A 20-minute website health check you can do yourself
Before you pay anyone for SEO, including us, it is worth knowing whether your website's foundations hold. These seven checks take about twenty minutes, use only free tools, and need no technical background. They cover the bottom layer of the SEO stack: the one every other layer depends on.
Check 1: Can Google actually see your pages?
Go to Google and search for site:yourwebsite.com.au (with your own address after the colon). This shows the pages Google has found on your site. Count them against the pages you know you have. If important pages are missing, Google may not be able to reach them, and nothing else in SEO can help a page Google cannot see.
Check 2: Does your site work on a phone?
Most searches happen on phones, so open your site on yours. Text should be readable without pinching to zoom, buttons should be easy to tap, and nothing should be cut off or overlapping. If you find yourself squinting or mis-tapping, so does every visitor.
Check 3: Is it fast enough to keep people?
Paste your address into PageSpeed Insights, Google's free speed tool. Do not agonise over the exact score; look at the mobile result and ask one question: does the page show something useful within a couple of seconds? Visitors give up quickly, and a slow site loses them before it says a word.
Check 4: Is the address bar padlocked?
Your site should load at an address starting with https, shown by a padlock in the browser. Without it, browsers label your site 'Not secure', which is a hard way to open a sales conversation. Most hosts provide this for free; if yours does not, that is worth a phone call.
Check 5: Do your page titles say what each page is about?
Look at your browser tab, or at how your pages appear in search results. A title like 'Home' or just your business name wastes the single most visible line you have. Each page's title should say plainly what the page covers, and for a local business, where you work.
Check 6: Does each service you want customers for have its own page?
A page can only answer one search well. If several distinct services share one crowded paragraph on your homepage, none of them gets a proper answer, and searchers looking for exactly that service find someone who gave it a full page instead.
Check 7: Could a stranger tell what you do, and where, in five seconds?
Open your homepage and imagine seeing it cold. Within five seconds it should be clear what you do, where you do it, and what to do next. This check is for people rather than Google, but it is the one that decides whether visitors become enquiries.
What your results mean
If everything passed, your foundations are probably sound, and the next honest question is whether your pages answer what your customers actually search. If several checks failed, fix the site before spending a dollar on content or links: building on a broken foundation just multiplies the problem, and any provider who quotes you without checking these first is skipping the layer that matters most.
If you would like a second pair of eyes on what you found, tell us the situation and we will give you a straight answer on which layer needs work. No page-one promises, because nobody honest can make them.