Find Out What's Holding You Back — Starting in the Next 60 Seconds
Run the 10-point self-audit further down this page and you'll get a prioritized fix list before you talk to anyone. If you want the full version — real data, real competitor comparison, reviewed by a strategist — that's free too, and the findings are yours either way.
- ✓Where you rank against the competitors actually beating you
- ✓Technical problems quietly suppressing everything else
- ✓Whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews name you at all
- ✓Where the site loses leads it already earned
Request Your Full Free Audit
Reviewed by a strategist, not a script. Takes about 60 seconds to request.
📞 1-800-481-8638or send details
📌 Short answer
A real SEO audit covers seven things: rankings and keyword gaps, technical health, Google Business Profile and map pack, AI search citation, entity and structured data signals, backlink corroboration, and the conversion path. The output that matters isn't a score — it's a list ordered by impact, so you know which one of twenty findings is the one actually costing you money. Ours is free, reviewed by a person, and yours to keep whether you hire us or not.
Most audits answer the wrong question
Type your URL into a free SEO checker and you'll get a number. 68 out of 100. Some red items, some green ones, a PDF.
What you won't get is the one sentence you actually needed: "your rankings are fine — your contact form has been silently failing since March."
That's the difference between measurement and diagnosis. A tool measures what's fast to measure. A diagnosis identifies what's load-bearing — and those overlap less than you'd hope.
Twenty findings is not an audit. Twenty findings ranked by which one is costing you the most money — that's an audit.
We've been doing Denver SEO since 2012, and the pattern is consistent: most businesses have somewhere between fifteen and thirty identifiable issues, of which two or three are doing almost all the damage. The value isn't in finding them. It's in knowing which two.
What the full audit covers
Rankings & keyword gaps
Where you sit today against the competitors actually beating you — not a generic list — plus the high-intent terms you should own and don't. Feeds directly into monthly SEO if you go that route.
Local & Google Maps
Profile completeness and categories, citation consistency, review velocity, and map pack positioning. Usually the highest-return surface for a local business. See local SEO Denver.
AI search citation
Whether assistants name you, who they name instead, and why. Covers AI Overviews and AI Mode plus ChatGPT and Perplexity — different surfaces, different fixes.
Entity & structured data
Whether search engines and AI systems can resolve what your business actually is. Conflicting details across the web quietly suppress everything. Our entity signals guide has a free scorecard.
Technical health
Crawlability, indexation, Core Web Vitals, mobile rendering, and — the one most audits skip — whether AI crawlers are permitted at all in your robots.txt.
Conversion & measurement
Where earned traffic leaks, and whether your numbers are even real. Around 40% of lead conversions arrive by phone — untracked, that breaks every decision downstream. See conversion optimization.
Score your own SEO — and get the fix list
Check every box that's true today. You'll get a weighted score plus a prioritized list of exactly what to fix first, built from the boxes you left empty. No tools needed for any of these.
Check the boxes above to see your score
Almost nobody checks all ten. The useful part isn't the number — it's which ones you left empty.
Nothing here is stored or sent anywhere — it runs entirely in your browser. A full audit measures each of these properly, with real data and competitor comparison.
What we actually find, and how often
After enough audits, the surprises stop. Here's roughly what turns up, ordered by how frequently it's the thing genuinely limiting a local business — not by how serious it sounds.
| What we find | How common | What it usually means |
|---|---|---|
| Phone calls not tracked | Very common | Every conversion number is understated. Fix this before judging anything else. |
| Business details disagree across the web | Very common | Old listings, a former address, a different category. Quietly suppresses map and AI visibility. |
| Mobile slower than the owner thinks | Very common | Tested on office wifi. On cellular it's a different site. |
| No AI citation, and no idea | Common | Absent from assistant answers entirely. Usually crawler access or thin entity signals. |
| Answer buried below the fold | Common | Page ranks, nothing gets extracted. Structural, not editorial. |
| Google Business Profile half-built | Common | Categories wrong or services blank. Cheapest high-impact fix available. |
| Form silently broken | Occasional | Submits, confirms, delivers nowhere. Costs more than any ranking problem. |
| Genuinely nothing wrong | Occasional | The constraint is elsewhere — pricing, capacity or follow-up. Worth knowing. |
⟷ swipe to compare
💡 The pattern worth noticing
Look at the top three. None of them are ranking problems. Two are measurement problems and one is a technical problem — and all three make everything downstream unreliable.
