SEO service
SEO Audit Services: What a Real Audit Looks Like
Almost every free SEO audit on the internet is a tool export. Someone ran your site through Screaming Frog, dropped a logo on the cover and emailed you 47 pages listing 312 missing alt tags, 6 redirect chains and a "site health score" of 74. It never said which of those is costing you money, or what to fix first.
That is not an audit. That is a list.
A real seo audit is a senior person spending a full day inside your site, your Search Console data and your competitors' pages, deciding which five problems are holding your revenue back and in what order to fix them. The tools still get run. They're raw material, not the deliverable.
Most people arrive here for one of four reasons. Traffic fell off a cliff and nobody can say why. A migration went sideways. They're about to sign with an agency and want an independent read first. Or they've paid someone $2,000 a month for fourteen months and want to know whether anything has been done.
- $990
- Entry price, published in full
- 30 days
- Notice to leave. No lock-in
- 1pm to 6pm
- AEST, senior-led, contactable
What's actually in the audit
Every audit covers all of this. Where a section comes back clean, we say so.
Crawl and index coverage
What Google has actually indexed against what you assume. We regularly find sites with half their service pages stuck in "Crawled, currently not indexed".
Internal linking and orphan pages
Which pages have nothing pointing at them, and whether your money pages are three clicks deep or eight.
Core Web Vitals from field data
Real Chrome data from your visitors on their own phones, not a Lighthouse score run on a fast desktop.
Technical seo audit items
Canonicals, robots directives, JavaScript rendering, pagination, faceted navigation, sitemap accuracy, response codes at scale.
Structured data
What you have, what's broken, and what competitors use to take up more room in the results page.
Content against real search intent
For each money keyword, what Google currently rewards and whether your page matches or argues with it. A page ranking nowhere is often a good page aimed at the wrong intent, which no tool will ever tell you.
Cannibalisation
Where two or three of your own pages split the signal for one query.
Local presence and Google Business Profile
Categories, service areas, review velocity, citations, and where you sit in the map pack for the suburbs you service rather than your own.
Backlink profile
Including anything toxic a previous provider left behind. If someone bought you 4,000 directory links in 2021, you need to know now.
Competitor gap analysis
Named pages. Not "they have more content", but "Competitor A ranks for 61 keywords through these four pages and you have no equivalent."
How findings are prioritised
This is what separates a seo site audit from a spreadsheet. Every finding carries three things.
Impact, 1 to 5
How much commercial movement the fix is likely to produce. A noindex tag on your best service page is a 5. Missing alt text on blog images is a 1. We score against revenue potential, not tool severity ratings, because the tools don't know your margins.
Effort, 1 to 5
A 1 is a text change in your CMS this afternoon. A 5 is a developer project of a week or more, like rebuilding faceted navigation across 3,000 products.
Owner
Every finding is labelled you, your developer, or us. A marketing coordinator can usually handle about 40 per cent of the list alone, and we say which, so you're not paying an agency for a morning's work.
Findings then sort into four buckets. High impact, low effort goes first, and that's where the surprises usually are. High impact, high effort becomes a scoped project with a rough cost. Low impact, low effort is housekeeping. Low impact, high effort gets one line on why not to bother.
Month by month
What the first year usually looks like, and when you can leave
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- Technical and local foundations
- Google Business Profile movement
- Organic rankings
- Compounding
- You can leave
Month 1
Setup-heavy. Crawl issues, tracking, the Google Business Profile, and the pages that earn money first. We do not dress month one up as results.
Typical timing, not a guarantee. Thirty days notice applies in any month, with no exit fee and no clawback.
What you receive
A written document, usually 18 to 25 pages depending on how much is wrong, with screenshots of the problems on your own site.
A prioritised action list as a separate sheet, so your developer can work from it without reading the document.
A screen recording, 20 to 30 minutes, walking through the findings with the evidence on screen.
A 45 minute call to go through questions, argue with our conclusions, and sort out sequencing.
What you don't get is a 200 page PDF nobody opens.
Standard audits land in five business days. An ecommerce seo audit takes seven to ten, because product templates, faceted navigation and duplicate variant URLs take real time to unpick.
Compare the models
What you are actually buying, laid side by side
Three ways people have bought SEO before they ring us, and the way we sell it.
SERPDrive
$990, $1,990 or $3,490 a month
- Who does the work
- The senior who scoped it. No account manager, no junior handover, contactable 1pm to 6pm AEST.
- What the report shows
- The deliverables listed for your tier, every month, with the work shown and an honest read of the numbers when they are not moving.
- When it goes wrong
- At the three month mark we go through the data honestly. If the volume in your niche is too thin, we say so rather than roll you into another quarter.
- The contract
- None. Thirty days notice in writing, any month, no exit fee and no clawback. You keep everything.
How this differs from the free audit
We also run a free mini-audit, and the gap is worth being straight about.
