The short version
Start with your Business Profile
Categories, every field filled, and your review count against the shops beating you. This is the cheapest lever you own.
Search yourself, incognito
Type your service plus your town in a private window. If you are not in the map pack, that is the leak.
Check the site converts, not just looks nice
Tap-to-call, fast load, visible trust, an easy form. A pretty site that buries the phone number still loses.
Confirm tracking actually fires
Place a test call and submit a test form. If they do not show up as conversions, you are spending half-blind.
Make sure you own everything
Google Ads account, domain, Business Profile, analytics, all in your name. If you cannot log in, you do not own it.
Most of what an agency calls an audit is a checklist anyone can run. Here is the whole thing, step by step, so you can run it on yourself this afternoon.
Why we bother telling you this. We learned the tracking step the hard way. At our own shop the conversion tracking sat broken for six months, so most calls and form fills were never counted and the ad budget burned half-blind. We fixed it and rebuilt the campaigns, and qualified leads (real calls and form fills) went from about 10 a month to 58. That 10-to-58 is the only first-party number on this site; everything else here is plain best practice, not a result we are claiming.
1. Check your Google Business Profile
Your Business Profile is the free listing that decides whether you show up when someone searches a service near them. It is the first thing to audit because it costs nothing to fix and moves the most.
How to check it. Search your own business name on Google and open the profile. Walk three things:
- Primary category. Is it the most specific one that matches your work? “HVAC contractor” beats “Contractor.” A vague category quietly costs you searches.
- Completeness. Services, service areas, hours, attributes, description, photos. Click into every field and look for blanks.
- Reviews versus your competitors. Search your main service plus your town, then look at the shops in the map pack. Note their review counts and star ratings next to yours.
What a red flag looks like. A generic primary category, half the fields empty, a stale photo, or a competitor with 180 reviews while you sit at 22. Any one of those is a reason Google shows someone else. The fixes just take a few hours a month, every month. The full playbook is in how to optimize your Google Business Profile.
2. Check the map pack from a clean search
The map pack is the block of three local listings with the little map above the regular results. For a contractor it is the most valuable spot on the page, and most would-be customers never scroll past it.
How to check it. Open an incognito window so your own history does not skew the result. Search the way a customer would: “roof repair [your town],” “ac repair near me,” “electrician [your town].” Do it for your top two or three services and note whether you appear in the three-pack, below it, or nowhere.
What a red flag looks like. You are not in the three-pack for your core service in your own town. Or you only show up when you literally type your company name, which means you are findable but not discoverable. New customers do not know your name yet, so they search the job, not the brand. If you are invisible for the job, you are invisible to them.
3. Check that your site actually converts
A website’s job is not to look nice. It is to turn a visitor into a call or a form fill. Plenty of good-looking contractor sites leak every visitor they get because the path to contact is buried.
How to check it. Pull up your own site on your phone, the way most people will, and run four tests:
- Tap-to-call. Is your phone number at the top, and does tapping it start a call? If a customer has to hunt for the number or copy and paste it, you lost some of them.
- Speed. Does it load in a couple of seconds, or do you stare at a blank screen? Run it through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights for a real score.
- Trust. Above the fold, can a stranger see reviews, a service area, licensing, real job photos? People decide in seconds whether you look legitimate.
- The form. Is there a short, obvious form that works on a phone? Count the fields. Every extra one you ask for drops your completion rate.
What a red flag looks like. The phone number is small or in an image, the page takes five-plus seconds to load, there is no proof you are real, or the form asks for ten fields. A site that does any of these is paying for visitors and handing them back. These leaks are exactly what a real report would surface, which is the subject of what a marketing report should show you.
4. Check that conversion tracking actually fires
This is the step almost nobody runs, and it is the one that bit us. You can have great ads, a great site, and a full map pack, and still be flying blind if the calls and forms are never counted. If you cannot see which clicks turned into leads, you cannot tell what is working, and neither can anyone you pay.
How to check it. You do not need to be technical to test it:
- Calls. Place a real test call to the number on your site and your ads, then check whether it shows up as a conversion in Google Ads or your analytics in the next day or two.
- Forms. Submit a test form. Confirm the lead lands in your inbox or CRM and registers as a conversion, not just an email that shows up and dies.
- Ask the blunt question. If someone runs your ads, ask them to show you, on screen, the last month of tracked calls and form fills. Watch whether they can.
What a red flag looks like. Your test call or test form never shows up as a conversion. Your “leads” number is really just clicks or impressions wearing a costume. Or whoever runs your marketing cannot show you tracked calls and forms when you ask. Broken tracking is invisible until you look, which is exactly why six months went by at our shop. Test it yourself and you will know in two days.
5. Check your ad accounts
If you run Google Ads or Local Services Ads, the account itself tells you whether the money is being spent with care or sprayed. You do not need to be a media buyer to spot the obvious problems.
How to check it. Log into the account and look for three things:
- Negative keywords. Search campaigns should have a growing list of negatives (terms like “jobs,” “free,” “DIY”) so you stop paying for clicks that never book. An empty negative list means you are paying for junk.
- Geographic targeting. Is the location set tight to the towns you actually serve, or is it a 50-mile blob that includes places you would never drive to? Loose geo burns budget on calls you cannot use.
- Branded versus non-branded. Are you only showing up when people search your name (branded), or also for the jobs (non-branded)? Branded clicks are cheap and look great on a report, but they are mostly people who already knew you. Real growth comes from the non-branded searches.
What a red flag looks like. No negative keywords, a service area set far wider than you work, or a campaign that looks busy but is almost all branded traffic taking credit for customers you already had. Any of those means spend is leaking.
6. Check what you actually own
This one takes ten minutes and protects everything else. The work does not matter if you do not own the accounts it lives in, because the day you part ways with whoever set them up, you can lose the history and the site overnight.
How to check it. Confirm you can personally log in to each of these, under an account in your name or your company’s:
- Google Ads account. Your own account ID, not a sub-account inside an agency’s.
- Domain. The registration for your website address, in your name.
- Google Business Profile. You are the owner, not a manager added to someone else’s.
- Analytics. Google Analytics and any call-tracking, owned by you.
What a red flag looks like. You cannot log in to any of these without asking your current provider. If leaving them means starting over with a new website, a new ad account, and zero history, you do not own your marketing, you rent it. Whoever does good work has no reason to hold the keys. There is more on why this matters in the pillar on telling whether your marketing is working.
Who this is and is not for
This audit is for the contractor who wants the truth about their own marketing, even when the truth is “I have been losing the map pack for a year.” If you would rather not look, none of this helps. If you do, you will come out knowing which of the six steps is leaking and roughly what it is costing you.
Run it yourself, or let us run it for you
That is the entire audit. There is no secret seventh step we are holding back, and nothing in it requires a login you do not already have. Run it this afternoon and you will know more about your marketing than most agencies will tell you in a year.
Here is the honest part: most contractors never run it, not because it is hard, but because it is a few hours they do not have between jobs. That is the whole reason the free game plan exists. We run these same six checks for you, read your site and ads against the shops beating you locally, and send back a plain report on where your leads are leaking and what each fix is worth in booked jobs. It comes back in a few days, no call unless you want one, and you keep it either way. Bring us on and you walk your finished site before a dollar moves, the scope is in writing, satisfaction is guaranteed on the build, and everything is yours from day one: month to month, walk anytime and keep it all. Get my free game plan.