You’ve got a website. Two people have emailed you this month offering a free website audit, and neither said what you’d get at the end of it. So you’ve done what most owners do. You’ve left both unread and gone back to the job in front of you.
That’s a sensible reaction. Most free audits are a list of things that might be wrong, in words you’d have to Google, with no sign of what any of it costs you. Here’s what a useful one looks like, and how I got reminded of it the awkward way.
I described my free audit and nobody cared
Blunt admission first. A few weeks ago I posted about our free audit on Instagram. Thirty-one people saw it. Nobody tapped the link and nobody visited my profile. Zero on both.
Fair enough. I’d described a thing and given nobody a reason to want it or a route to get it. I’d done exactly what I’d tell a client not to do.
The mistake is common, and it isn’t only an Instagram problem. Plenty of audit offers read the same way: “We’ll check your speed, your keywords, your backlinks and your ads.” That’s a list of what’s included. It doesn’t answer the one question you’re actually asking, which is: “Is this costing me money, and how much?”
What a fix is actually worth
Here’s a number instead.
Lawrence Roofing is a Wellington roofing company running Meta Ads with us. In month one, their cost per lead was $79.70. Cost per lead is just what you pay in ad spend each time a real enquiry comes in. By July 2026 it was $19.41. That’s a 76% drop.
Under $600 of ad spend produced $125k to $180k of work. You can see more of our real client results on the website.
I’m not telling you every business will get that. They won’t, and anyone who promises it is selling you something. I’m telling you what the gap can look like when an ad account is leaking and someone finds where. Put $79.70 and $19.41 side by side and the first number stops looking like “what ads cost”. Part of it was the leak.
That’s the bit most audits skip. They’ll tell you the leak exists. They won’t tell you what plugging it is worth.
What a free website audit should include
If you’re going to say yes to one, it should do these five things:
- Look at what’s actually live. Your real website, your real Google listing, your real ads. Not a template with your name dropped in.
- Cover Google and AI search. More people now ask ChatGPT or Google’s AI answers who to call, so being invisible there costs you the same as being invisible on page one.
- Find where the money leaks. A contact form that doesn’t send. Ads pointing at a page that doesn’t match the ad. A site that takes six seconds to load on a phone.
- Say what each problem is worth, in plain English. Not “your meta descriptions need work”. Something closer to “this page gets your best traffic and loses most of it”.
- Be read by a human. An automated scan can flag 200 issues. A person can tell you which three matter.
That’s what our Free Leak Check is built to do. It looks at your website, your visibility on Google and AI search, and your ads. A person reads it, and it lands in your inbox within 24 hours.
How to spot a thin one
You can usually tell within thirty seconds of opening the report. A thin audit has a big score out of 100 on the front page, a wall of red and orange warnings, and no sentence that starts with “this is why it matters to you”.
It also tends to look identical for every business. If a plumber in Tauranga and an online rug shop in Auckland would get the same twelve findings in the same order, nobody looked at either of them.
A useful one is shorter and more opinionated. It tells you the two or three things worth fixing first, why, and roughly what’s at stake. It leaves out the other forty because they won’t move the phone.
The question to ask about what happens next
Most owners I talk to have had the same experience with quotes. It says “from $X”, and then it’s never $X.
So the second thing to check about any audit is what sits behind it. If the next step is “let’s jump on a call to discuss investment”, you’ve been handed a sales funnel with a report stapled to the front. A decent audit points at a next step with an actual price on it, or tells you honestly that nothing’s worth paying for yet.
Sometimes the answer is that your website’s fine and the problem is somewhere else. That’s still a useful answer. It’s much cheaper to hear it from a free check than from a year of retainer invoices.
Our prices are published on the pricing page, so you can see the numbers before anyone speaks to you.
Why I got the Instagram post wrong
I wrote that post as if the audit was the product. It isn’t. The audit is the way you get to the product, and the product is a number: what’s leaking, and what it’s costing you each month.
A roofing company in Wellington didn’t care about an audit. It cared about paying $19.41 for a lead instead of $79.70. Everything in the report is just how you find that out.
An audit that can’t get you to a number like that is only a very polite list.