The free one is a real human spending 30 to 45 minutes on your site. Three genuine findings, one quick win you can do yourself without us, one thing that needs help. It's useful. It has caught noindexed homepages and Google Business Profiles in the wrong primary category. It isn't a substitute for the paid audit and we don't pretend it is.
The paid one is a full day of senior time, closer to two for ecommerce. It covers everything above rather than whatever sits nearest the surface, with scoring, ownership, a recording and a call. Small site and a sanity check, take the free one. Money riding on the answer, pay for the real thing.
What this costs
| Audit | Price | Delivery |
|---|---|---|
| Standard seo audit service | $1,500 | 5 business days |
| Ecommerce audit (up to 5,000 URLs) | $2,500 | 7 to 10 business days |
If you go on to a retainer within 60 days, the audit fee is credited against your first month in full. Take the $1,500 audit, move onto the $1,990 Growth plan, and month one costs $490. We'd rather you buy the audit, see how we think and then decide, than sign a retainer off a sales call. Retainer pricing sits on our SEO pricing page.
Run the sum
How many enquiries a month each tier has to bring in
The only sum that matters, and it changes completely with what you sell. Move these to your own numbers.
Each enquiry is worth about $420 at that rate. That is revenue, not margin, so apply your own margin.
Local
$990 a month · One service area
3 enquiries a month to break even
GrowthMost common
$1,990 a month · Multi-suburb or service
5 enquiries a month to break even
Authority
$3,490 a month · Competitive metro
9 enquiries a month to break even
Fees are the published monthly prices, in Australian dollars, ex GST. If the number for Authority is not realistic for your business, Authority is the wrong buy, and we will say so.
Who doesn't need a paid audit
A brand new five page website. There's nothing to audit. You need pages built and a Google Business Profile sorted, not an analysis of problems you haven't had time to create yet.
A business in a category with no search volume. If eleven people a month search for what you sell, the audit will be accurate and useless.
Someone who already knows the problem. If your developer says the site takes nine seconds to load on mobile, spend the $1,500 fixing it.
Questions
Questions we get asked
Straight answers, including the uncomfortable ones. Anything else goes to the person who does the work.
Ask your own questionIs this just a tool report?
No. We run the tools, then throw out most of what they say. A crawl of a 400 page site flags around 600 issues. Maybe twelve matter. Our job is picking those twelve and explaining why the other 588 are noise.
Do you fix the issues or just list them?
Diagnosis only. We'll quote separately if you want us implementing, or you hand the action list to whoever already works on your site. Plenty of clients fix it themselves and we never hear from them again. That's a fine outcome.
Can our developer implement it without you?
Usually yes for the technical findings, which is why everything carries an owner and is written for a developer rather than a marketer. Content and local work is harder to hand over, because it needs ongoing judgement.
What if you find nothing wrong?
It has happened twice. Both times we said so in writing, refunded half the fee and told them the problem was competitive, not technical. If the site is sound and you still aren't ranking, that's a content and links problem, and we'd rather say it than invent findings.
Do we get the raw data?
Yes. Crawl exports, keyword data, backlink files, the lot. It's your site and your data. We don't hold it hostage to keep you on a retainer, which is a thing that happens.
Will you tell us if our current agency is doing a bad job?
We'll tell you what we find and let you draw the conclusion. If twelve months produced no new content, no technical fixes and no links, that shows up plainly in the data and you can raise it with them. Sometimes the agency is doing solid work and the market is just hard, and we say that too. Trashing the incumbent to win work is a poor way to operate.
Free, by hand, no obligation
Book the audit, or start with the free one
Fill in the enquiry form with your website and what's prompting this. We'll come back inside one business day with a fixed price, a start date and which tier fits your site.
If you'd rather test us first, take the free mini-audit. Four fields, two business days, three real findings, no sales call. We're contactable 1pm to 6pm AEST either way.
- Turnaround
- Two business days
- Follow-up
- No sales call unless you ask
What clients say
In their own words
Upwork reviews, reproduced unedited apart from the spelling of Arbaz’s name.
Working with Arbaz has been an absolute pleasure. His expertise in managing our off-page strategy is evident in the tangible results and increased visibility we've achieved. Arbaz is professional, diligent, and consistently goes above and beyond our expectations. He not only understands our goals but also offers insights that add tremendous value to our strategy. I appreciate his proactive approach and clear communication. We feel fortunate to have him as a part of our team and I highly recommend him to anyone looking for top-tier off-page strategy services.
Arbaz was incredibly helpful and dependable. His expertise in SEO is evident, and he did an outstanding job restoring many of our websites. I highly recommend working with him.
Great service, great communicator, patient, kind, helpful, and knowledgeable. Arbaz delivered a solid report that listed all the issues we face with our site, and answered all our questions. Happy!
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