SEO Audit Proposal  ·  National Storage × Red Valkyrie

A second opinion on your SEO, one suburb at a time.

One deep, independent audit of National Storage's organic search: every facility checked in its own suburbs, the site behind them, the profiles above them, and the AI engines that now answer storage questions before Google shows a link. It ends in one ranked list, built to sit next to your agency's roadmap: the overlap is confirmation, and the gaps are the conversation.

Prepared for Joel Milligan and the National Storage marketing team  ·  6 July 2026  ·  Ref RV-2026-0706

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Facilities checked, each in its own suburbs
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Named checks across 8 audit areas
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Founders doing the work themselves, no handoff
0 wks
Kickoff to working session
01 The approach

How we will run it.

Four weeks, both founders, the full portfolio. We crawl the site, pull every profile, run local rankings around every facility, and check how you show up where storage questions now get answered. Everything gets scored, and everything lands in one ranked list, ordered by what it is worth.

As we discussed, we work without sight of your agency's current roadmap or reporting. The picture gets built from live results, the crawl, and your own search and analytics data, so the list we hand back is a genuinely independent second reading. Laying it next to the current plan takes your team an afternoon.

It is the same way the SEO work at Guardian started: with an audit, before anything else.

The search term report

One request worth making early: a Google Ads search term report covering the last 180 days, with conversion data. It shows which searches actually turn into move-ins, and we use it to weight every finding in the audit by proven revenue rather than raw search volume. A CSV export is fine, or read-only Google Ads access and we pull it ourselves.

02 What we audit

Eight areas. 84 checks.

You have seen the nine-area paid diagnostic in our deck. This is the same discipline rebuilt for organic, run across the full portfolio.

12 checks Local rankings, facility by facility Where each facility really sits in the map pack and organic results, measured from the suburbs it serves rather than from one office postcode.
  • Map rank grids around every facility for the searches that rent units: storage units [suburb], self storage near me, cheap storage [suburb]
  • Map pack presence and position at street-level points, not one city-wide average
  • Organic positions for the same terms, suburb by suburb
  • How far from each facility visibility holds before it drops away
  • Facilities close enough to steal rankings from each other
  • Local pack share against Kennards, Storage King, StoreLocal, and the independents in each market
11 checks Google Business Profiles Every profile in the portfolio pulled and reviewed as a set. This layer decides most local storage searches before anyone reaches a website.
  • Primary and secondary categories against what actually wins the pack in each market
  • Review volume, rating, recency, and whether anyone replies
  • Photo count, quality, and freshness per facility
  • Services, attributes, and descriptions filled in or left empty
  • Posting cadence, and whether the posts earn anything
  • Hours accuracy including holidays, plus duplicate and unclaimed listings
  • Spam and fake competitor listings pushing you down the pack
  • Name, address, and phone consistency across the directories that matter
  • Link tagging, so profile traffic is measurable in the first place
18 checks Technical health A full crawl of nationalstorage.com.au, held against what Google has actually indexed.
  • Indexation: what the sitemaps declare, what the index holds, and the gap between them
  • Crawl waste, orphan pages, and pages Google visits but should not
  • Click depth: whether every page that matters sits within a few clicks of the homepage
  • The WordPress build from the outside: theme and plugin weight, and what it does to load times
  • Rendering: what disappears when JavaScript does
  • Core Web Vitals and load speed on facility pages, mobile first
  • Structured data: LocalBusiness and SelfStorage schema, reviews, and FAQs, all validated
  • Canonicals, redirects, redirect chains, and broken links
  • Image weight and formats on the photo-heavy facility pages
  • Filters, search results, and parameter pages leaking into the index
10 checks Facility pages and architecture 300 plus pages that each have to win their own suburb without becoming 300 copies of the same page.
  • What is actually unique per facility: copy, photos, reviews, directions, unit types, and prices
  • Duplicate and near-duplicate content across the location template
  • Internal linking: how many clicks from the homepage to a facility, and which pages pass authority down
  • What the homepage gives its space and links to, and what it buries
  • The state, city, and suburb hub structure above the facility pages
  • Titles and headings: does each page target its suburb and product, or just the brand
  • Whether unit size, price, and product pages support the facility pages or compete with them
12 checks Keywords, content, and competitors The searches that rent units, who owns them today, and the content behind the rankings.
  • Ranking coverage for head, city, and suburb terms across the portfolio
  • Product lines beyond the core: business, vehicle, boat, caravan, wine, and records storage
  • Striking distance: page-two rankings that a focused push moves to page one
  • The questions renters ask before they choose (sizes, what fits in them, what drives the price) and whether the site answers them
  • Side-by-side content comparison against Kennards, Storage King, and StoreLocal
  • What the blog earns against what it costs to keep publishing
  • Readiness for the peak moving periods, when demand spikes
7 checks Links and authority Whether the domain carries the weight to win the markets it is in, and where the profile runs thin.
  • Domain authority and link growth against the national competitors
  • Where the links come from, and the anchors they use
  • Toxic, spammy, or irrelevant links worth cleaning up
  • Local links market by market: the councils, clubs, and directories that move suburb rankings
  • The sponsorship assets you already pay for, and whether those placements pass any authority back to the site
9 checks AI search (GEO) The research and pricing questions renters ask before they choose are now mostly answered by AI before a results page loads. We baseline where you stand in those answers, and we stick to what is measurable, skipping the fads (llms.txt files, schema as an AI lever) that current evidence says do nothing.
  • Presence and citations in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode for storage searches, checked city by city
  • Where the map pack still owns the result and where the AI answer has taken over: pricing and unit-size questions have flipped much faster than the near me searches
  • A ChatGPT prompt panel at city level: who gets named and who gets cited for the questions renters actually ask, with Gemini and Claude read the same way
  • ChatGPT's local answers now draw on the same listings and review data Google uses, so we check how your profiles hold up there too
  • Which sources the AI engines cite for storage answers, and what it takes to become one of them
  • Whether your pages answer questions directly enough for an engine to quote them
  • Entity and knowledge panel health: does Google know exactly what National Storage is
  • Brand accuracy: what the engines get wrong about your locations, prices, and products
  • AI crawler access, done precisely: the bots that feed live answers are not the bots that train models, and blocking the wrong one costs visibility
5 checks The converting-terms cross-check Your last 180 days of paid search terms, with conversions, laid over the organic picture. This layer turns findings into priorities.
  • The searches proven to produce move-ins, and where you rank organically for each
  • High-intent terms where paid is carrying what organic should own
  • The dollar case: what winning proven converters organically is worth against current paid cost
  • A conversion weighting applied to every finding in the audit, so the ranked list orders by revenue rather than volume

