What does a website audit actually include?
Short answer
A useful audit covers your website's speed and mobile experience, your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your AI visibility, and what actually happens when a customer tries to reach you: the form, the call, the follow-up. Free tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Search Console let you check the technical side yourself in an afternoon. Forward Dawn's $499 audit adds the Google profile, reviews, AI visibility, local rankings, and a prioritized plan, in a report and a 30-minute call.
Reviewed
What should a website audit check?
Speed and the Core Web Vitals Google measures (loading, responsiveness, visual stability), whether the site works properly on a phone, and the trust signals a stranger looks for in the first few seconds. Then the part that costs money when it breaks: what happens when someone tries to contact you. Does the form deliver? Does a call get answered? Is there any follow-up at all? An audit that never tests that has skipped the expensive part. Online stores and national publishers are the exception; for them a technical crawl matters more than a contact test.
What can I check myself without hiring anyone?
Most of the technical side. Google PageSpeed Insights reports your site’s speed and user experience on mobile and desktop for free and tells you what’s slowing it down. Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report shows the same three metrics based on real visitors over time, also free, once your site has enough traffic for Google to have collected data on it. Between the two, you can spot most technical problems in an afternoon without paying anyone.
Should an audit cover my Google profile and reviews too?
For a local business, yes. Plenty of customers decide on the profile before they ever reach your website, and outdated hours or unanswered reviews lose work a fast website can’t win back. A technical audit that stops at the site misses all of it.
Is the result a report, a call, or both?
Depends who’s selling it. Ours is both: a hosted report page you keep permanently, a PDF for your team, and a 30-minute walkthrough call, so you’re not left alone with a document guessing what matters most.
What does Forward Dawn’s audit cover?
Eight sections: your website and what happens when a customer tries to reach you, your Google Business Profile point by point, your reviews and reputation, whether AI assistants like ChatGPT recommend you, your local rankings across your service area, your business and offer compared to the local market, an estimate of the revenue you’re missing in dollars with the math shown, and a prioritized action plan you keep whether you work with us or not. It’s $499, one time, with no subscription; the audit page has each section in detail.
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