The Truth About "Free" SEO Audits (Don't Get Conned)

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That free SEO audit is not free.

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It's a sales pitch with a spreadsheet on top.

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It took them 20 minutes, and it's about to cost you a whole lot more.

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This is SEO Fucking What.

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I'm Nikki, and I've been doing SEO for over 30 years,

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before it was even called SEO.

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I help small business owners and B2B service providers make

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money from their websites by actually getting found on search.

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And today, I want to talk about free SEO audits, specifically why

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most of them are not audits at all.

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They're sales pitches in disguise, And the difference matters because one of

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them helped you, and the other one helps the agency empty your bank account.

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Now, I wanna be clear before I start.

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There are obviously legitimate free audits out there.

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I do them myself, and I'll talk to you about what one looks like later.

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But the majority of what gets branded as a free SEO audit is a lead generation

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tool with your URL on the cover.

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That's not cynicism.

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That's just what it is.

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me walk you through how it works.

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You get an email, or you fill in a form on an agency website, or someone

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slides into your LinkedIn DMs.

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Whatever the route, within a day or two, you've got a PDF in your inbox.

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It might be called a free SEO health check, or a complimentary

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website analysis, or a full SEO audit completely free of charge.

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The name varies, the structure doesn't.

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There's usually a big alarming number at the top.

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Your site has six hundred and twenty-three errors or eight hundred and forty-seven

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errors or twelve hundred errors.

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I've seen all sorts.

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Whatever the tool spat out, color-coded to look catastrophic.

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Then page after page after fucking page of red and orange.

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Problems, warnings, issues, all presented at the same volume, all

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requiring immediate attention.

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And at the very end, a page about how this agency can fix every single one

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of these devastating problems for you, starting from X thousand pounds a month.

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Let's book a call.

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That's not a service.

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It's a funnel dressed up as a favor.

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Here's what went into producing that free audit.

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They took your URL.

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They put it into a tool.

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Screaming Frog, Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, SE Ranking, one of the standard crawlers

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that most SEOs use every single day.

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They ran the crawl.

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It took about 10 minutes at the most for a small site.

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Then they exported the results, added some red formatting, dropped

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in their logo, and sent it over.

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And really, honestly, that is what most free audits are, a

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crawl report with branding on it.

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And do you know what makes it really infuriating?

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That crawl report is always going to find problems.

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Every site has problems.

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Even well-maintained, professionally built websites have issues

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that show up in a crawl.

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Missing alt text, redirect chains, pages that shouldn't be indexed,

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meta titles slightly too long.

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This is not a sign of catastrophe.

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It's just how websites work.

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But when you present every single one of those issues at the same volume with

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no context about which one actually affects your specific site's performance,

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everything looks like an alarm.

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And that, that, my lovelies, is exactly the fucking point Nobody gets sent a

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free audit that says, "Do you know what?

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Your site's doing all right.

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There are two things you might wanna fix.

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Here's what to do." Those kinds of audits don't convert to sales.

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The audit that tells you that Google is about to abandon you entirely and your

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competitors are pulling ahead every single day you leave this unfixed, that's

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the one that gets the phone ringing.

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I've talked about dodgy agency tactics back in episode nine when I went through

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the red flags you should be running from.

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And in episode 15, I covered the paid version of this problem, an

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audit that cost a client thousands of pounds and somehow managed to miss

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hreflang errors and redirect chains because it was too busy producing

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charts about ChatGPT citation rates.

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That was the expensive con.

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This is the free one.

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Different price point, same fundamental issue.

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This audit is not built to help you.

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It's built to sell you something.

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And this is where it gets properly grubby, 'cause it's not just about

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the errors, it's about the urgency.

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They tell you that every day you leave these issues unfixed,

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you're losing customers.

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Google is penalizing you right now.

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Your competitors are surging ahead while you read this email.

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You need to act immediately.

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And sometimes that urgency is real.

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Sometimes there genuinely is a serious technical problem dragging your

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rankings down, and every week matters.

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But in a free audit from an agency you've never spoken to, who sent

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you a PDF before asking you a single question about your business, that

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urgency is almost always manufactured.

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They don't know if Google is penalizing you.

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They haven't looked at your traffic data or your Google Search Console.

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They have no idea what your business goals are, or who your customers

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are, or what's already working.

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They ran a crawl, found the standard list of things that crawls always

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find, labeled the whole fucking lot as critical, and are now presenting it as

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a disaster to make you panic and sign something before you've had time to think.

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Don't!

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So what does a real audit look like?

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I do a lot of these free of charge, and I want to tell you what goes into

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them because the contrast with a cruel report in a branded PDF is pretty stark.

