A $350 audit can feel like a real outlay for a small business. It is fair to ask the question: what’s the return?

Here is the math, with one specific scenario and one general principle. The scenario will look familiar to anyone who has seen their own analytics.

The scenario

Imagine you run a service business. Lawn care, HVAC, dental, accounting, whatever. Your average new customer is worth $600 to your business in the first year, and you charge them in roughly that range over twelve months.

Your website gets one hundred visitors in a typical month. (Conservative for a small local business with even modest Google Business Profile presence.) Of those hundred, about three fill out the contact form and become leads. Of those three, you close one. That is a roughly 3% form-to-lead conversion rate and a 33% close rate. Both are reasonable middle-of-the-road numbers for the kind of business we are describing.

So: $600 of new annual revenue, every month, from the website.

Now: imagine the contact form on your site has a problem on iPhone. (We have audited several where it did.) The form looks like it submits. The user gets a thank-you message. But the underlying email never fires. Of your hundred monthly visitors, sixty are on iPhone. Of those sixty, maybe two would normally fill out the form. That is two leads a month, vanishing silently, never showing up in your inbox.

You don’t know they were lost. They look identical to the visitors who never had any intent in the first place.

Two missed leads a month, closing at 33%, at $600 each: $400 a month of vanishing revenue. $4,800 over a year. The Pro Diagnosis + Remedy Package costs $350.

The audit pays back in less than one month, from a single fix.

What this scenario assumes

A few things, and they are worth naming so the math isn’t a stretch:

  • Your business has been running long enough for “normal” form conversion rates to apply.
  • The broken form is a real problem on real devices, not theoretical.
  • You haven’t already found and fixed the issue through other means.

If those assumptions don’t hold, the math shifts. But the general principle does not.

The general principle

The general principle is that small business websites tend to have at least one quiet, expensive issue that nobody is going to find without looking on purpose. That issue is paying its own rent every month, and the rent is paid in lost leads, lost rankings, or lost trust.

Common candidates we surface in audits:

  • A contact form broken on one mobile platform
  • A phone number formatted in a way Siri or Apple Maps can’t parse correctly
  • Schema markup describing the wrong business category, which causes the wrong rich results to appear (or none)
  • A duplicate analytics tag double-counting visitors, which makes every other decision based on bad data
  • A robots.txt directive accidentally blocking AI crawlers, which means ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity will never quote your site
  • An auto-generated meta description pulling from footer text, which is what shows up in Google’s search results

Any one of those issues, surfaced and fixed, can repay an audit several times over. We don’t promise every audit will find one of these. But we have not yet run an audit on a small business website that didn’t find at least one finding worth more than the audit cost.

The reverse math

There is a less optimistic version of this calculation that is also worth considering.

If your website is not generating leads, you may already be paying the rent on issues you don’t know about. The audit cost is bounded ($350, once). The cost of the unknown issues compounds, month over month, every month you don’t find them. The longer you wait, the more it costs to not have looked.

This is not a hard sell. It is the math.

If you would rather know what is leaking than wonder about it, the Pro Diagnosis + Remedy Package is the way to find out.