An SEO audit
in plain English.
An SEO audit is a check of everything that decides whether people searching for what you do can find you — your rankings, the technical health of your site, your content, your Google Business Profile, and whether any of it is being measured properly.
I do that check by hand and write it up in language you can act on. The Basic version is free on every introductory call; the In-Depth version, checked against your actual accounts, starts at $300 ex-GST.
// 45 min · Google Meet · No obligation
// What gets checked
What an SEO audit actually covers.
Six areas, in the order they tend to matter. This is the SEO and analytics foundation of the Digital Health Check, taken deep rather than wide:
Search visibility and rankings
Which searches you show up for, roughly where you're landing, and which ones are worth going after — checked against what people in your market actually type, not a vanity keyword list.
Technical crawling and indexing
Whether Google can reach, read and index your pages at all — redirects, canonical tags, sitemaps, robots rules and page speed, read from the outside. With account access I add what Search Console reports about indexing, and crawl the site properly.
On-page and content
Titles, headings, internal links and whether each page answers the question it's meant to. Includes pages competing with each other for the same search, which quietly holds both back.
Local search and Google Business Profile
Categories, service areas, hours, photos, posts and review activity, plus whether your business details match across the web. For a business serving nearby customers this is usually the biggest single lever.
Measurement
Whether GA4, Search Console and conversion tracking are there at all — and, with account access, whether those events are counting the enquiries you care about. From the outside I can see a tag on the page; only account access shows whether it fires. A ranking gain you can't measure is a story, not a result.
AI-search readiness
Whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews can find, understand and describe your business correctly — schema, entity clarity and crawler access.
If the local and Google Business Profile side is where your customers come from, my local SEO page goes further into it. If you want someone to do the fixing afterwards rather than an audit on its own, that's SEO consulting.
// Two versions
Free, or checked from the inside.
The difference is access, not effort. One works from what anyone can see; the other looks inside your accounts.
// Basic · free · most people start here
The Basic SEO audit.
Free on every introductory call. I check your search visibility, technical health, content, Google Business Profile and AI-search readiness from publicly available data, then walk you through what I found. You keep the PDF whether or not anything follows. No account access needed.
// In-Depth · from $300 ex-GST
The In-Depth SEO audit.
Everything above, plus the parts only account access can show — which searches genuinely bring people in, whether your conversion tracking is counting the enquiries you care about, and what your Google Business Profile insights say. Read-only access, revocable anytime. Priced and booked on the Digital Health Check page, where you can also add other channels.
// What you get
What lands in your inbox.
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A graded PDF in plain English. Each area gets a grade — poor, fair, good, strong, excellent — with the specific finding that earned it. You see the working, not just the verdict.
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A prioritised fix list. What to do first, what can wait, and what to leave alone. Ordered by what it's likely to be worth against what it takes to do, so you can start on Monday.
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A walkthrough call. Forty-five minutes going through the findings together, so you can ask what any of it means. Written reports are easy to nod along to and hard to act on.
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Yours to keep, either way. Hand the PDF to your team, another agency or a freelancer and they'll be able to act on it without me. That's the point — you're paying for the read, not for a lock-in.
If enquiries have gone quiet and you're not sure where they're being lost, the enquiry-leaks checklist covers the things I check most often — you can work through it yourself before booking anything.
// Tools and judgement
What a scanner finds, and what it can't.
Free scanners are genuinely useful, and I run them too. PageSpeed Insights, Search Console and the automated crawlers will find broken links, missing titles, slow pages and invalid markup faster and more thoroughly than any person reading a site by hand.
What they hand back is a list of everything technically wrong, usually 40 to 80 items, sorted by their own severity scale rather than by what it's worth to your business. Working out which three of those matter, whether two of your pages are quietly competing for the same search, whether your tracking is counting anything you'd act on, and what to do first on a limited budget — that's the part a person does.
So the honest version is: run the free tools. Then the audit tells you which of their findings is worth your Monday morning, and which you can ignore.
You work directly with me, start to finish. The person reading your Search Console is the person on the call, because it's the same person.— Nathan Schram · SEO audits, Melbourne
// Fit
When this is worth doing.
An SEO audit earns its place when people are searching for what you do and you can't tell whether they're finding you — or when you're about to spend real money on search and want a baseline first. Four cases where I'd say don't bother:
// Pricing
What it costs.
The Basic SEO audit is free, on every introductory call, with the PDF yours to keep. The In-Depth version starts at $300 ex-GST — that's the SEO and analytics foundation, and it's the same number whether you're a two-person business or a twenty-person one.
If you want the fixing done afterwards rather than doing it yourself, that's quoted to scope after the audit. Ongoing search work starts from around $1,000 a month, and plenty of businesses never need it. Nothing here is a prerequisite for anything else — you can take the PDF and stop.
For what SEO costs more broadly in this market, I wrote a plain-English breakdown: how much SEO costs in Australia.
ACNC-registered charities: 25% off. A single ABN check at intake — the same rate that runs across every NSD service.
// FAQ
Common questions.
How much does an SEO audit cost?
What does an SEO audit service include?
Can ChatGPT or a free tool do an SEO audit?
How long does an SEO audit take?
Is this the same as the Digital Health Check?
Do I need an SEO audit?
How much does SEO cost in Australia?
// Start
Get started.
Book a 45-minute call. I'll run the Basic SEO audit on your site and Google Business Profile beforehand and walk you through it, so the conversation starts from a clear picture of where you stand in search — free, whether anything follows or not.
// 45 minutes · Google Meet · no obligation
The SEO audit is one layer of it. Want the whole picture — website, ads, social and the rest — in the same call?
- Seven plain-English pillars, each with a grade and the finding behind it
- Your top 3 fixes, in priority order
- Yours to keep, whether you work with me afterwards or not
The PDF is yours to keep regardless.
// Last updated: 2026-08-10