What is an SEO audit (and what should it cover)?

An SEO audit is a top-to-bottom health check of your website. Someone crawls every page, looks at how Google sees it, and works out exactly why it isn't ranking or converting as well as it should. Done properly, it's a diagnosis. Done lazily, it's a free PDF designed to scare you into signing a contract.

The difference is in what gets checked, and whether anyone fixes it afterwards.

What a real audit covers

A complete audit looks at five layers. Skip any of them and you've got a partial picture.

1. Technical health

This is the plumbing. Can Google crawl and index your pages at all? An audit checks your robots.txt and XML sitemap, looks for pages accidentally blocked or marked noindex, finds broken links and redirect chains, and flags duplicate content competing with itself. It also checks Core Web Vitals, how fast pages load and how stable they are while loading, because slow sites get demoted and abandoned. A site on bloated WordPress hosting usually fails here.

2. On-page SEO

Page by page: are title tags and meta descriptions written for the right search terms? Is there one clear <h1> per page? Are headings structured logically? Is image alt text present? Is structured data (schema markup) in place so Google can show rich results? These are small fixes on their own and a big lift together.

3. Content

The audit maps what you've published against what your customers actually search for, and finds the gaps, the questions you should be answering and aren't. It also flags thin pages, pages cannibalising each other for the same keyword, and, increasingly important, pages padded with AI-generated filler that Google now discounts. Good content audits point you toward pages worth writing, not just ones worth deleting.

4. Links and authority

Who links to you, and is any of it harmful? The audit reviews your backlink profile for spammy or toxic links that could be dragging you down, and looks at internal linking, how well your own pages pass authority to each other. Internal linking is the cheapest SEO win most sites are leaving on the table.

5. Analytics and conversion

Ranking is pointless if visitors don't do anything. A worthwhile audit checks that your analytics are even tracking correctly (you'd be surprised how often they aren't), then looks at where traffic comes from, which pages convert, and where people drop off. SEO that drives traffic to a page nobody acts on is a vanity exercise.

The bit most "free audits" skip

Plenty of agencies will run an automated tool over your site, slap their logo on the output, and call it an audit. The report is real enough, but it's a sales document, not a plan. It tells you that something's wrong without telling you which three things matter, in what order, or how to fix them.

A genuine audit ends with a prioritised action list: here's the handful of issues actually costing you traffic, here's why, here's what fixing each one involves. The best ones don't stop at the list. They do the work. We audit and fix as one engagement, because a report that sits in your inbox doesn't move a single ranking.

How long it takes and what it's worth

For a typical Australian small-business site, a thorough audit-and-fix is a few weeks of work and runs $4,000-$8,000. That sounds like a lot until you realise it's often a cheaper, faster win than a full rebuild, and it's the right first step before committing to any ongoing SEO spend, since it tells you what you're actually dealing with.

If your traffic has stalled or never started, that's the place to begin. See what our SEO audit includes and what it costs.