There is a specific kind of frustration that brings owners to a consultant rather than an agency. You are spending money on marketing. Something is not working. Nobody in the chain has an incentive to tell you plainly what it is, because the person who would diagnose the problem is usually the person selling the solution.
Consulting work is structured to remove that conflict. You buy the diagnosis. What you do with it is genuinely up to you.
An audit should end an argument, not start a sales process
Most free SEO audits are lead magnets. They run an automated crawl, produce two hundred warnings sorted by severity, and conclude that you need to hire the company that ran it. The findings are technically accurate and practically useless, because they do not distinguish between the four issues costing you money and the hundred and ninety-six that are noise.
A real audit answers a different question: given this market, this competition and this budget, what are the three things that would change the outcome? Sometimes the answer is embarrassing for us — a business with a well-optimised profile and no competitors within fifteen miles does not need a retainer, it needs to answer the phone faster.
The work covers the Business Profile against Google’s published guidelines, the site’s crawlability and indexing, the page structure against the queries that matter, the local footprint, and the competitive gap. What comes back is a prioritised list with the reasoning attached, so you can challenge the conclusions rather than take them on faith.
Details on what a full SEO audit examines and delivers.
Competitor and keyword research tells you which fight is winnable
Most keyword research sold to local businesses is a spreadsheet of search volumes. Volume is the least useful column on it. A term with sixty searches a month and clear buying intent in Saline is worth more to a local contractor than a term with four thousand searches nationally.
The questions that matter are narrower. Which queries do your actual competitors rank for that you do not. Which of those are winnable given your current authority. Which are being held by national aggregators and directory sites that you will never displace, so you should stop spending on them. And which questions are people asking that nobody in your market has bothered to answer yet — usually the cheapest opportunity available.
Ann Arbor has an unusual competitive structure because of the university. Some categories are saturated with businesses chasing student demand and comparatively thin on anyone serving established households in Ann Arbor Township or Scio. Knowing which side of that split you are on changes the entire keyword plan.
See how competitor gaps and buyer keywords are mapped.
Analytics that tell you whether the marketing worked
A surprising number of local businesses cannot answer a simple question: how many calls came from search last month. The tracking either was never configured, or it was configured to count sessions rather than outcomes, or it counts bot traffic and inflates everything.
Getting this right is not glamorous and it is not expensive, but it changes every decision that follows. When call tracking, form submissions and the queries reported by Google Search Console line up, you can see which pages produce customers and which produce traffic. Those are rarely the same pages.
We configure the measurement, define what counts as a conversion for your business, filter the noise, and build a report you will actually read. Then we teach you to read it, because a dashboard nobody understands is worse than no dashboard.
Our page on setting up conversion tracking that reflects real leads covers the setup in full.
Who this internet marketing service suits, and who it does not
Consulting suits three situations. You have internal marketing capacity and need direction rather than hands. You are evaluating an incumbent agency and want an independent read. Or you are about to spend significantly and want to know whether the plan is sound before the money leaves.
It suits you badly if you want the work done. A prioritised list of fixes is worthless sitting in a folder, and a fair number of audits do end up there. If you know that about yourself, the honest recommendation is to skip the audit and start with the ongoing local SEO and content work instead, which begins with the same diagnostic anyway.
What you get, concretely
A written document, not a slide deck. Findings ordered by expected impact rather than by technical category. The reasoning behind each recommendation, including what we are uncertain about. A competitor picture showing who is actually beating you and on what. And a call to walk through it, where the most useful thing you can do is argue with the conclusions.
We will also tell you what we could not determine. Access gaps, data that looked unreliable, and questions that only you can answer about your own business get flagged as open rather than filled in with assumptions.
Call 734-747-3922 or request an audit, and we will scope it honestly — including telling you if you do not need one.