Free audit is a phrase that has been ruined. Type your website into a box, wait eleven seconds, receive a page of red warnings and a request to book a call. Nothing in it was looked at by a person and most of it would say the same about any website on earth.
So it is worth setting out what an audit is supposed to examine, partly so you can judge ours, and mostly so you can judge anybody else’s.
The seven things worth checking
Whether search engines can reach you and file you at all. Is the site in Google’s index. Is there a sitemap and does it list more than the homepage. Is there anything in the site’s own settings telling search engines to stay away. This layer is either fine or catastrophic, rarely in between, and it is checked first because nothing else matters until it passes.
Whether a machine can describe you without guessing. Whether there is structured data on your pages stating what your business is called and what it does. Whether your page titles say both who you are and what you sell. Whether the same description of your business appears everywhere, or five different ones do. This is the layer that decides what an AI assistant says about you.
Whether you turn up when someone looks. Your own name. Your name plus your category. And the searches a stranger makes who does not know you exist, which is the one that actually brings customers. Plus what the assistants say when asked who to hire in your city.
Whether you can be found on the platforms your customers use. Not how many followers you have. Whether searching your brand name inside Instagram or Facebook surfaces the real profile, whether the bio says what you do and where, whether anything has been posted recently, and whether the profile and the website link to each other.
What your link looks like when somebody shares it. When a customer sends your website to a friend on WhatsApp, does a proper card appear with an image and a description, or a bare blue link. This is a small thing that decides whether the link gets opened.
Whether the page arrives before the visitor leaves. Measured on a phone, on mobile data, because that is where your customers are, not on the fast connection your site was built on.
Whether somebody who arrives can reach a human being. Is there an email on your own domain rather than a free one. Is there a way to make contact without hunting. Is there any way to capture an enquiry besides a phone number. Can a visitor identify an actual person or team.
How to tell a real audit from a sales document
Every finding cites what was actually collected. Not "your SEO needs work", but the specific thing that was checked, what came back, and where it can be seen. If you cannot verify a finding yourself from what is in the document, it is an opinion.
Every serious problem comes with its fix. Where the fix is code, the code should be in the document, ready to paste, so you could hand the whole thing to your own developer and never speak to the auditor again. An audit that names problems and withholds solutions is a sales document.
It says what was not checked. This is the part that tells you whether to trust the rest. Anything behind a login was not checked. Anything on a staging site was not checked. Rankings gathered from the wrong country are not evidence of anything and should be labelled as such.
It contains no invented numbers. Traffic estimates, domain authority scores and keyword volumes are guesses from tools presented as measurements. A number nobody can trace back to something that was actually observed should not be there.
It says when things are fine. An audit where everything is red is not a thorough audit, it is a frightening one.
What an audit cannot tell you
Worth being honest about the limits.
It cannot tell you how much traffic you get. That lives in your own analytics, and any external estimate of it is a guess dressed up.
It cannot tell you why customers do not buy once they have arrived. That is a question about your offer, your price and your follow-up, and it needs your numbers, not your website.
It cannot see anything behind a login, which means the parts of your social presence only you can see are genuinely invisible to it.
And it is a snapshot. A ranking today is not a ranking next month.
Why anybody gives one away
The obvious answer is that it starts conversations, and that is true. The less obvious answer is that it is the only honest way to quote for this work.
A price given before anybody has looked at your website is a guess with a number on it. Most businesses have never seen this information about themselves, and a surprising number discover that the thing they were about to spend money fixing was not the problem. That conversation is worth more than the fee for the audit would have been.
It also means the document is yours whatever happens next. You can take it to another agency, hand it to your own developer, or file it. If it is only useful when we do the work, it was never an audit.
Ours covers all seven areas, cites the evidence for every finding, ships the fix for every problem, states plainly what it did not check, and comes with no obligation. If you want to see what your business looks like from the outside, that is the way to find out.
