How long does a digital health review take?
Usually 10 to 15 working days, from getting access to the analytics, Search Console, CMS and CRM, through reading and hands-on testing, to a report of 15 to 25 pages and a meeting to walk through it.
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The £1500 audit that finds money you’re already leaving on the table
Which parts of your digital activity make money and which quietly cost it. A focused audit looks at how people find you, what happens when they land, where they drop out and what you pay for in tools, ads and subscriptions, then ranks a short list of fixes by what they will return. If it turns up one campaign burning £300 a month for nothing, £1500 of consulting time is covered in five months. Some audits simply confirm a business is in good shape.
What does a digital audit look at?
The parts that move the numbers. How people find you, and whether the right people are finding you at all. What happens when they land. Where they drop out before they buy or enquire. What you pay for in tools, ads and subscriptions, and whether any of it earns its keep. It is a structured look at what you already have, scored against what it should be doing, and not a 60-page report you will never read.
The first things I check are specific. Would a stranger know what you sell, who it is for and what to do next from the first screen, in under five seconds? How many clicks from the homepage to the contact form: two is fine, four or more loses leads. How the site behaves on a mid-range phone on patchy 4G, rather than a fast desktop browser. How long the form is, since eleven fields can lose about 60% of the submissions four would get. And whether the analytics work at all: half the websites I audit have GA4 set up wrong, with events not firing and conversions not tracked.
A thorough audit also covers the numbers and the qualitative side, a technical crawl, a brief look at competitors, the marketing technology in use, and recommendations that are strategy rather than a list of tactics, with a timeline for when to invest over the next 24 months.
How does an audit run?
Over 10-15 working days. Day one is access: GA4, Search Console, the CMS, the CRM and the social and email tools, because without them the review is opinion, and most clients underestimate how much of the first 48 hours is admin. Days two and three are reading the last 90 days of analytics. Days four to six are hands-on: the site as a user would see it, on a desktop and on a real Android phone with the network throttled, following the journeys, trying the contact form. Day seven is the technical layer. Days eight to ten are the report, in plain language and priority order, usually 15-25 pages. Day eleven is a meeting to walk through it, and the client leaves with three to five actions for the month, each owned by a named person.
What do automated audit tools miss?
The judgement. I run several scanners on every client site as a starting point, and they find in five minutes what would take me hours: broken links, missing meta tags, slow images, the 50 most frequent SEO mistakes, standard accessibility violations, and what has changed since the last scan. They cannot tell you whether the homepage is the wrong landing page for your paid traffic, whether a service page leads with the wrong benefit, how you compare with the competitors you actually lose to, or which page is doing well but could double with a small change. The tool is the starting point.
Why do owners miss these problems themselves?
Because they are too close. You know what the site is meant to say, so you read what should be there rather than what is on the page. You remember why you signed up for a tool, so you keep paying for it. I built my first website in 1994 and I still catch myself doing this on my own projects.
What changes after an audit?
In the first week the quick wins ship, such as a form simplified or a page rewritten, and the numbers move within two to three weeks. In the first month the medium items are scheduled and broken tracking gets fixed, so the dashboard starts telling the truth. In the first quarter the strategic items become owned conversations. One client was sure their checkout was the problem; the audit showed it was a service page two steps earlier, with vague pricing and no clear ask. It was rewritten in an afternoon and conversion lifted 22% in three weeks.
The audit fixes nothing by itself. About 30% of the audits I deliver are fully acted on, another 40% are half done and the remaining 30% are filed. What decides it is whether the team has the time and ownership to follow through.
Is it worth the money?
Usually, because the maths is simple. Say roughly £1500 buys an audit and a prioritised action list. If it finds one ad campaign burning £300 a month with nothing to show, the cost is covered in five months and you are in profit every month after. A broken enquiry form swallowing leads is revenue you should have had all along. I do not promise miracles, and some audits turn up a tidy business doing mostly the right things; even then you get confidence that the money is going where it should, and a plan for the next 12 months. If you cannot say which channel brings your best customers and what each enquiry costs, that is the sign to start.
Related evidence: 55 digital audits. Here’s what I found.. Earlier in this journey: A digital strategy that fits on one page and a small budget.
Questions people ask
How many audits actually get acted on?
About 30% of the audits I deliver are fully acted on, another 40% are half done, and the rest are filed. The difference is whether the team has the time and ownership to follow through, rather than the quality of the audit.
Not sure where to start?
Most clients begin with a conversation. No pitch, no hard sell.
Just a straightforward discussion about where you are and whether I can help.
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