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Stick around.

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So I recently did a free audit for a B2B service provider whose site had

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recently been rebuilt, and I wanna tell you what went into it because

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it's the clearest way I know to show you what the real thing looks like.

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The first thing in the document was a full disclosure about what

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I used and how I put it together.

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exact tools, what I ran, what I looked at manually with my very own

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eyes right there in the introduction.

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No proprietary methodology, no mystery process, just here's what I did.

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Second, what the site was actually doing well.

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The site had strong trust signals, solid content, good positioning.

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I gave them a section on what was working before I got anywhere near the problems.

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A dodgy free audit never finds anything that's fine because fine

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doesn't frighten you into a contract.

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A real audit will tell you the truth, which includes what

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you don't need to worry about.

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And then the technical issues.

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Yes, there were problems on the site.

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There are always problems, but every single problem came with context.

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So for example, the page speed score wasn't just a bad number sitting on

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a page with big red flags around it.

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I explained to the website owner that for someone selling credibility

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to B2B clients, a slow site is working against you before a

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prospect has read a single word.

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The broken schema on the blog post wasn't just flagged as a catastrophic error.

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I told them that the blog posts on their websites were currently ineligible

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for rich results in search, and this was why, and here was the fix.

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And then I gave them a really clear priority order.

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Fix immediately, fix soon, think carefully about.

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Not 900 items all labeled critical.

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A proper assessment of what matters most for this specific site, this specific

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person, what they're trying to achieve.

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And the close, a soft offer to work through it together in a

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one-to-one session if they wanted to.

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No urgency, no manufactured panic, no, "Every day you wait, you're losing money."

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And I know what some of you are thinking right now.

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"Nikki, if that's your free audit, what do you put in your paid ones?" Well, exactly.

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And that's exactly the question I want you asking, not just about me, about

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every agency that sends you a freebie.

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Because the free audit is supposed to be where they put their best foot forward.

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It's a sales document, remember.

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So if what you get is an automated crawl with alarming numbers and no context

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and no understanding of your business, that is their best foot forward.

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That is what they think good looks like, and that tells you everything

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you need to know about what you'd actually get if you paid them.

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So I'm gonna give you three questions to run every free audit through

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before you take it seriously.

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First of all, did they ask you about your business before sending it?

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A real audit starts with understanding what you're trying to achieve,

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who your customers are, what's already working, and what isn't.

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If a 40-page document about your website arrives before anyone has asked you a

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single question about your business, it was built without that information, which

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means it can't be about your business.

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It's a template with your URL in it.

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Secondly, does it tell you what matters most, or does it just list everything?

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Running a crawl and producing a list of issues is not a skill.

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Every SEO tool on the planet can do that for free.

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The skill is knowing which issues affect your rankings and your traffic and which

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ones are background noise that can wait.

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If everything in the audit is marked as critical or urgent, none of it is.

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They're not triaging your problems, they're burying you in them.

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Thirdly, is the proposed solution entirely hire us?

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A real audit gives you enough to understand your situation and act

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on it yourself if you want to.

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You might still decide you want help, and that's fine, but a genuine assessment

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of your site tells you what to do, not just that something needs doing and that

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only this particular agency can sort it.

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Run any free audit through those three questions and you'll know pretty

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quickly whether someone put real thought into it or just ran your URL through

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a tool and crossed their fingers.

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This week's homework is simple.

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If you've had a free SEO audit sent to you in the past year and it's

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sitting in your inbox, get it out.

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Run it through the three questions.

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Be honest with yourself about what the answers tell you.

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And if you haven't had one, go and request one from an

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agency you've been considering.

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See what arrives and what it tells you about how they actually work.

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The audit is free.

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The information about whether this is an agency worth talking to is priceless.

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If you want to understand your site well enough to spot the difference between

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a real audit and a panic-inducing spreadsheet designed to scare you into

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signing a contract, that's exactly what my Non-Wanky SEO course is for.

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It's my online course at nonwankyseo.com.

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It'll teach you exactly what matters and why without the jargon, without

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the waffle, without anyone trying to frighten you into spending

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money you don't need to spend.

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It's £200 as a one-off payment or £20 a month if you'd rather spread the cost.

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Either way, you come out of it knowing enough to ask the right questions and

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to recognize when someone's sending you a sales pitch dressed up as a service.

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Make sure you're following SEO Fucking What wherever you're listening right

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now so you don't miss the next episode.

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Until then, get found, make money, and the next time a free audit lands

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in your inbox, check whether anyone bothered to ask about your business

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before they told you it was broken.