A real audit.
Not a disguised sales call.

Actually free, no payment required. The honest framing: it's a lead magnet — the audit gives us a chance to show what working with us looks like, and gives you a chance to evaluate our work before committing to anything. Roughly 25% of audit requests turn into discovery calls; another 35% take the audit, fix some of the recommendations themselves, and come back later. The rest never come back. We're fine with all three outcomes. The audit itself is the same 14-section deliverable regardless of whether you ever hire us.

Fourteen sections across four categories. Technical SEO: site speed and Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, crawl errors, sitemap and robots.txt, schema markup, canonical handling. Content: indexation analysis, content gaps vs competitors, cannibalisation issues, thin/duplicate content flagging. Authority: backlink profile health, anchor text distribution, lost links, top-performing competitor links. AI search visibility: Mention Layer baseline across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Overviews for your top 10 priority queries. Competitor benchmark: where you rank against your top three competitors on 30+ priority keywords. The deliverable is a 15-25 page PDF plus a recorded video walkthrough where Joel goes through the findings personally.

We deliver within 5-7 business days of receiving your information. Most of that time is the manual review portion — the automated tooling produces output in hours, but the part that matters (Joel's senior-level interpretation of what the data actually means for your situation) takes the bulk of the time. We could deliver faster by skipping the manual review, but you'd have a tool report instead of an audit.

Both. Each finding includes the issue, the impact (high/medium/low), the difficulty to fix (easy/moderate/significant), and a specific recommended action. The video walkthrough goes deeper on the top 5-7 findings — explaining context, trade-offs, and how we'd prioritise the work. The point of the audit is to give you something actionable, not just a long list of problems. If you wanted to take the audit and implement the recommendations yourself, you'd have everything you need.

Two reasons. First, the audit costs us 4-6 hours of senior labor — meaningful but recoverable through the engagements that come from it. Second, the audit is the most credible sales tool we have. Every prospect we send a real audit to has a much clearer picture of how we operate than they'd have from a pitch deck. The 25% that convert to engagements come in pre-sold on quality. The 75% that don't either weren't a good fit (in which case the audit saved both of us time) or come back later when timing is right. We've found this funnel produces higher-quality engagements than any other prospecting channel.

Best fit is businesses doing $500K-$10M in revenue with an existing website and at least one identifiable SEO competitor. Below $500K revenue, the audit ROI rarely justifies a paid SEO engagement at any tier — we'll often recommend specific DIY fixes during the discovery call instead. Above $10M revenue, the audit scope expands and we usually charge $5K-$15K for the work because the analysis is meaningfully larger. The free version covers the sweet spot in between.

Within 24 hours: a brief intake email confirming receipt with 2-3 specific questions to clarify scope. Within 5-7 business days: the completed audit PDF plus video walkthrough delivered by email. Optional next step: a 30-minute discovery call to discuss what's in the audit and whether engagement makes sense. There's no automatic follow-up sequence trying to push you to a sales call — we send the deliverable and let you decide what's next. About 60% of audit recipients respond to the deliverable email; 40% go quiet, and we don't chase.

Most 'free audits' are one of four things: a SEMrush/Ahrefs report with the agency logo on it, a 30-minute screen-share that's actually a sales pitch, a 'site grade' from a tool like Hubspot's Website Grader, or an automated checklist. Our audit is none of those. It's a manually-reviewed, written, 15-25 page deliverable with a recorded video walkthrough — the same format we'd produce for a paying client at the start of an engagement. The difference is what 4-6 hours of senior labor produces vs 5 minutes of tool output with branding applied.