Short answer: Run through five phases - technical SEO, on-page SEO, backlinks, local SEO, and competitive analysis - using free tools like Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and a crawler such as Screaming Frog, then prioritise fixes by impact and effort. A full audit like this takes under two hours for a small site and should be repeated quarterly.
An SEO audit is one of the most valuable things you can do for your website's search performance. It reveals exactly what's working, what's broken, and where the biggest opportunities lie. Yet most Australian businesses have never done one - or did one a couple of years ago and never followed up. This guide walks through a complete audit step by step, using the same framework used for client audits, and pairs well with our wider step-by-step SEO audit guide if you want more detail on any single phase.
Phase 1: Technical SEO audit
Start with the foundation. If Google can't crawl and index your site properly, nothing else matters.
Crawlability checks
- Google Search Console access - if you don't have it set up, do it now. It's free and essential.
- XML sitemap - is it submitted? Does it include all important pages? Are there errors?
- Robots.txt - are you accidentally blocking important pages?
- Crawl errors - check Search Console's Pages report for 404s, server errors, and redirect issues.
- Crawl budget - for large sites, check the Crawl Stats report for anomalies.
Indexation checks
- Indexed page count - search
site:yourdomain.com.auin Google. Does the count roughly match your expectations? - Noindex tags - are any important pages accidentally set to noindex?
- Canonical tags - does every page have a self-referencing canonical? Are there conflicts?
- Duplicate content - are multiple URLs serving the same content?
Site speed and Core Web Vitals
- PageSpeed Insights score - test your homepage, top service pages, and blog posts on both mobile and desktop.
- LCP under 2.5s - is the largest content element loading quickly?
- INP under 200ms - is the page responsive to user interactions?
- CLS under 0.1 - are elements shifting during page load?
- Image optimisation - are images in a modern format like WebP with proper dimensions set?
Speed issues are often the quickest wins on this list - see our guide on why page speed matters for SEO if slow load times show up repeatedly across your site.
Phase 2: On-page SEO audit
Once the technical foundation is sound, check whether your pages are properly optimised for the keywords they're meant to rank for.
Meta data
- Title tags - unique, under around 60 characters, include the primary keyword.
- Meta descriptions - unique, roughly 150-160 characters, include a call to action and keyword.
- H1 tags - one per page, includes the primary keyword, matches search intent.
- Header hierarchy - logical H2 to H3 to H4 structure, no skipped levels.
Content quality
- Depth and usefulness - does the page actually answer the question a searcher had, or just circle around it?
- Keyword usage - is the primary keyword and its natural variants used throughout, without forcing it in awkwardly?
- Related terms - are related concepts and synonyms covered so the page reads as genuinely comprehensive?
- E-E-A-T signals - author bios, credentials, citations, first-hand experience.
- Freshness - is content dated and recently reviewed or updated?
Internal linking
- Contextual links - a handful of internal links per page to related content.
- Anchor text - descriptive and relevant, not "click here".
- Link equity distribution - are your most important pages receiving the most internal links?
- Orphan pages - are any pages unreachable via internal links?
Phase 3: Off-page and backlink audit
Your backlink profile remains one of the strongest ranking signals available, so it's worth reviewing alongside on-page work as part of any link building strategy.
- Total backlinks - how many referring domains link to your site?
- Link quality - are links from relevant, credible Australian sites?
- Toxic links - are there spammy or irrelevant links that need disavowing?
- Anchor text distribution - does it look natural or over-optimised?
- Competitor gap - which sites link to competitors but not you?
Phase 4: Local SEO audit (for Australian businesses)
If you serve local customers, local SEO is critical - our local SEO checklist covers this in more depth.
- Google Business Profile - claimed, verified, and fully completed with photos, hours, and services.
- NAP consistency - name, address and phone number identical across all directories.
- Local citations - listed on relevant Australian directories for your industry and location.
- Reviews - actively generating Google reviews with responses to all of them.
- Local schema - LocalBusiness structured data with the correct address and service area.
Phase 5: Competitive analysis
- Keyword gaps - which keywords do competitors rank for that you don't?
- Content gaps - what topics have competitors covered that you haven't?
- Backlink gaps - which sites link to competitors but not you?
- SERP features - are competitors winning featured snippets, FAQs, or other rich results that you could target instead?
Prioritising your audit findings
After completing the audit, categorise findings by impact and effort so you know where to start:
- Quick wins - high impact, low effort, such as fixing broken links, updating meta tags, or submitting a missing sitemap.
- Strategic projects - high impact, high effort, such as a site speed overhaul, new content creation, or a sustained link building programme.
- Maintenance tasks - low impact, low effort, such as updating a copyright year or fixing minor schema errors.
- Deprioritise - low impact, high effort, such as redesigning a page that gets almost no traffic.
How often should you audit?
Full audits are worth running quarterly, with quick technical checks monthly and Search Console monitoring weekly. Run an audit immediately after any major site change too - a redesign, a platform migration, or a new CMS can quietly break things that took years to build.
Tools worth using
You don't need an expensive stack to run a thorough audit. Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights cover most of Phase 1 for free. A crawler such as Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) will surface broken links, missing meta data and duplicate titles across the whole site in minutes. For backlink and competitor analysis, a paid tool such as Ahrefs or Semrush makes Phase 3 and Phase 5 far faster, though a manual review of Search Console's Links report will get you most of the way for a smaller site.
Documenting the audit
Keep the audit itself as a simple spreadsheet or shared document: one row per issue, tagged by phase, impact and effort, with an owner and a status. This turns the audit from a one-off document into something you can revisit each quarter, tracking which quick wins have actually been fixed and which strategic projects are still sitting on the backlog. It also makes it easy to hand the findings to a developer or an SEO consultant without them needing to redo the discovery work.
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.
- Local SEO - for businesses relying on local search traffic.
- How to run an SEO audit - a deeper walkthrough of the audit process.
- Ecommerce SEO audit checklist - the same process adapted for online stores.
