Audit Your Own Website in an Afternoon

Most website audits sold to small businesses are a forty-page PDF produced by a tool in eleven seconds. They list 340 "issues", score your site 46 out of 100, and leave you no better informed about whether a customer can actually buy from you. You can do better yourself in one afternoon, with no technical training, using free tools and your own phone.

What follows is a checklist in four parts. Block out three hours, keep a single notebook page or a text file open, and write down every problem you find as one line. Do not fix anything while you are looking — fixing breaks the flow and you will run out of afternoon. Find first, fix later.

What you need before you start

A laptop, your phone on mobile data (not office Wi-Fi — you want to see what a customer on a patchy 4G connection sees), and access to two free Google tools: Google Search Console and your Google Business Profile. If you do not have Search Console access, that is itself finding number one. It is the only place Google tells you directly what it thinks of your site, it is free, and verification usually takes a few minutes if your web developer or hosting provider can add a record for you.

Also useful: one colleague who has never used your website. You will need them for ten minutes at the end.

Hour one: be a customer, on a phone

Put the laptop aside. Nearly all of this hour happens on the phone, because that is where the majority of your visitors are, and because desktop hides problems that phones expose brutally.

Open an incognito or private browsing window so your own history does not flatter the results. Then work through this in order and write down anything that irritates you:

1. Search for your business by name. Does your own site come first? Is the description under it the one you would have written, or is it a stray sentence from the middle of a page?
2. Search the way a stranger would. Not your brand — the thing you sell plus your area. "CCTV installation Laxmi Nagar", "chartered accountant Preet Vihar". Note where you appear, or that you do not.
3. Land on the homepage and count seconds until you can read something. Then ask the hard question: within one screen, is it obvious what you sell, where you are, and what to do next? Many Indian small business homepages open with a rotating banner that says "Welcome to Excellence" and answers none of the three.
4. Tap the phone number. Does it dial? A number typed as plain text on a mobile page is a number nobody rings.
5. Tap the WhatsApp button, if there is one. Does it open a chat with a sensible pre-filled message, or a dead link?
6. Fill in your own enquiry form with real details. Submit it. Note what happens on screen — a thank-you message, a blank page, nothing at all?
7. Check whether the enquiry arrived, and where. Inbox? Spam? A webmail account nobody has opened since 2021? Forms that silently fail are the single most expensive fault on Indian small business sites, and they are invisible until you test.
8. Find your prices, or your reason for not showing them. If a visitor cannot form any idea of cost, they must ring you to find out, and most will not.
9. Try to find your address and opening hours in under ten seconds.
10. Zoom out mentally: how many taps from homepage to enquiry? Three is fine. Six is a leak.

Then repeat steps 3 to 7 on the two pages that are not your homepage — your main service page and whatever page your Google listing points at. People arrive on those directly and never see your homepage at all.

Hour two: what Google can actually see

Now the laptop. This hour is about the gap between the site you think you have and the site a search engine has recorded.

Type site:yourdomain.in into Google. That operator shows roughly which of your pages Google has in its index. Two things to look for. First, is the number roughly what you expected — if you have 30 pages and Google shows 4, something is blocking it. Second, read the titles. Are several identical? Are any of them "Home" or "Untitled"? Google's own guidance is that a title should describe the page specifically; around 55 to 60 characters is what typically displays before truncation, though Google rewrites titles when it thinks yours is unhelpful.

Check your domain has one home. Type your address four ways: with and without www, with http and with https. All four should end up at the same final address with a padlock. If http:// loads without redirecting, or if www and non-www both load separately, you have split your own site in two and confused everyone including yourself.

Open Search Console and look at three screens only. Pages (how many are indexed, and the reasons given for those that are not), Performance (which search queries actually bring people in — often startlingly different from what you assumed), and any manual action notice. Ignore the rest for today.

Hunt for broken links. Click every link in your main menu and footer. A page that returns 404 — the standard code meaning "not found" — is a dead end. Pay particular attention to old brochure PDFs and the "Careers" page nobody has touched in years.

Read your own content as a stranger. Pick your most important service page and ask: does it answer the four questions a buyer has — what exactly this is, who it is for, what it costs or depends on, and what happens after they enquire? Most pages answer the first and skip the rest.

