Before a first call, we spend half an hour looking at a business from the outside, the way a customer or a competitor would. None of it needs a login, and most of it an owner can do alone.
Speed on a phone
Run the homepage through Google’s PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile score first. Most visitors arrive on a phone, often on a weak signal, and a slow first screen loses them before they read a word. Below 50, the site is likely costing you visits your ads already paid for.
What reviews say twice
Read the twenty newest reviews on Google and wherever else your customers leave them, and look for the phrase that comes up twice. Praise that repeats is your strongest message, and it is often missing from your own site. A complaint that repeats is usually an operations problem; more marketing only makes it louder.
What competitors pay to say
Meta’s Ad Library and Google’s Ads Transparency Center show the ads any business is running now. Look up three competitors. An ad that has run for months is probably working, so note its offer, its picture, and its first line.
When people start searching
Google Trends shows when interest in your category rises and falls. For a seasonal business, the gap between when people start searching and when you start spending is often the cheapest fix there is.
Whether anything is counting
Check that the site carries Google Analytics and the pixel for any platform you advertise on. A surprising number of sites run ads with nothing measuring what happens after the click, and money you can’t trace is the first thing we stop.
What we do with it
Each finding gets three scores from 0 to 3: impact, confidence, and ease. Sorted, the top three become the questions for the call. When a business wants the full version, our outside-in audit covers the same ground in depth for a fixed $2K.
Fixed fee, agreed up frontNever a percentage of your ad spendYou keep everything we build