That's why the audit starts with whether your numbers are real, not with keywords. If we told you your rankings improved 30% and you couldn't tell whether calls went up, we'd both be guessing.
Three problem types — and why mixing them up is expensive
Everything on the self-audit sorts into one of three buckets. The buckets matter more than the score, because they call for opposite responses — and the most costly mistake in local marketing is treating one as another.
| Problem type | How it looks | What it needs | Cost of getting it wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visibility | Low traffic. Nobody is arriving in the first place. | Rankings, map pack, AI citation — upstream work that compounds slowly. | Optimising a conversion path nobody reaches. Months spent polishing an empty room. |
| Conversion | Traffic looks fine. The phone doesn't match. | Speed, clarity, proof placement, form friction — fast, cheap, measurable. | Buying more traffic. Every additional visitor now costs more and leaves anyway. |
| Measurement | You genuinely can't tell which of the above it is. | Call tracking and a baseline, before anything else changes. | Everything. Every decision downstream is a coin flip wearing a spreadsheet. |
⟷ swipe to compare
Notice that the third one isn't really a marketing problem — it's an epistemics problem. You can't fix what you can't see, and you can't tell whether you fixed it either. Which is why it sits first in the audit and first in the self-check's priority list.
⚠️ The expensive version of this mistake
A business with a conversion problem hires an SEO agency. Traffic goes up 40%. Leads stay flat. Eighteen months and a lot of money later, everyone concludes "SEO doesn't work for us."
SEO worked. It was never the constraint. That's the scenario this audit exists to prevent, and it's why we'd rather tell you the problem is downstream than sell you the thing we happen to make money on.
How the full audit works
No lengthy sales process. Four steps, and you can stop after any of them.
Step 1
You request it
The form above or a phone call. We need the URL, roughly what you sell, and — if you know it — who you consider your real competitors. That last one saves us guessing and makes the comparison sharper.
Step 2
We dig in
Rankings, technical health, Google Business Profile, AI citation across a fixed panel of buyer questions, entity signals, backlink profile and the conversion path. A person reviews it — the tools produce inputs, not conclusions.
Step 3
We walk you through it
Plain language, ordered by impact, with the reasoning shown. You'll know which finding is the expensive one and which three you can safely ignore for now. Ask hard questions — that's the point of the call.
Step 4
You decide
Implement it yourself, hand it to your current provider, or have us run it. The roadmap is written to be actionable without us, because a roadmap that only works if you hire us isn't a roadmap — it's a pitch.
✅ If you do want us to run it
Terms are set per engagement — month-to-month is available and is what most clients run on. Build-your-own levels start at $100 a month in $100 increments if you'd rather begin with one area done properly than commit to a full engagement. Ranges and what moves them are on the pricing page.
What an audit can't tell you
Worth stating up front, because the things an audit genuinely can't answer are the things people most often expect it to.
- How long a specific ranking will take. That depends partly on what your competitors do next, which nobody can see. We can tell you what's plausible and what isn't.
- What a lead is worth to you. Only you know your close rate and average customer value — which is why the break-even calculator asks for your numbers rather than assuming them.
- Whether search is even your problem. Sometimes the constraint is pricing, capacity or follow-up. In that case more traffic makes things measurably worse. Our constraint diagnostic walks the six stages and names the real one.
- What a competitor is spending. We can infer investment level from output. We can't see an invoice, and anyone claiming otherwise is guessing with confidence.
An audit that never concludes "you don't need us yet" isn't a diagnosis. It's a sales process with charts.
We've told people to fix their phone system before touching their website. It's not generosity — a client whose real problem goes unsolved churns in four months and tells people it didn't work.
Why get it from us
Plenty of agencies will run you an audit. Fewer rank for their own terms, and fewer still will show you the methodology before you've paid anything.
We've been doing Denver SEO since 2012, and rather than asking you to take the approach on faith, we publish it. The 5-Layer system is documented in full, including what it explicitly doesn't cover. The entity signals guide includes the same scorecard we use internally. The agentic AI guide explains how assistants shortlist vendors. You could read all of it and do this yourself — some people do.