Hour three: speed, local listings and AI

Run your homepage and one service page through Google's PageSpeed Insights. Look at the field data section if it appears — that is measurements from real Chrome users, not a simulation. Google's published Core Web Vitals thresholds are the ones to note: Largest Contentful Paint, meaning the time until the biggest thing on screen has loaded, should be under 2.5 seconds; Interaction to Next Paint, the delay between a tap and a visible response, under 200 milliseconds; Cumulative Layout Shift, a measure of how much the page jumps about while loading, under 0.1. Anything well outside those is a real finding. A score of 72 out of 100 on its own is not — the score is a weighted summary, not a verdict.

While you are there, check one image. Right-click, save it, look at the file size. A photo straight off a phone is often four megabytes and should usually be under 200 kilobytes on a web page. If every product photo is full-size, you have found your speed problem without needing a developer. There is more on this in our note on how sites are built and maintained.

Then your Google Business Profile. Open it and check five things: category, address, hours including festival closures, the phone number, and the website link. Then check that the name, address and phone number on your profile match your website exactly — not "Shop 4" in one place and "Shop No. 4" in another. Look at your reviews and count how many you have replied to.

Finally, the uncertain part. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI results a question a customer would ask — "who does commercial interior work in East Delhi" — and see whether you appear, and whether what it says about you is correct. Be honest with yourself about what this tells you. These systems are not consistent: the same question asked twice can give different answers, they rarely explain their sources, and nobody outside those companies can verify how a business gets chosen. Treat it as a spot check, not a score, and be sceptical of anyone selling guaranteed placement in AI answers. What does seem to help is having clear, factual, well-structured pages that state plainly who you are and what you do — which is the same thing that helps humans. We write more about this in AI visibility work.

Findings you can safely ignore

If you run a free online audit tool during this afternoon, you will get a long list. Much of it does not matter, and some of it is sold hard by agencies, including the sort of agency we are.

• A score out of 100. Whether from a speed tool or an "SEO checker", this is a marketing device. The underlying measurements matter; the aggregate number does not.
• Domain Authority, Domain Rating and similar. These are invented by third-party tools, not by Google. Raising a vendor's private metric is not a business outcome.
• Keyword density. Nobody has been able to show that writing the phrase a specific number of times helps, and it reliably makes pages worse to read.
• "Missing meta keywords tag." Google has said publicly for many years that it does not use that tag. Any audit flagging it was run by a tool from 2009.
• Hundreds of "low-severity" warnings about things like image dimension attributes on your blog archive page. Real, trivial.
• A free audit that arrives unsolicited with a WhatsApp follow-up ten minutes later. It is a sales script with your logo pasted on page one.

The ten-minute test that beats everything

Sit your colleague down with your phone. Give them one instruction — "you need a quote for X, find it" — and then say nothing for ten minutes. Do not help. Do not explain. Watch where their thumb hesitates.

You will learn more in those ten minutes than from any tool. People hesitate at exactly the places where your site assumes knowledge they do not have: industry jargon in the menu, a form asking for a GST number before they have decided to buy, a service name that makes sense internally and nowhere else.

What to do with your list

You should now have somewhere between eight and forty lines. Sort them into three groups, in this order.

1. Broken. Forms not arriving, numbers that do not dial, 404s in the menu, the site loading on four different addresses. Fix this week. Nothing else you do matters if the enquiry never reaches you.
2. Confusing. Unclear homepage, missing prices, buried contact details, the places your colleague hesitated. Fix this month. These are writing jobs more than technical ones, and you are better placed to do them than any agency.
3. Slow or missing. Oversized images, Core Web Vitals outside the thresholds, pages that do not exist for services you actually sell, an unclaimed or half-filled Google listing. Plan these over a quarter.

Do the whole exercise again in six months. The second audit takes ninety minutes because you know where to look, and the comparison is genuinely useful: you will see which problems came back, which means they are symptoms of how the site is maintained rather than one-off mistakes.

Next steps

Start with hour one today — it needs nothing but your phone and twenty quiet minutes, and the enquiry-form test alone justifies the afternoon. Work through the rest at the weekend when the office is quiet.

If the list that comes out of it is mostly writing and listings work, do it yourself; you know your business better than we do. If it is mostly structural — redirects, indexing, a site that cannot be edited without a developer — that is where it makes sense to bring someone in. You can send us your list and ask which items are genuinely worth paying for, or read more on how search work is actually scoped before you commission anything.

Questions we get asked