You inspect the job before you quote it. Do the same to your marketing.
A written 24-point review of your website, Google profile, ads, tracking and AI search visibility — back in one business day, at no cost. One contractor specialist publicly charges $1,000 for the same review. You keep our findings whether you hire us or not.
Marketing Inspection — Sample Findings
Typical contractor · 24 points checkedIssues found in this sample9 of 24 points
Six of the nine cost nothing to fixNo agency required
Illustrative sample showing the report format — not a real client. Your findings will differ.
Sources: DreamHost 2026 Local Business Trust Index, from an analysis of 230 local businesses; ReplyOnTheFly 2026 Google Business Profile audit guidance; Jobber home services traffic data via PipelineOn; Connectica 2026 local search analysis. These are the problems an audit exists to find — and most of them are visible from outside your business, which is why we can check them before you give us anything but a web address.
How healthy is your contractor marketing right now?
Twelve checks, weighted by how much each one actually costs you when it's missing. Tick what's true today and you'll get a score, a plain reading of where you sit, and your three highest-value fixes ranked. Nothing is sent anywhere — this runs entirely in your browser, and you never have to give us your email to use it.
The 12-Point Self-Audit
AFC · No. 022Tick the boxes above
Every check is weighted by what it costs you when it's missing, so the score isn't simply how many you ticked. Response time carries the most weight of anything on the list.
Your highest-value fixes, ranked
Runs in your browser; nothing is stored or transmitted. The weightings are our judgement, informed by published benchmarks — response time carries the most because 78% of customers buy from whoever replies first, and tracking carries a lot because without it every other decision is a guess. A high score here doesn't mean nothing is wrong; it means the obvious things aren't.
What does the free contractor marketing audit cover?
Six areas, twenty-four checks, and a written summary that names what to fix first and roughly what each one is worth. It's done by a person rather than generated by a scanner, which is why it takes a day instead of a minute — and why it catches the things automated tools are known to miss.
Website & conversion
Mobile load time on cellular rather than wifi, tap-to-call placement, form friction, whether prices or ranges appear anywhere, and how your conversion rate compares to the published benchmark for your specific trade.
Google Business Profile
Primary and secondary category selection, completeness of every field, photo recency, review velocity, Q&A, and anything that raises suspension risk — including keyword stuffing in the business name, which still appears regularly.
Map pack visibility
Where you actually rank measured from multiple points across your service area, not from your own address. This is the section that most often surprises contractors, because ranking first in your own yard is not the same as ranking anywhere.
Paid advertising accounts
If you're running ads: negative keyword lists, match types, branded versus non-branded reporting, Performance Max brand exclusions, and what your conversion action is actually counting. Read-only access, revocable any time.
Tracking & attribution
Whether conversion tracking exists, whether it's counting the right things, and whether calls are attributed by channel at all. This is the most common failure we find and the one that makes every other number on your reports unreliable.
AI search visibility
Whether AI assistants can read your business, what your robots.txt permits, what structured data exists, and how you currently surface when someone asks an assistant for a contractor in your area.
What it is not: a scanner output with a colour-coded score and a sales call attached. Automated tools measure static data well and are notoriously poor at the things that matter most here — multi-point proximity testing, suspension risk, and anything involving whether your leads actually book. Where a tool is the right instrument we use one, and then a person reads the result.
Because about a third of the time, the answer is that you don't need us.
The audit is how we work out whether we can genuinely help. Sometimes the honest finding is that your setup is fine and the gap is your response time, which no agency can fix for you. Sometimes it's three things you can do yourself in an afternoon. We would rather find that out in a day than six months into an engagement neither of us should have started — and you keep the report either way.
Request yoursCan you audit your own contractor marketing?
Yes, and you should do these five before hiring anyone at all. They take about an hour between them, cost nothing, and find most of what actually matters. If you only ever do this and never contact us, the page has done its job.
Time your own response
Have someone who isn't an employee submit your contact form at 4pm on a Friday. Time the reply. 78% of customers buy from whoever responds first, so this number caps the return on every channel you run — and more than half of contractors take five days or longer.
Search from outside your postcode
Search your main service plus a suburb you want work in, on a phone that isn't on your office network. Proximity dominates map rankings, so what you see standing in your own yard tells you nothing about what a customer eight miles out sees.