📚 Worth reading before your audit call
Three that will make the conversation faster and sharper:
Find your real constraint — a six-stage diagnostic that establishes whether visibility is even your bottleneck.
Denver metro market differences — why Cherry Creek and Thornton need different strategies, with a 13-city comparator.
Entity signals — the five layers that decide whether a machine can verify your business exists.
Competitive density changes by suburb
One thing a generic audit will miss: the Denver metro isn't one market. The number of competitors genuinely fighting for a term varies enormously between adjacent cities, and that changes what's realistic and what a budget needs to be. Where you operate:
Free SEO audit — your questions answered
The twelve we get asked most, answered the way we'd answer them on the phone.
Yes, and the findings are yours to keep whether or not you engage us afterwards.
We do it because an honest diagnosis is the most useful thing we can hand someone who's deciding what to do next — and because a business that understands its own situation is a better client than one being sold to. No cost, no obligation, nothing withheld pending a purchase.
Organic rankings and keyword gaps against your actual competitors, technical health and Core Web Vitals, Google Business Profile and local pack visibility, AI search citation across AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity, entity and structured data signals, your backlink and corroboration profile, and a conversion path review.
All of it assembled into a roadmap ordered by impact rather than by category.
An automated tool returns a number derived from things it can measure quickly, which isn't the same as things that matter. It can't tell you that your competitor's advantage is a decade of local press coverage, or that your rankings are fine and your form has been broken since March.
Ours is reviewed by a strategist who works in this market and can say which of the twenty issues found is the one actually costing you money.
Most audits are completed and walked through with you within a few business days.
If you're working to a deadline — a board meeting, a renewal decision, a competitor's launch — say so when you request it and we'll tell you honestly whether we can meet it rather than promising and slipping.
Terms are set per engagement. Month-to-month is available and is what most clients run on. Some engagements — particularly larger builds with significant upfront production — are structured with a defined term so both sides know what's committed.
You'd know which applies before signing anything. None of that affects the audit, which is free either way.
Yes, and most audits still don't. We run a fixed panel of the questions your buyers would actually ask an assistant, record whether you're named and who appears instead, then check the underlying causes: crawler access, entity consistency, extractable content structure and third-party corroboration.
Being invisible to assistants is now a separate problem from ranking poorly, with a different fix.
It will tell you what's holding it back, which is usually one of a small number of things: an incomplete or miscategorised Google Business Profile, business details that disagree with each other across the web, a review flow that's gone quiet, or a service area configured in a way that works against you.
For most local service businesses the map pack is the highest-value surface on the page.
It can't tell you how long a specific ranking will take, because that depends on what competitors do next. It can't value a lead — only you know your close rate and customer value.
And it can't tell you whether your prices, your capacity or your follow-up are the real constraint. Sometimes the honest finding is that search visibility isn't the problem, and we'd rather say that than sell around it.
No. We're Denver-based and know this metro market by market, which matters most where proximity and competitive density decide outcomes.
We also work with clients across Colorado and nationally, and for national or ecommerce work the local knowledge matters far less than category understanding. Either way the audit is the same.
You get the findings and a prioritized roadmap, and then you decide. Some people implement it themselves, which is a legitimate outcome and one we plan for by writing the roadmap to be actionable without us.
Some engage us for the whole thing. Some pick one area — build-your-own levels start at $100 a month in $100 increments — and add from there.
Yes, and you should. The ten-point self-check on this page takes about a minute, requires no tools, and returns a prioritized list of what to fix based on which checks you failed and how much each one typically matters.
It won't replace a full audit, but it'll tell you whether you have a visibility problem, a conversion problem or a measurement problem — which is the first fork in the road.
It happens, and it's a useful result rather than a wasted one. If the site is technically sound, the profile is strong and the conversion path works, then the constraint is somewhere else — usually competitive investment, market size, or something downstream of marketing entirely.
Knowing that saves you from spending months optimising something that was never the bottleneck.
Two ways to start, both free
Run the ten-point self-check above and get your fix list in a minute — or request the full audit and have a strategist do it properly. The findings are yours either way.
📞 1-800-481-8638 · (720) 249-6588 · info@eyetoad.com · Mon–Fri 8AM–6PM MT
Denver-based since 2012 · A+ BBB Accredited · 5.0 from 60 Google Reviews