Technical health
Crawlability, indexing, redirects, broken links, duplicate URLs, canonical tags, robots and sitemap. The plumbing that decides whether Google can read the site at all.
Free · no obligation · yours to keep
A free SEO audit that tells you what’s actually wrong.
Not a scan with your logo pasted on the front. I go through your site and your local visibility by hand, write down what I find with the evidence attached, and send it to you whether or not you ever hire me.
What this is
Diagnosis first, decisions after
Most people asking for help with their website already suspect something is wrong — they just can’t name it. The audit exists to name it.
It is deliberately a separate thing from the fixing. I’m not trying to find a reason to sell you a rebuild; quite often the report says your site is fine and the problem is your Google Business Profile, or that the fix is three afternoons of work you could do yourself. You get the same report either way.
If you want the fixing done as well, that’s the website service or local SEO. Those are separate conversations that happen after you’ve read the findings, not before.
What you actually receive
- A written report, in plain English, sent as a document you keep
- Every finding backed by the specific page, URL or screenshot it came from
- Problems ordered by what would change the phone ringing, not by severity score
- An honest note on anything I couldn’t check without your access
- No pricing pages, no proposal, no follow-up sequence attached to it
Scope
The five things I go through
Every audit covers all five. How deep each one goes depends on what your site turns out to be doing.
Content and duplication
Page by page: titles, descriptions, headings, thin pages, and how similar your pages are to each other. Near-identical service pages are the single most common problem I find on small-business sites.
Local visibility
Google Business Profile completeness, categories, name-address-phone consistency across the web, and how you appear for searches with a town attached compared with the businesses beating you.
Structured data
Whether your schema exists, parses, and contains real values rather than placeholder strings and empty arrays. Broken markup is common and quietly costs you rich results.
Speed and mobile
Load behaviour on a phone on mobile data, oversized images, render-blocking scripts, and whether the layout actually works at 375px wide rather than just shrinking.
And the conversion path
Thrown in because it decides whether any of the above pays off: can a visitor find your phone number in two seconds, is there a form, and does anything track whether either gets used?
The method
I audited my own site first
Before rebuilding topinlocal.com I ran exactly this process on it, and it was not flattering.
What it found
- Five commercial pages running 88–96% identical body text — effectively one page repeated
- FAQ blocks answering a different service from the one on the page
- A “Services” link in the main navigation that returned a 404 on every page of the site
- No analytics or conversion tracking of any kind, so nothing was measurable
- No page at all for the town the business is actually based in
That report is the reason this site exists in its current form.
I mention it for two reasons. First, it’s the only case study I can show you that I can fully evidence — it’s my own business, so nothing is hidden or anonymised. Second, it’s the honest version of what an audit feels like to receive: a list of things you’d rather not read, ordered by which one is costing you most.
Your report follows the same structure. If your site is in better shape than mine was, it’ll be a shorter document, and I’ll say so plainly rather than padding it out.
What happens
From request to report
You send the details
Your website address, the town you want to be found in, and what you do. That’s genuinely all I need to start.
I go through it
Usually three to five working days. If anything needs your access — Search Console, for instance — I’ll ask, and I’ll audit without it if you’d rather not.
You get the report
Emailed to you as a document. Read it, ignore it, forward it to whoever built your site — it’s yours.
Optional: we talk
A call to walk through it if you want one. If you don’t reply, you don’t hear from me again. No sequence, no chasing.
Common questions
The things people ask before requesting one
Is it really free, and what’s the catch?
It’s free and there’s no catch beyond the obvious one: I do it hoping some people who read the report decide to hire me for the fixing. Plenty don’t, and that’s fine — the report is written to be useful on its own, and you can hand it to another agency or your own developer without asking me.
How long does it take?
Usually three to five working days from the point I have your website address. Bigger sites take longer. If I’m booked up I’ll tell you the honest date rather than accepting and going quiet.
Will you just use it to sell me things?
No. The report contains findings and priorities, not prices and packages. Plenty of audits conclude that the biggest win is something the owner can do themselves in an afternoon, and I say so in the document. If you want quotes afterwards, ask and you’ll get them; if you don’t, that’s the end of it.
Do you audit sites you didn’t build?
Almost all of them are. WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, something a nephew built in 2016 — it doesn’t matter. I audit what’s live, on the platform it’s live on, and any recommendation takes account of what that platform can realistically do.
What access do you need from me?
None to get started — everything in the core audit is done from the public site and public search results. Google Search Console and Google Business Profile access make the local and indexing sections much more accurate, so I’ll ask for read access if you have it. Declining just means those sections carry a note saying what I couldn’t verify.
What if the audit says my site is fine?
Then that’s what it says, and it’s a short report. It’s a real outcome and it happens. Usually there’s still something worth doing on the local side — the profile, the reviews, the citations — but I’m not going to invent problems to justify the exercise.
Request one
Three things and I can start
Your website, the town you want to be found in, and what you do. Everything else I can work out myself.
Prefer to talk first? Call or text 01255 442479, or email Tony@topinlocal.com. Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm.
No website yet? Say so in the message — I’ll audit your local visibility and your competitors instead, which is the more useful half at that stage. That conversation belongs on the websites page.