, this is usually where to look first — not another article, not another keyword, just the invisible plumbing underneath the pages you already have.
See the tools I use to audit and fix sites on the Tools page, browse resources on the Digital Market page, or check what I've built on the Products page. If your own site needs a technical SEO check, message me — I do this hands-on.