Load your site on cellular data
Not office wifi. Open your busiest service page and count seconds until it's usable. Under 2.5 seconds is the standard, 71% of your traffic is on a phone, and this one check explains a surprising share of "our ads don't work".
Compare your profile to your website
Name, address, phone, hours, services — do they match exactly? An analysis of 230 local businesses found 53% had mismatched information between the two, and it's free to fix in about twenty minutes.
Work out one cost per booked job
Last quarter's spend on one channel, divided by jobs actually won from it — not enquiries. If you can't produce that number, you don't yet know whether the channel works, and no report full of rankings will tell you.
Run those five and you'll have found more than most paid audits surface, because they test the things that are true rather than the things that are measurable. What to realistically expect from each channel is the natural next question once you know where you stand.
What goes wrong most often in contractor marketing?
Not the things contractors expect. Almost nobody's problem is that their logo is dated or their website isn't modern enough. The findings that repeat are boring, unglamorous, and expensive — and most of them were introduced by somebody who was paid to help.
What contractors think is wrong
- "Our website looks old"
- "We need to be on more social platforms"
- "We're not ranking number one"
- "We need a bigger ad budget"
- "Our competitor has more reviews"
What's usually actually wrong
- Nobody can tell which channel produced any job
- The phone isn't answered fast enough
- The site is slow on the network most visitors use
- The ad account pays for searches with no buying intent
- The Google profile is half filled in
Tracking that doesn't exist, or half exists
The most common finding by a distance, and the most damaging, because it makes every other number unreliable. Sometimes there's no tracking at all; more often it's partially installed and quietly reporting bad data — counting every form submission including job applications, or missing calls entirely when calls are how most contractor work arrives. Everything downstream of this is guesswork, including any automated bidding, which optimises toward whatever it's been told to count.
A website that looks fine and performs badly
Most contractor sites are built as digital brochures rather than as something designed to produce enquiries. They load slowly on cellular data, bury the phone number, ask for information before offering any, and never mention price. The tell is a site that a contractor is proud of and that converts below the published benchmark for their trade — and since every channel eventually lands here, that gap taxes all of them at once.
A Google profile treated as an afterthought
Broad primary category chosen because it felt safe, half the fields blank, photos from two years ago, and information that contradicts the website. With more than 60% of local searches ending without a click to any website, the profile often is the customer's entire experience of your business. Complete profiles are reported 2.7 times more likely to be judged reputable, and this is free to fix.
Ad accounts spending on the wrong searches
Inherited Google Ads accounts almost always show the same pattern: broad match keywords, no negative keyword list, branded searches counted as campaign wins, and Performance Max running without brand exclusions. At $8 to $45 a click this is expensive, and it usually takes an afternoon rather than a rebuild to correct. The search term report tells you most of it for free.
Leads that arrive and then sit
The one no agency can fix for you, and the one that most often explains why a campaign "isn't working". More than half of contractors take five days or longer to respond to an enquiry while 78% of customers buy from whoever gets there first. A contractor with mediocre marketing and a two-minute response beats a contractor with excellent marketing and a two-day one, every time.
Notice how few of those cost money to fix. Three of the five are configuration and habit rather than budget, which is the main reason the audit is free — a good number of them end with us telling you to go and do something yourself rather than quoting for it.
Free audit questions
What is a contractor marketing audit?
Is the free contractor marketing audit really free?
How long does the audit take to get back?
What do you need from me to run the audit?
Will you try to sell me something afterwards?
What are the most common problems found in contractor marketing audits?
Can I audit my own contractor marketing?
Do you audit Google Ads accounts you did not build?
Get your 24-point audit back tomorrow
Fill this in and you'll have written findings within one business day. No card, no contract, no obligation, and the report is yours to keep, act on, or hand to another agency entirely.
Three fields do most of the work: your website, your trade, and the towns you want jobs in. Everything else just makes the report sharper. If you'd rather talk it through first, 1-800-481-8638 reaches a person, or email info@eyetoad.com.
Don't have a website yet? Say so. That's a genuinely different and much shorter conversation, and it's a better position to start from than a bad site you've already paid for.
Request your free audit
Back within one business day.
Find out what's actually broken before you spend another dollar.
Twenty-four points, one business day, no cost and no obligation. Worst case you get a free report and a list of things you can fix yourself.