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A good pitch to a small business starts with something true about its website that the owner can check in a minute. A vague “your site could be better” gets deleted. “Your booking page doesn’t open on a phone” gets a reply.
This checklist gives you ten checks, in the order that keeps an audit short: what to look at, how to verify it yourself, and what to say about it. It works by hand, with a phone, a browser and Google’s own tools.
Before you start: one sheet, one order
Open a spreadsheet with one row per business and one column per check below. For each finding, note the date, the device or tool you used, and a screenshot if you can. Websites change: a record of what you saw, and when, keeps your email accurate and lets you check again before you send.
Audit businesses of the same kind together, such as five dental clinics in one neighbourhood. Patterns show up fast, and you learn what “good” looks like for that trade. If you haven’t built your list yet, start with how to find local businesses that need a new website.
The ten checks
1. Does the site load on its own address?
Type the address yourself, with and without www, and once starting with http://. Each should land on the same working homepage. An expired domain, a parked page, a hosting error or a site that only works under one spelling is the biggest gap there is, and the easiest to explain.
2. HTTPS and its certificate
The address should start with https://, and the http:// version should redirect there. Click the icon left of the address to see whether the connection is secure and the certificate valid. Browsers warn visitors about plain http pages: the find-local guide explains what Chrome shows.
Google’s page experience self-assessment asks, “Are your pages served in a secure fashion?” Yet Google also says it “always seeks to show the most relevant content, even if the page experience is sub-par.” Sell HTTPS as trust, not as a ranking boost. The fix is rarely expensive: Let’s Encrypt, run by the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group, issues certificates at no cost, and many hosts set them up for you.
3. On a phone
Open the site on your own phone, not in a narrow desktop window. Can you read the text without zooming? Do buttons work with a thumb? Does anything run off the side of the screen?
Then view the page source on a computer and search for viewport. Without a viewport meta tag such as <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">, phones may draw the page as if on a wider screen and shrink it to fit, as MDN explains. That’s the tiny-text, pinch-to-zoom look owners recognise.
It matters for search too. Google says it “uses the mobile version of a site’s content” for indexing and ranking, and that the mobile site should have the same content as the desktop one. A phone version that hides the menu, the hours or the services hides them from Google as well.
4. Speed, with Google’s own numbers
Paste the address into PageSpeed Insights and read the phone results first. Google’s web.dev sets three Core Web Vitals targets, judged at the 75th percentile of page loads, on phones and computers separately:
| What it measures | Good |
|---|---|
| LCP: how long the main image or text block takes to appear | 2.5 s or less |
| INP: how quickly the page reacts to a tap or click | 200 ms or less |
| CLS: how much the layout jumps while it loads | 0.1 or less |
Know which numbers you’re quoting. The top of the report is field data: real Chrome users over the previous 28 days. The scores below are lab data, from a simulated Lighthouse test. A small site may not have enough visitors: PageSpeed Insights then falls back to data for the whole site, or shows no real-user data at all. In that case, quote the lab result and call it a lab test.
5. Calling, finding and booking
Check, from the homepage and on a phone, the ways a customer gets in touch or comes in:
- Phone: is the number visible, and is it a
tel:link? On a phone, atel:link lets the visitor call in one tap. - Address and hours: are they on the site, and current?
- Booking or ordering: for clinics, salons, restaurants and gyms, is there a way to book or order online? How many taps does it take?
- Contact form: does the page exist and load? Don’t send a test message: it lands in a real person’s inbox.
6. Is anyone looking after it?
Look for signs the site has been left alone: a copyright year from years ago in the footer, news or events long past, a menu or price list that contradicts the listing, holiday hours from a previous year, links that lead nowhere. A neglected site can mean nobody owns it any more: a good opening for a care plan, not only a redesign.
7. How it shows in search results
Search for the business’s name and look at its result, then view the homepage source for <title> and <meta name="description">.
Google asks for “descriptive and concise” titles, distinct on each page, without the same words repeated. It says it uses the meta description only “sometimes”, when it describes the page better than the page’s own text, and that identical descriptions on every page “aren’t helpful”. A homepage titled “Home”, or every page with the same title, is a clear, fixable finding.
