Technical SEO in Canberra: find what is quietly blocking your rankings

An SEO audit is the diagnosis and technical SEO is the treatment. The audit reviews your site and produces a prioritised list of issues, their business impact and the fix for each. Technical SEO is the ongoing work of implementing those fixes and keeping the site healthy: crawlability, indexation, Core Web Vitals, structured data and site architecture. Most engagements start with an audit so we know exactly what to work on first.

A full technical audit checks everything that decides whether Google can find, understand and rank your pages: crawlability and how your crawl budget is spent, indexation and any "crawled, currently not indexed" pages, Core Web Vitals and page speed, site architecture and internal linking, structured data, HTTPS and security, redirects and broken links, and mobile usability. You get each finding with its severity, its business impact and the exact fix, prioritised so the costly problems come first, exactly like the sample excerpt above rather than a raw tool export nobody can act on.

Core Web Vitals are three metrics Google uses to measure real user experience. Largest Contentful Paint (loading) should be 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness) should be 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability) should be 0.1 or less, all measured at the 75th percentile of your real visitors. INP replaced the older First Input Delay metric in March 2024, so any advice still quoting FID is out of date.

Google Search Console usually gives one of two reasons. "Discovered, currently not indexed" means Google knows the page exists but has not crawled it yet, often a crawl-priority or site-quality signal. "Crawled, currently not indexed" means Google crawled the page and decided not to index it, usually because the content is thin, too similar to another page, or does not match what searchers want. Our audit identifies which pages are affected and the reason for each, then the fix.

It can, mostly through page bloat. Builders wrap every element in extra containers, so a simple block that should be a few lines of code can become thirty or forty. Google flags a page as having an excessive number of elements above roughly 1,400, and heavy page weight is the most common reason builder sites fail the INP responsiveness metric on mobile. It is fixable with settings and clean-up rather than a rebuild, and we handle that as part of the work.

It depends on the size of your site, because more pages means more to analyse. A small business site is usually a few hundred to around a thousand dollars, while large sites with thousands of URLs cost more. We scope your site first and give a fixed quote before any work starts, so you know the price and what you are getting up front, with no open-ended hourly billing. The full picture on cost sits on our pricing page.

Crawl budget is the amount of crawling attention Google gives your site in a given period. For a typical small business site of a few dozen pages it is a non-issue, so ignore anyone selling crawl budget optimisation for a ten page site. It matters when something on your site multiplies URLs: ecommerce filters, tag archives, on-site search pages or calendar plugins can generate thousands of near-duplicate addresses, and Google wastes its visit on those instead of the pages that make you money. The audit checks whether this is happening and, if it is, blocks the waste at the source.

Once a year is enough for most established sites, plus a fresh audit before any migration, redesign or platform change, and after any unexplained traffic drop. Between audits, Google Search Console gives you free ongoing monitoring of indexing and Core Web Vitals, and we set that up as part of the work. What wastes money is repeating a full audit every few months while the first report's fixes are still sitting in a drawer. Fix first, verify, then re-audit when the site or the situation genuinely changes.

Some fixes show quickly. When we clear an indexing block or a crawl issue, pages can start appearing in Google within days of a re-crawl. Core Web Vitals and speed improvements usually reflect within a few weeks, once Google gathers enough real-user data at the 75th percentile. Bigger gains in rankings and traffic build over one to three months, because a healthy technical foundation is what lets your content and links finally do their job.