Most businesses that ask for an audit already suspect what is wrong. What they lack is confidence about which problem to spend money on, and an independent read from someone who does not benefit from the answer.
That is what this is. You buy a diagnosis. The findings are yours.
What gets examined
The Business Profile, against Google’s published guidelines: primary and secondary categories, the service list, service-area configuration, the address decision, attributes, hours, photos and the review profile. This is where the cheapest available wins usually hide.
Ranking reality, via a geo-grid scan across your service area rather than a single position. Almost every owner has searched from their own office and drawn the wrong conclusion.
The website, technically: whether pages render real HTML, whether they are indexed, canonical handling, redirect behaviour, sitemap accuracy, page speed against Google’s thresholds, and whether anything is quietly blocking crawling.
Page structure, against the queries that matter. Which pages exist, which queries have no page, which pages compete with each other, and where the internal linking sends authority.
Listings and citations, for duplicates, conflicts and stale data that give Google competing versions of your business.
The competitive gap: who is actually beating you, on what, and whether it is winnable at a sensible cost.
Where we have access, what Search Console reports about impressions, queries and indexing does a lot of the work here, because it shows what Google already thinks of the site rather than what a crawler guesses.
The part that makes it useful
Any competent crawler produces a findings list. The value is in the ordering, and ordering requires things software does not know: what a job is worth to you, which services you want more of, what capacity you have, and how competitive your specific towns are.
So the deliverable is not sorted by technical severity. It is sorted by expected commercial effect, with the reasoning attached so you can disagree. A missing meta description on a page nobody searches for is technically a finding and practically irrelevant. A wrong primary category is one line in a report and possibly the whole problem.
We also mark what we could not determine — access gaps, unreliable data, questions only you can answer — as open rather than filling them with assumptions.
Typical findings, and how boring they are
Across Washtenaw County businesses the recurring items are consistent: a primary category that does not match how customers search, an almost-empty service list on the profile, a website where several pages target the same query, duplicate listings nobody knew existed, no tracking of which calls came from search, and a service-area configuration that either over-claims or under-claims.
Very few of these are exotic. That is the point — the reason they persist is that nobody has looked, not that they are difficult.
What happens afterwards
You get the document and a call to walk through it, where arguing with the conclusions is the most useful thing you can do.
Then it is genuinely your choice. Some clients execute it themselves, and the profile fixes in particular are realistic for an owner with a few focused hours. Some hand it to an existing marketing person. Some ask us to run it, which becomes the ongoing agency work.
If you already know you will not execute it yourself, say so at the start. An audit that sits in a folder helped nobody, and starting directly with the ongoing work — which begins with the same diagnostic anyway — is the better use of your money.
Strategy, as distinct from the audit
Where an audit says what is wrong, the strategy piece says what to do over the next two to three quarters and in what order: which services get pages first, whether paid search should run alongside, when to start link and review work, and what to measure.
It is deliberately short. A strategy document long enough to be impressive is usually one nobody follows.
Call 734-747-3922 or request an audit, and we will scope it honestly — including telling you when you do not need one.
This sits under Marketing consultant services beyond SEO Audits & Strategy, where the rest of that category is set out.