8. Accessibility basics
Two checks anyone can run. First, images: the W3C says images “must have text alternatives that describe the information or function represented by them”, while purely decorative images get an empty alt="". A logo or a “Book now” button made of an image with no alt text is a real problem for screen reader users.
Second, contrast: WCAG 2.2 success criterion 1.4.3 (level AA) asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. Check light grey text on a white background first. Point it out as readability for every customer, without claiming the business breaks a law.
9. Email setup
A business’s email records are public. Look up its SPF and DMARC records on the email check page, which sends the business nothing. A missing DMARC record means nothing tells mail servers to refuse email that fakes the business’s address. SPF, DKIM and DMARC explained covers what each finding means.
10. Listings match the site
Compare the website with the business’s public map listings and directory pages: name, phone, address, hours and website link. A listing with old hours, a disconnected number or no website link sends customers the wrong way. If the listing shows no website, search the name and city before you conclude there is none.
Rank what you found
You may find several gaps. Pitch one, the one that costs the business most. A simple order:
| Priority | Gaps |
|---|---|
| First | No website, or one that doesn’t load |
| High | No phone layout, slow on a phone, no HTTPS or a bad certificate |
| Medium | Hard to call or book, a neglected site, missing or repeated page titles, weak email setup |
| Lower | Missing alt text, low contrast, listing details out of date |
Weigh the business’s kind too. No online booking is a bigger gap for a salon, where customers book appointments, than for an emergency plumber, who gets calls. A slow site matters more when most customers arrive on phones.
Turn one finding into a pitch
Owners have been warned about cold pitches. Google’s own page on hiring an SEO tells them to “be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that email you out of the blue”, and says “no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google”. Write the email that passes that test.
Say who you are
Your name, your business and that you work nearby.
Name one finding and how to see it
“Open your site on your phone and tap Book: the page doesn’t load.” The owner can check it in a minute.
Explain it plainly
What a customer sees or can’t do. No invented figures about lost sales, no promises about rankings.
Offer the fix and a small next step
What you would change, and a ten-minute call or a one-page summary of what you checked.
In Canada, an email like this also has to follow CASL: an address the business published, a message relevant to its business, your identification and an unsubscribe link. Cold email in Canada covers the rules.
What an audit by hand can’t tell you
- How many visitors the site gets, or where they come from. Only the owner’s analytics know.
- Why something is the way it is. A slow site may be a cheap host or a heavy theme, and the owner may already know.
- Whether the lab test matches real visitors, when there’s no field data.
- Whether a business has no website, from its listing alone.
Say what you checked, and stop there. An accurate, modest audit earns more trust than a long list of alarms.
Run the checklist with RadiusPilot
RadiusPilot runs most of these checks for you, for a whole neighbourhood at once, and keeps the record.
Check every homepage in a scan
In the Windows app, a test version, a scan checks up to 300 homepages: HTTPS and a valid certificate, a mobile viewport, booking links, the copyright year, the page title and description, the page size and load time. See what the website checks look at.
Run a full audit
Run audit in a business’s profile runs Google’s speed test on a phone and a computer, Email health, Site technology, Site history and, in the Windows app, a read of the site. It grades the site from A to F and lists pitch lines built only from what it found.
Rank by opportunity
Each business gets a score from 0 to 100 with its reasons, using facts only. See how the opportunity score works.
Check one site in your browser
Site speed and Email health also run in the web app, with nothing to install.
Sources
- web.dev: Web Vitals
- PageSpeed Insights: About (field and lab data)
- Google Search Central: Understanding page experience
- Google Search Central: Mobile-first indexing best practices
- Google Search Central: Influencing your title links
- Google Search Central: Control your snippets (meta descriptions)
- Google Search Central: Do you need an SEO?
- MDN: The viewport meta tag
- MDN: The a element (linking to telephone numbers)
- W3C WAI: Images tutorial
- W3C WAI: Understanding SC 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum), WCAG 2.2
- Let’s Encrypt
Checked against these pages on November 2, 2026.