The 14-Point Audit We Run Before Taking Any Client

Why the order matters more than the list

Every agency has an audit. Most of them are a crawl report with a logo on it. Ours is fourteen checks in a fixed order, and the order is the point, because the first checks decide whether the later ones mean anything. I run it on every business before we take them on, and we hand over the findings whether or not they hire us.

The reason it exists is simple. More than half the accounts we inherit are optimising toward something that is not a real lead, and a good share of the rest have a marketing problem that turns out to be an operations problem: nobody answers after four, quotes go out in a week, reviews are never asked for. You cannot fix those with a campaign. The audit is how we find out which kind of problem it is before anyone spends money.

Checks one to three: tracking, always first

One: are calls, forms and chats tracked at all. Two: are they de-duplicated, so one customer who calls twice and fills in a form is one lead and not three. Three: does what the ad platforms count as a conversion match what the business calls a lead. On a foundation repair account in Colorado Springs the answer to three was no, so Google Ads had been optimising toward the wrong thing for a long time. Fixing the measurement first was what made the later work pay: sessions 2.3× in ninety days and roughly seventy thousand dollars a year of wasted spend removed. The case study shows it.

If tracking fails these checks, every performance conclusion from the last year is suspect. We fix it, wait for a clean baseline, and only then judge a channel. Skipping this is how businesses end up cutting the channel that was working.

Checks four to six: the money questions

Four: what does a booked job earn, on average, by service. Five: what is the close rate on inbound leads. Six: how fast is the phone answered, and what happens after hours. Those three numbers decide whether a channel is viable, and no amount of optimisation overrides them. A channel producing leads at eighty dollars is a bargain for a roofer and a disaster for a carpet cleaner.

This is also where the operations problems show up. If the close rate is fifteen percent and the phone rings out a third of the time, the cheapest marketing improvement available is answering the phone. We say so, in writing, even though it means less work for us.

Checks seven to ten: the Business Profile and the map

Seven: primary category, compared to the three businesses outranking you. Eight: the review pace over the last six months and whether reviews get replies. Nine: whether every service listed on the profile has a real page behind it on the site. Ten: a map grid scan, the position checked from a spread of points across the service area rather than one spot. Google’s local ranking page says the map results run on relevance, distance and prominence, and these four checks cover the parts of each you can affect. I have written up what moves them in what moves the map pack.

Checks eleven to fourteen: the technical layer

Eleven: indexing. Which pages Google has in its index and which it has seen and declined, straight from the Search Console page indexing report. Twelve: speed and Core Web Vitals, Google’s measures of how a page loads and responds on real devices, because a slow site wastes every paid click. Thirteen: duplicate and thin pages, usually templated city pages, which Google’s spam policies describe as doorway pages when they exist only to rank for near-identical searches. Fourteen: structure, meaning service pages that match what people search for, internal links that reach them, and schema that tells Google what the business is.

The indexing check deserves a sentence on its own, because it is where most surprises live. Search Console lists the pages Google has chosen not to index and why, and on an inherited site it is common to find the service pages that matter sitting in that list while forty templated city pages are indexed and doing nothing. Google’s own crawling and indexing FAQ is clear that it makes no promises about when or whether a page gets indexed, so the job is to give it fewer, better pages and a clear path to them, then watch the report move.

We rank the findings by expected impact over effort and ship the top three within the first two weeks of an engagement. On the Spartanburg roofing account the first two weeks were all in this layer, and the twelve months that followed produced a 151% rise in Google clicks with no new ad spend. That case study is the pattern.

The findings are yours either way

We hand over the full audit whether or not you hire us. If the answer is that your marketing is fine and your intake process is the bottleneck, that is worth more to you than a retainer, and it is the honest answer. Our why us page lists this alongside the other things we commit to, because it is one of the ways we are different from the agencies people come to us from.

The audit takes about a week from access to findings. You get a written document you could hand to another agency, a call to go through it, and a ranked list of what to do first. If you want one, start here. Bring access to Search Console, the Business Profile and whatever ad accounts exist, and we will take it from there.