What an SEO audit should include: what we found checking 21 SA websites.

Short answer: a useful SEO audit answers four questions, in this order. Can Google see your pages? Does your Google Business Profile say the right thing? Which page is Google using for each search you care about, and where does it really rank from your customers’ suburbs? And who is beating you, and why? It ends with a short list of fixes in priority order, each with an owner. If an audit can’t tell you which three things to fix first, it isn’t finished.

What we checked, and on what

On 5 and 6 October 2026 we ran the same checks across the 21 websites we look after: 19 client sites (trades, hospitality, retail, tourism and services, mostly in the Barossa, Gawler and Adelaide) plus our own two, jbdigitalbarossa.com.au and this site. Some findings are named where the client’s results are already public on our results page; the rest are described without names.

1. Can Google see the pages? (Often, no.)

We inspected 385 pages listed in those sites’ sitemaps through Google’s own URL Inspection tool. 264 (69%) were indexed. The other third:

The worst case was a new service website with 2 of 23 pages in Google. The live pages were fine. Eight of them were still marked “noindex” in Google’s records from a crawl in mid-August; the setting had since been removed, but Google hadn’t been back to see. Most of the rest were simply waiting to be fetched. Nothing about the site looked wrong in a browser. Only an inspection found it.

Two other sites still had old http:// addresses showing in search alongside the https:// ones. The redirects were right; Google was just slow to swap them. That one fixes itself, and an audit should say so rather than raise an alarm.

What an audit should do here: inspect your real pages in Search Console (not just run a crawler), list every important page that isn’t indexed, and say why. A fresh page waiting a few weeks is normal. A money page missing for months is the first fix.

2. Does the Business Profile say the right thing?

For any business that serves a local area, the Google Business Profile decides the map box, and the map box sits above the normal results on almost every local search. Across the client profiles we reviewed on 5 October:

• Three had their service area centred in the wrong place: one in the Riverland for a business that works around Gawler, one near the Adelaide Hills for a Barossa business, and one in the middle of the state. A profile centred a long way from its customers struggles in their map box no matter how good it is.
• Two linked to Facebook or Instagram instead of the website. The profile’s website link is one of the ways Google ties the profile to the site that proves it.
• One, with more than 100 reviews, was unclaimed and pointed at a lapsed domain. All those reviews, sending people to a dead address.
• One had a duplicate listing and Saturday hours of 6:30pm to midnight for a daytime trade, and wasn’t showing in Google Maps at all.

None of these show up in a website audit tool, because none of them are on the website. All of them cost enquiries. Our Business Profile checklist covers the fields to check.

3. Which page does Google use, and where does it really rank?

This is where we found the most useful problem on our own site. When we set the baseline for this site on 6 October, our About page was taking 73% of all our Google impressions, including searches like “seo consultant adelaide” that our home page was written for. Our first live appearance for “seo audit adelaide” was the About page at position 37, while the free audit page built for that search didn’t appear. Google had picked the wrong page for the job. On 25 October 2026 our contact page, where the audit form sits, was #2 (rank tracker, mobile, from Adelaide).

The fix was small and additive: clearer wording on the home page for the agency, company and consultant searches, and plain links from the About page and the home page to the audit page with the words people search. An audit should find this kind of mismatch for every search that matters to you: which page Google is showing, and whether it’s the one you want.

Then it should check the ranking properly. A Search Console average is a blend of every searcher in every suburb. In early October one of our trade clients averaged 4.7 for a core Adelaide search in Search Console (28 days to 3 October 2026) but wasn’t in the top 20 when we searched from the city on 5 October; by 23 October it was #2 from Adelaide on desktop. All of those are true. We explain why in Search Console says #1, so why can’t I find myself? An audit should report live checks from the suburbs you want work from, with the date, and keep the two numbers apart.

4. Who vouches for you?

Links from other websites are still how Google judges whether a business is real and established. The trap is counting them. A tool said this site had 12 referring domains on 6 October. Eleven of those were spam-scored junk that links to everything. The real number was close to zero, apart from our own parent company. An audit should give you the real count, the junk count separately, and the few places that would genuinely link to you: suppliers, associations, local business groups, the people you’ve done work for. For us that meant agency directories and the case-study clients who are happy to say who built their site.

5. Who is winning, and why?

For this site’s own main searches (“seo adelaide”, “seo agency adelaide”, “seo company adelaide” and the rest), a map box sat above the normal results on every one we checked, and list and directory pages took one or two of the top five organic spots on three of the four we looked at closely. That shapes the plan. We have no Adelaide office, so we will never be in that map box and we don’t pretend otherwise; the organic results and the directories are the real page one for us. A useful audit tells you what the page you are trying to get onto actually looks like, before anyone promises you a position on it.

What the audit should hand you

1. A short list, in priority order. Three to ten fixes, most important first, not 400 warnings sorted by severity.
2. An owner for each fix. Some are yours (photos, reviews, the correct hours), some are your web person’s, some are the agency’s.
3. The evidence: screenshots, dates, the suburb a check was run from, the Search Console window.
4. What not to do. Often the most valuable line: don’t chase “plumber adelaide” this year; win your five suburbs first.
5. Something you can keep, whether or not you hire whoever wrote it.

What it isn’t

• A score out of 100. Scores reward the things a tool can measure. Not one of the problems above would move a typical site score much.
• A ranking promise. Nobody can promise a position on Google, and an audit that ends with one is a sales letter.
• A reason to rebuild. Most of what we found was fixed on the existing site and profile. Sometimes a rebuild is right; it shouldn’t be the default answer.

How ours works

Our free SEO audit for Adelaide businesses covers the six areas we check by hand: technical, on-page, local and Business Profile, content, authority and competitors. It comes back within 1–⁠2 business days as a PDF summary with the fixes in priority order and a clear recommendation. It’s yours to keep.

Free SEO audit · Adelaide & South Australia

Free SEO audit

A free Adelaide SEO audit checked by a person: technical, on-page, local and Business Profile, with a PDF summary within 1–⁠2 business days.

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