Short answer: A free SEO audit starts in Google Search Console, not in a paid tool. Check the Page Indexing report to see what Google has actually indexed, review Core Web Vitals for speed and stability problems, run a crawl to find broken links and duplicate content, check that your internal links point to the pages that matter, and read your top pages the way a visitor would. Then rank every issue you find by how much effort it takes to fix against how much traffic or revenue it's likely to influence, and work down the list.
Most Australian small businesses either haven't looked at their SEO in years or paid for an audit once and never actioned it. The good news is that the tools that matter most for a first pass are free, and you don't need a crawler licence or a subscription to find the issues that are actually costing you traffic. This walkthrough uses Google Search Console as the backbone, because it's the only tool that shows you what Google itself sees on your site, and pairs it with a basic crawl and a manual content review. If you want the fuller five-phase version of this process, our step-by-step SEO audit guide goes deeper on backlinks and local SEO.
Step 1: Confirm what Google can actually see
Before worrying about rankings, check whether your pages are indexed at all. In Search Console, open the Page indexing report, which splits every URL Google knows about into indexed and not indexed, with a reason for each excluded page. Work through the "not indexed" list looking for pages that should be live - a page marked "Discovered - currently not indexed" or "Crawled - currently not indexed" that you actually want ranking is worth investigating, since it usually points to thin content, a crawl budget issue, or a page Google doesn't think is worth serving yet.
Pages excluded for reasons like "Alternate page with proper canonical tag" or "Duplicate without user-selected canonical" are often fine and don't need action - Google is simply choosing one version of a page over another. The distinction matters, because chasing every line in this report wastes time; the goal is to find pages that matter to your business and aren't indexed, not to get every single URL to zero exclusions.
Step 2: Check crawlability basics
- Robots.txt - open
yourdomain.com.au/robots.txtand check you aren't accidentally disallowing folders that hold important content. Robots.txt controls what crawlers can request, not what gets indexed, so a blocked page can sometimes still appear in search with no description - see Google's introduction to robots.txt for how the file is actually interpreted. - XML sitemap - confirm it's submitted in Search Console under Sitemaps, that it returns a 200 status, and that it lists your current pages rather than URLs from an old site structure.
- Noindex tags - view source (or use a browser extension) on a handful of key pages to check none of them carry a stray
noindextag left over from staging or a theme setting. - Redirect chains - a page that redirects two or three times before landing on its final URL wastes crawl budget and slows every visitor who lands on the old link.
Step 3: Read Core Web Vitals like a diagnostic, not a score
In Search Console, the Core Web Vitals report groups your URLs by whether they pass or fail on real user data, measured across three metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (loading speed), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness), and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability). Google's own guidance on Core Web Vitals and search results explains that these are field measurements from actual visitors, not a lab test, so a page can look fast in a manual PageSpeed check and still fail here if real users on patchy mobile connections are having a worse experience.
Treat this report as a triage list rather than a single score to chase. If your product or service pages fail on LCP, check whether a large hero image or an unoptimised video is the culprit before touching anything else - it's usually the single biggest lever. If pages fail on layout shift, look for ads, embedded widgets, or web fonts loading in without reserved space, since these are the most common causes.
Step 4: Run a basic crawl of your own site
A free crawler such as Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) will surface issues Search Console won't show you directly, because it looks at your site the way a bot does rather than reporting on what's already indexed. Point it at your homepage and let it crawl, then check for:
- Broken internal links - links pointing to pages that 404, often left over from an old menu structure or a page that was deleted without a redirect.
- Duplicate title tags and meta descriptions - a common symptom of templated pages that were never customised per page.
- Missing H1s - pages with no clear heading confuse both visitors and search engines about what the page is actually about.
- Thin pages - very short pages with little unique content, which are candidates for either expanding, merging, or removing.
Step 5: Check your internal linking
Internal links tell Google which pages you consider important, and they help visitors find related content instead of leaving after one page. Look at your most important service or product pages and ask honestly: how many other pages on the site link to them? If the answer is "just the main navigation", you're relying entirely on menu placement to signal importance, and any blog content you publish is doing nothing to support the pages that actually generate revenue.
A quick fix that pays off repeatedly: whenever you publish a new blog post, add two or three contextual links to relevant service pages within the body copy, using descriptive anchor text rather than "click here" or "learn more". Over a year of consistent publishing, this quietly builds internal authority toward the pages you most want to rank, in a way a single one-off audit never will.
Also check for orphan pages - pages that exist on the site but that nothing else links to. A crawl combined with your XML sitemap will usually surface these; if Google can only find a page via the sitemap and never via a normal click path, it's a weaker signal of importance than a page reachable in two clicks from the homepage.
Step 6: Read your content the way a visitor would
Pick your top five landing pages by traffic (Search Console's Performance report will show you this under Pages) and actually read them end to end, as if you were the person searching. Ask three questions of each: does this page fully answer the question that brought someone here, does it read as more useful than what's currently ranking above you, and is there a clear next step for the reader once they finish it. Pages that fail any of these three are candidates for a content refresh before you touch anything technical, because no amount of crawl fixes will help a page that simply doesn't answer the question well.
While you're there, check the publish or last-updated date. A page from three years ago that hasn't been touched since is a common, quiet cause of a slow ranking decline, particularly for anything time-sensitive like pricing, services, or industry information.
Prioritise fixes by effort versus impact
Once you've worked through the steps above, you'll have a list that's too long to tackle all at once. Sort it into four groups rather than working top to bottom in the order you found things:
- Quick wins - low effort, meaningful impact: fixing broken links, correcting a stray noindex tag, adding missing internal links to a key page, resubmitting a sitemap.
- Worth scheduling - higher effort, meaningful impact: a content refresh on a page that's slipping, compressing and resizing images site-wide, restructuring navigation to surface orphaned pages.
- Low priority - low effort, low impact: cosmetic meta description tweaks on pages that get almost no search traffic.
- Needs a real decision - high effort, uncertain impact: a full site migration or platform change, which is worth scoping properly with a developer or an SEO consultant rather than squeezing into a weekend.
Work through the quick wins first. They're rarely the reason a site is dramatically underperforming, but they're free, fast, and they remove the small frictions that compound across hundreds of pages.
How often to repeat this
A full pass through Search Console, a crawl, and a content review is worth doing every quarter for most small business sites, with a quick check of the Page Indexing and Core Web Vitals reports monthly in between. Always run a check immediately after a site redesign, a platform migration, or a new CMS - these are the moments most likely to introduce a stray noindex tag, a broken redirect map, or a wave of new duplicate content, and catching it in the first week is far cheaper than catching it three months later once rankings have already slipped.
Where to go next
- SEO services - ongoing SEO management once the audit findings are actioned.
- Technical SEO - fixing the crawlability and indexation issues an audit uncovers.
- SEO consultant - for a second opinion on findings before committing to a larger project.
- How to run an SEO audit - the deeper five-phase version of this process.
- Why page speed matters for SEO - more detail on fixing Core Web Vitals failures.
