What a website audit is, and why to run it as a customer
Most website audits start with a tool and end with a long report of technical warnings. Most of those warnings will never cost you a customer. What does cost you customers is simpler: a visitor cannot tell what you do, cannot find a phone number, or gives up because the page is slow on a phone.
So this checklist works the other way round. You review the site the way a customer does, then add the few technical checks that matter for search. It is the website part of our how customers see you check, which also covers maps profiles, reply speed and AI answers. You can run this part yourself in about 30 minutes.
BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (1,002 US adults) found that 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, and that after a positive review 54% visit the business’s website. Your website is often the second stop, right after the reviews. It has to hold up.
Before you start: set up the test
- Take your phone, not your laptop. Many customers meet your site on a phone, and Google indexes the mobile version of a site.
- Open a private browser window so you see the site as a stranger does, without saved logins.
- Pick one real service you sell and one real search a customer would type, such as “water heater repair near me” or “teeth whitening cost”.
- Write down what you find as you go. A simple note with pass or fail is enough.
The ten checks
1. The five-second test
Open the home page and count to five. Can you say what the business does, for whom and where? If a stranger needs to scroll to find out, the top of the page needs work. Name the service and the area in the first screen, in plain words.
2. The contact path
Find the phone number. Tap it. It should start a call. Find the contact form, fill it in with a test message and confirm it reaches a real inbox, and note how long the reply takes. Check that the number, the email and the booking link are the same on every page. A broken form is the most expensive error on a small site because nothing tells you it is broken.
3. Mobile use
On your phone, check that you can read the text without zooming, tap the menu with a thumb, and scroll without the page jumping. Google says it indexes and ranks using the mobile version of a site, and that the mobile version should contain the same content as the desktop one. Do not hide important text behind tabs or taps that only work on desktop. If a price table or a service list is missing on mobile, it is missing for Google too.
4. Service pages with real facts
For each main service, is there a page that says what is included, who it is for, where you work, what it typically costs or what a quote depends on, how long it takes and how to start? A page that says only “quality service” is not a service page. Add the facts a customer asks on the phone.
5. Trust on the page
Look for proof a stranger can check: real reviews with a link to where they live, named people and credentials, licenses and insurance where they apply, a physical address or a clear service area, photos of your own work. Google’s guidance on helpful content asks who wrote the page, how, and why. It also warns against easily verified factual errors and against changing dates to make pages look fresh when nothing changed. Check that your hours, prices and “last updated” claims are true today.
6. Speed
Run your home page and your top service page through Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Google’s published targets for a good experience are a Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, an Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds and a Cumulative Layout Shift below 0.1. Google recommends good Core Web Vitals but does not say how much they weigh in ranking, so treat speed as a customer problem first: a page that takes ten seconds to show a phone number loses the call.
7. Titles, descriptions and headings
Search your business name plus your main service and look at how the result appears. Google’s SEO Starter Guide says a good title is unique to the page, clear and concise, and describes the page accurately, and that a good meta description is short, unique to one page and includes its most relevant points. Check that no two pages share a title. Headings should help a reader move through the page. There is no ideal number of them.
8. Local facts and structured data
Is your business name, address (or service area), phone number and hours written in plain text, not only in an image? Structured data (schema) can repeat those facts for search engines. Google’s LocalBusiness documentation lists name and address as required, and recommends telephone, opening hours, URL and geographic coordinates. It also states that Google does not guarantee that features using structured data will appear in results. Add it to be accurate and readable, not as a promise of a result.
9. Accessibility
Accessibility means customers with low vision, limited mobility or a slow connection can still use the site. The W3C publishes the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and encourages use of the latest version. Do four quick checks yourself: can you reach every link and button with the Tab key, does every image that carries meaning have a short text description, is the text readable against its background, and does every form field have a visible label? We build to WCAG 2.1 AA. Whichever version you target, a full accessibility review needs a specialist, and this is not legal advice.
10. Crawler access
Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. A rule left over from a development site can block every search bot. OpenAI documents separate crawlers: OAI-SearchBot surfaces sites in ChatGPT’s search features, and sites that opt out of it are not shown in ChatGPT search answers, while GPTBot relates to model training. They can be allowed or blocked independently. Decide on purpose which you allow. Allowing a bot does not guarantee that any assistant will mention you. It only removes a self-inflicted block.
A one-page scorecard
Copy this into a note and mark each line pass, fail or unsure.
| Check | Pass if | Fix priority |
|---|---|---|
| Five-second test | Service, audience and area are clear without scrolling | High |
| Contact path | Phone is tap-to-call, form arrives in a real inbox | High |
| Mobile | Readable, tappable, same content as desktop | High |
| Service pages | Each service has scope, area, price logic, next step | High |
| Trust | Reviews, people, license, address or service area are visible | Medium |
| Speed | Core Web Vitals in the “good” ranges | Medium |
| Titles and descriptions | Unique, accurate, one per page | Medium |
| Local facts and schema | Name, address, phone, hours in text and in markup | Medium |
| Accessibility | Keyboard, text alternatives, contrast, form labels | Medium |
| Crawler access | robots.txt does not block the bots you want | Low effort, high damage if wrong |
Free tools worth using
- Your phone. It finds more problems than any report.
- Google PageSpeed Insights. Speed and Core Web Vitals for one page at a time.
- Google Search Console. Free after you verify the site. Its Core Web Vitals report shows how your pages perform for real visitors, and the URL Inspection tool shows how Google sees a page.
- A site: search. Type site:yourdomain.com into Google to check which pages are indexed.
What to fix first
- A broken or slow contact path.
- Missing facts on service pages: what, where, how much or what it depends on, how to start.
- Mobile problems that hide content or buttons.
- Wrong or inconsistent name, address, phone or hours, here and on your profiles. The Google Business Profile checklist covers the profile side.
- Titles, descriptions and schema.
Then repeat the test in a month. If you want a second pair of eyes, our free demo shows how customers and AI assistants see you today, with 3-4 competitors side by side. It is free with no obligation (30-minute call; demo shared within 3 business days). You can ask for it on the free demo page. And if you wonder what ChatGPT says about you right now, the 30-minute self-test takes you through it.
Published . Updated .