By Andrew Heppinstall – Founder, Unavoidable Marketing – 29 June 2026
“Free audit” has earned itself a bad name. Too often it is a thin excuse to get on a call and pitch a retainer, with a one-page PDF of generic recommendations tacked on at the end. That is not what a useful audit looks like.
If you are going to invest the time to share your website, your ad accounts and your analytics with someone, you deserve to come out the other side knowing exactly what is working, what is leaking money, and what the smartest next move is, regardless of whether you ever work with them. This is what an honest one actually covers, and the three issues we find in roughly four out of five businesses we audit.
Part one: the website
Your website is doing one of three things at any given moment: bringing in business, sitting there politely, or quietly losing you customers. A good audit can tell you which, fast.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
How quickly does the site actually load on a mid-range Android phone on 4G? Not your iPhone on home wi-fi. We run it through real-device tests and Google’s Core Web Vitals report. Anything slower than around 2.5 seconds to Largest Contentful Paint is leaving money on the table.
Mobile usability
Most service business traffic is on mobile. We walk through the site on a phone, looking for tap targets that are too small, forms that are a nightmare to fill in with thumbs, and pop-ups that bury the content. The number of “desktop-first” sites still being shipped in 2026 is alarming.
Conversion paths
Can someone landing on your homepage figure out what to do next inside three seconds? Is there a clear primary call to action above the fold? Are phone numbers tap-to-call on mobile? Is the contact form short enough that an actual human would fill it in? Most sites fail at least two of these.
Trust signals
Reviews on display, real photos of real people, case studies with named clients, security and accreditation badges where relevant. The opposite of stock photography and “established 2012” badges that mean nothing.
Part two: how people are finding you (or not)
Traffic without context is just numbers in a dashboard. A good audit shows you where the traffic is coming from, how qualified it is, and what is missing.
Search visibility
Which keywords are you ranking for, and which ones bring in actual business versus vanity traffic? We look at rankings, click-through rates and the gap between what you rank for and what your competitors rank for. More on the long-term shape of this in our SEO service overview.
Google Business Profile
If you are a local business and your GBP is not optimised, you are handing a head start to every competitor whose is. We check categories, services, photos, post cadence, Q&A and review velocity.
Paid advertising
If you are running ads, we look at account structure, match types, negative keywords, conversion tracking, and the ratio of spend going on terms that have ever converted versus those that have not. More about how we set these up in the Google Ads service page.
Social and content
Posting cadence, engagement, whether the content actually matches what customers ask about. Quietly, this is where most businesses are leaving the most easy wins on the table.
Part three: the numbers behind the marketing
This is the part most “free audits” skip because it requires actually opening the analytics. Without it, every recommendation is a guess.
Tracking and attribution
Is GA4 set up properly, with conversion events for the things that actually matter (calls, form submissions, bookings, purchases)? If not, fixing this is usually the highest-leverage thing we can recommend in the whole audit.
Cost per lead and cost per customer
Once tracking is sane, what is a lead costing across each channel, and what is a customer worth on average? Most owners can guess these to the nearest order of magnitude. Almost none have the real numbers.
What the data is telling you
Is one channel quietly carrying the business? Is another bleeding money? Is your best month explained by something you can repeat, or was it a one-off referral?
The three issues we spot in roughly 80% of audits
Across the last few hundred audits, three problems show up over and over again.
1. Conversion tracking is broken or missing
Either there is no tracking on key actions (calls, form submissions, bookings), or there is tracking but it is double-counting or attributing to the wrong source. Result: every marketing decision after that is based on bad data. This is genuinely the most common, and the cheapest to fix.
2. The website does not match the ad spend
Spending good money on ads to send people to a slow, confusing or trust-thin page is the marketing equivalent of pouring petrol on a damp fire. Fixing the page often doubles the same campaign’s results overnight. See our website design approach for what “matches the ad spend” looks like.
3. There is no follow-up system for leads that do not buy first time
Most of the leads who do not buy in the first contact will buy something from someone within 90 days. Without a follow-up system, that “someone” is almost certainly not you. A simple email and SMS sequence usually recovers more revenue than any new ad campaign.
When a free audit is not the right answer
If you are looking for a deep technical SEO audit on a large enterprise site, that is paid work, full stop. If you want a six-month engagement plan signed off before we have looked at your numbers, that is not what a free audit is for. And if you are not willing to share basic access to analytics or ad accounts, we cannot produce anything useful, and we would rather not pretend otherwise.
Where this fits is the owner-led business that wants a straight answer on whether what they are doing is working, and what the next sensible step is. That is the conversation we are best at having.
How to actually get one
You can request a free audit on our quote page or call us on 07749 941 111. We are a Leeds team and we work with service businesses across the UK. There is more about our background on the about page, and recent client work on the portfolio.
You will get a written summary plus a 30-minute call to walk through it. No pressure to take it any further, no auto-renewal, no surprise invoice at the end. Just a clear picture of where you actually stand.
Frequently asked questions
What do you need from me to run a free audit?
Read-only access to GA4, Google Ads (if running) and Google Business Profile. We do not need passwords for anything else. If you do not have those set up, we will tell you that and how to fix it.
How long does it take?
From access being granted to delivery, usually around five working days. We block out proper time to do it rather than rushing it between client work.
What do I get at the end?
A written report with prioritised recommendations, screenshots, and ballpark effort and impact for each, plus a 30-minute call to walk through it.
Is there any obligation to use you afterwards?
No. About half the people we audit choose to work with us, the other half use the report to fix things themselves or with their existing team. Both are fine outcomes.
What if you find something embarrassing?
We have seen worse. We are not here to make anyone feel bad. The point of the audit is to fix things, not score points.