We Checked More Than 3,500 UAE Business Websites. These Are the Most Common Problems.
We checked more than 3,500 UAE business websites. About one in five was in good shape. The rest had at least one technical problem quietly costing them customers, usually without the owner knowing.
We checked more than 3,500 UAE business websites over the past few months. About one in five was in good shape. The rest had at least one technical problem that quietly costs them customers, and in most cases the owner has no idea it is there.
None of this came from anything private. Open a website, view its page source, and you can see the same signals we looked at.
Weak on-page SEO
The most common problem by a wide margin. Close to a quarter of the sites were missing basic on-page essentials, most often the meta description, which is the short summary Google shows under your link in the results. When it is absent, Google writes one itself by grabbing a sentence from somewhere on the page, and the result usually reads worse than the competitor listed above or below you. This is the cheapest thing on the list to fix, and the one businesses overlook most.
An outdated site
Around one in six sites were years out of date or broke on a phone. When a potential client is comparing a few firms before they call, the website settles the comparison quietly, and a dated one tends to lose it.
No structured data
Roughly one in ten sites carried no schema markup. Schema is invisible code that tells Google what a page contains, such as a service or a customer review, so the search result can show more detail. It shows up nowhere on the page, but competitors who have it keep pulling ahead in the rankings.
Hidden from Google by accident
Eighty-two sites were set to noindex, a single line of code that tells Google to leave the site out of its results entirely. A developer usually switches it on during construction so an unfinished site does not get indexed, then forgets to switch it off at launch, and it sits there for years. The business does not appear in search at all, and the setting is almost always an accident nobody caught. It takes about five minutes to fix.
Sites that would not respond
A quarter of the addresses we tried did not return a normal response. Some of those businesses are genuinely offline or misconfigured. Others are blocking automated traffic so aggressively that they are probably blocking Google along with everything else. If a site cannot answer a basic request, there is a good chance search engines are hitting the same wall.
Checking your own site
Most of this you can catch without any tool. Search your business name on Google and read the grey line under your link. If it is missing, or reads like it was pulled from the wrong part of the page, you have the on-page problem. To check the noindex setting, open your homepage, right-click, choose View Page Source, and use Ctrl-F to search for the word noindex. If it appears, Google is being told to ignore you.
Every issue above sits in the part of a website anyone can inspect from their own browser. You can run your own site through our free SEO audit tool and get the full list in a couple of minutes.
Written by Foreground Digital. Start a project →