Does Your Website Need an SEO Audit?
What an SEO audit actually involves, the signs your site needs one, and the checks any business owner can run in half an hour.
"SEO audit" gets thrown around as both a genuine health check and a sales hook - plenty of agencies send automated reports full of red warnings to frighten you into a retainer. Here's what an audit is actually for, when you need one, and the checks you can do yourself before paying anyone.
The warning signs
- Your traffic or enquiry numbers have slid over months, not days
- Google shows the wrong pages for your important searches
- Whole sections of your site are missing from Google entirely
- A redesign or platform change happened recently and things went quiet
- You're paying for SEO but nobody has ever checked the foundations
If none of those apply and your phone rings steadily, you don't need an audit this month - you need content and reviews. Audits fix problems; they don't create growth on their own.
What a real audit covers
- Indexing. Is Google actually seeing your pages? The fastest check: search site:yourdomain.com.au and compare the count to your real page count.
- Speed and mobile. Google's PageSpeed Insights on your five most important pages. Anything scoring red on mobile is costing you rankings and customers.
- Titles and headings. One clear H1 per page, titles that name the service and area, no duplicated titles across pages.
- Structure. A page per service, a page per location, internal links between them - the structure Google uses to decide what you're about.
- Broken things. Dead links, missing images, forms that don't send. Broken forms cost you enquiries that were already won.
- Trust signals. Consistent business details everywhere, a live Google Business Profile, reviews that mention your services.
The free half-hour version
Run these checks yourself
- Search site:yourdomain.com.au - are all your pages there?
- PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and top service page
- Open your site on your own phone - does it load in a blink and scroll cleanly?
- Search your main service plus your suburb - who shows up, and where are you?
- Click every link in your main menu - any dead ends?
- Submit a test enquiry through your own form - does it arrive?
If those checks come back clean, your problem is probably content or competition, not technical damage - and that's a different conversation. If several come back ugly, a proper audit with a prioritised fix list is worth the money.
Audit, or rebuild?
If your site is a slow, ageing template with thin pages, an audit becomes a punch list for a site that should be replaced. Rule of thumb: if the fixes cost more than a fresh, properly-structured website, rebuild. When a redesign is worth it walks that decision, and why your website isn't showing up on Google covers the most common causes in detail. For the bigger picture, the tradie's guide to SEO puts audits in context.
Want to Improve Your Google Visibility?
SEO varies enormously depending on your website, your market and who you're competing against, so there's no fixed package. Tell me what you do and where you work, and I'll tell you honestly what's realistic.
Talk to Mike About SEOCommon questions
- How much does an SEO audit cost in Australia?
- A genuine manual audit for a small business site typically runs $500 to $2,000 depending on site size. Be wary of free automated audits used as a scare tactic, and equally wary of $2,000 reports that are just exported software output.
- How often should a website be audited?
- Once a year is plenty for most small businesses, plus immediately after any redesign, migration or unexplained traffic drop.
- Will an audit improve my rankings by itself?
- No - it identifies what's holding you back. Rankings move when the fixes get made and the content gets built. An audit is the map, not the journey.
Written by Mike - Web Guy Mike
I build and look after websites for Australian tradies and small service businesses. Every site is built by me - no outsourcing, no account managers. More about Mike.