Counts are the named checks in our audit workbook. The local ones run once per facility, so across the portfolio the checks run into the thousands.

03 The local lens

Measured from the street, not from head office.

Map results change block by block. A single rank pulled from a city centre says almost nothing about a facility three suburbs away, so we check the map results from a grid of points around every facility instead. Three patterns come up again and again; the audit tells you which one each facility is in.

Top of the pack on the doorstep and holding to the edge of the catchment. The job here is defence: keep the reviews coming, keep the profile active, and watch for spam listings creeping in.

Position 1 to 3: in the map pack 4 to 10: just outside it, beatable 11 to 20: buried in the list 20+: not in the running

Illustrative numbers. The audit builds a real grid like this for every facility, from live map results in its own suburbs, for the searches that rent units.

04 What you receive

Written to be used, not filed.

01 · The audit document

The full findings, with the evidence

Typically 80 to 120 pages. Every finding scored by impact and effort, shown with the data behind it, and written so your team can act on it without a translator.

02 · The ranked list

Every opportunity, in order

One ordered list, weighted by the conversion data from your own search terms. Formatted to sit directly beside your agency's roadmap, which is the whole point.

03 · The executive summary

Two pages for leadership

The state of play, the five things worth doing first, and what they are worth. Reads in one sitting, and travels well upward.

04 · The working session

90 minutes with Brad and Robin

We walk your team through the findings and the order we would run them in. Bring your agency if you like: the list is written so it can go straight onto their board.

05 The price

One fixed fee. No meter running.

The SEO audit

Fixed fee, full portfolio

$9,000 + GST
All 8 audit areas across nationalstorage.com.auIncluded
Rank grids and profile review for every facility in the portfolioIncluded
The converting-terms cross-check against 180 days of paid dataIncluded
The audit document, the ranked list, and the executive summaryIncluded
90-minute working session, your agency welcome in the roomIncluded
All crawl, ranking, and data costsIncluded

Progress check

Optional. Book any time in the 6 months after delivery

$3,500 + GST

We re-run the rank grids and the profile pulls, measure what moved, and re-score the ranked list against the baseline the audit set. One shorter document, one session. It answers the question an audit alone cannot: did the plan get done, and did it work.

Where the number comes from

300 plus facilities each checked in its own market, and both founders doing the work themselves: roughly 55 hours of senior time between us. Prices are in AUD and exclude GST.

06 Timeline

Four weeks, kickoff to working session.

Week 1

Setup and the full-portfolio pulls

A 30-minute kickoff, and access lands: the search term report, Search Console, Analytics, and Bing. The full crawl runs, rank grids queue across every facility, and profile data comes in for the whole portfolio.

Week 2

The local layer

Grid results analysed facility by facility, and the profile review runs across the portfolio.

Week 3

Site, content, links, and AI

Technical findings confirmed by hand, the content and competitor comparison, the link profile, and the AI answer checks city by city. Everything gets scored.

Week 4

The document and the session

Findings written up, the list ranked with the conversion weighting, and the executive summary drafted. The working session runs in the back half of the week.

Four weeks assumes the search term export arrives in week 1. Without it the audit still runs; the ranked list just loses its conversion weighting, so we would rather wait for it.

07 Access

What we will need.

From your side

  • The Google Ads search term report: last 180 days, with conversion data. A CSV export, or read-only Ads access and we pull it ourselves
  • Google Search Console, read-only
  • Google Analytics, read-only
  • Bing Webmaster Tools, read-only (if it is not set up, we will note that too)
  • A confirmed facility list
  • 30 minutes for kickoff, and a contact for quick questions along the way

Not needed

  • Your SEO agency's roadmap, reporting, or briefs. We build our list without seeing theirs, which is what keeps the comparison honest
  • WordPress admin. The audit works from the outside, the way Google sees the site
  • Time with your agency before we deliver. After delivery, happily
08 Not in this quote

What this is not.

  • Making the changes. We hand over a ranked list with the evidence; we do not edit the site, the templates, or the profiles
  • A paid search audit. That is a separate piece of work, and the deck you have shows its shape
  • Ongoing SEO management or a retainer
  • Landing page or conversion design work

If you want help running the list once it lands, that is a separate conversation.

Ready when you are.

Send the search term export and a kickoff time, and the four weeks start. Either of us is the right first call.

robin@redvalkyrie.com.au  ·  brad@redvalkyrie.com.au