The free audit email is right about your website. It is also right about everyone else's.

It arrives on a Tuesday with your domain name in the subject line. Somebody has been looking at your website, and they have found problems.

The unsettling part is that they are usually not wrong.

One question

Before you read another line of it, apply this. Could that sentence have been written without looking at my website at all?

Most of them could. That is not a small observation, because a finding that applies to every small business site in the country is not a finding about yours. It is a sentence that happens to be true near you.

Why the claims land

An audit run automatically against any domain will always return something, because the tools measure dozens of things and no real website scores perfectly on all of them.

So the error count is real and means nothing, since the same scan on the sender's own site would produce a comparable number. The speed complaint is real and nearly universal. The observation that you do not rank for some broad phrase is real and would be true of almost everybody, because one business can occupy that position and there are thousands of you. Even the line about competitors being ahead of you is safe, because for any keyword worth naming, somebody is.

None of that requires a person to have formed an opinion about your business.

It depends on a score that does not exist

The genre rests on a belief that Google keeps a rating for your website, that yours is bad, and that the sender can see it.

There is no such number. What exists is a handful of separate measurements of narrow things, and the one usually waved at you is the PageSpeed score, which is a lab result rather than a description of what your visitors experience. A red number there is genuinely worth understanding. It is not a verdict, and it is certainly not a rating that anybody has assigned to your business.

What a real finding sounds like

It names something specific to you that a person had to notice.

Your contact form does not submit on an iPhone. The phone number on your homepage is different from the one on your Business Profile. Your service page for the thing you most want to sell does not mention the town you are in. Each of those is checkable in a minute and would be wrong to say about most other businesses. Each also carries an obvious consequence, which is the difference between an observation and a template.

A real finding also survives being asked "so what?". If the answer is another metric rather than a lost customer, the finding was decoration.

Check it yourself, free

You do not have to take anybody's word, including ours.

Search Console will tell you what your site actually appears for and how often, from an account you own rather than a report you were sent. PageSpeed Insights will give you the same performance figures the email is quoting. Between them, most claims in a cold audit can be confirmed or dismissed in about ten minutes, and doing that once teaches you more about your own site than the email ever intended to.

The awkward part

We are an agency, and this is an agency website. So take the same test to us.

If anybody, us included, tells you something about your business that could have been said to the business next door, they have not looked. That is the whole standard, and it is the reason we suggest checking your own numbers before any agency call rather than after, since a conversation where you already know what you rank for is a completely different conversation.

Some of these emails are from real people who did look, and they read differently when they are. Specific, unflattering, and about you.

If one has landed and you cannot tell which sort it is, book a strategy call and read it to us. We will tell you which parts are worth acting on, including the parts that are.