A useful audit answers four questions. Can people find you, does your website turn a visitor into a contact, can you tell where the money went, and does anyone follow up when someone reaches out. Everything else in a forty page audit report is padding.
We do ours free, which tells you what we think it is worth as a standalone product. Paid audits in this market usually run somewhere between a few hundred and a couple of thousand dollars, and the price says almost nothing about the quality. What matters is whether the thing ends in a prioritized list you could hand to someone, or in a PDF full of screenshots.
Question one: can people find you?
Two halves, and they break separately. The map listing is one system and the ordinary search results are another, so a business can be strong in one and invisible in the other.
On the profile side we look at the primary category, the services list, the description, the hours including holidays, the photos and whether anything has been posted this year. On the website side we look at whether there is a real page for each service, whether the pages are indexed at all, and whether the site is turning up for the searches that come with an intent to hire rather than the ones that come with an intent to browse.
Search Console holds sixteen months of performance data, and it is free. If a business has it connected, most of this half of the audit is already sitting there waiting to be read. If it is not connected, that is usually the first thing we fix.
Question two: does the site convert?
Open the site on a phone and read only what fits above the fold. If a stranger cannot tell what you do, who you do it for and where, nothing further down the page gets a chance.
Then the mechanical checks. How many fields are on the form, whether the phone number is a real tappable link, whether the contact route is visible from every page, how fast the thing loads. Google publishes thresholds for that last one: a largest contentful paint under 2.5 seconds, an interaction to next paint under 200 milliseconds, and layout shift under 0.1. They are a floor rather than a target, and a surprising number of small business sites sit well outside them because of one oversized image nobody ever compressed.
Want the four questions answered for your business?
Give us access to your site and your search console and we will come back within a week with a one page list in priority order.
Get a free website and marketing auditQuestion three: can you tell where the money went?
This is the one that most often comes back broken, and it is the least glamorous to fix. Calls untracked. Form submissions going to an inbox with no record. Ad spend that cannot be tied to a single booked job.
An audit should tell you, plainly, how many people contacted the business last month and roughly where they came from. If nobody can answer that, then every conversation about budget for the next year is guesswork, and the first recommendation is to fix the counting before spending another dollar on anything.
Question four: does anyone follow up?
We audit the inbox, not just the website. Where does a form submission land, who sees it, how fast, and what happens on a Saturday.
The single most expensive problem we have found in an audit was a business losing inquiries because the form went to an address that forwarded to someone who had left. Nobody had noticed for weeks. No amount of search work would have shown up as a result, and the fix cost nothing. That is the sort of thing an audit is actually for.
What should the deliverable look like?
A short list, in priority order, with an honest note on effort against impact. Ours usually runs to one page and about eight items, and the top three are the only ones that matter in the first month.
| The finding | What it should say |
|---|---|
| Findability | Which searches you can realistically win, and which you cannot |
| Conversion | The specific thing on the page costing you contacts |
| Measurement | How many people contacted you last month, and from where |
| Follow up | Where an inquiry lands and how long it sits there |
| Order of work | The three things to do first, and why those three |
Be suspicious of an audit that recommends everything. A list of forty two issues with no ordering is a way of avoiding a judgment call, and the judgment call is the value. If a report does not say what to do first, it has left the hard part to you.
How long does it take?
Ours takes about a week from the point where we have access to what we need. Access is the bottleneck more often than the work: Search Console, the ad account, the website login, and somebody who can confirm what actually happens when an inquiry arrives.
A deeper audit for a business with several locations or a large site takes longer and is worth paying for. For a single location local business, a week and a page is the honest shape of it.
What we do not put in an audit
Scores. We stopped giving an overall number out of a hundred because it did nothing except make people feel bad or complacent, and two businesses with identical scores can need completely different work. We also leave out anything we cannot tie to a decision, which cuts most of the length out of a typical report.
And we do not audit for problems we happen to sell the fix for. If the honest answer is that your website is fine and your problem is that nobody answers the phone between eleven and two, that is what the audit says, even though it means we do not sell you a website.
If you want ours, it costs nothing and takes about a week. What we do with the findings after that is on the Growth Engine page and the digital marketing page, and the plans that carry the ongoing work are priced on the pricing page.