Free Website Audit vs a Paid Audit: What Are You Actually Paying For?
If you’ve searched for help with your website, you’ve probably been offered a free website audit before you’ve even asked for one. Type your domain into one of the big SEO tools and thirty seconds later you’ve got a score out of 100, a wall of red warning icons, and a nudge to book a call. It feels like you’ve learned something. Most of the time, you haven’t — not anything you can actually act on, anyway.
We get asked often enough why Plan A Marketing charges £699 for a website audit when so much is offered for nothing, so it’s worth answering properly rather than dodging it. The honest answer is that free and paid audits aren’t really the same product wearing different price tags. They’re doing two different jobs, and it’s worth understanding the difference before you rely on either one — particularly if you’re already trying to work out why your website isn’t getting any traffic in the first place.
What a free automated audit actually checks
A free website audit tool runs a script against your site. It checks things like page speed, whether your metadata is filled in, whether your headings are structured sensibly, whether you’ve got broken links, and a handful of other technical boxes. All useful things to know in isolation — but the tool has no idea what your business actually does, who your customers are, or which of those thirty flagged issues is actually costing you enquiries versus which one nobody will ever notice.
It also can’t tell the difference between a real problem and a false alarm. We’ve seen automated audits flag a site for a missing meta description that was there all along, mark a slow-loading page as “critical” when it’s a page almost nobody visits, or dock points for a technical issue that has no real bearing on whether a local customer finds and trusts the business. The scan doesn’t know any of that context. It just counts what it’s programmed to count, the same way for a plumber in Mirfield as for a national retailer.
Why “free” usually means “lead generation”
There’s nothing wrong with a company using a free tool to get you talking to them — that’s a fair way to start a conversation, and plenty of decent agencies do it. But it’s worth being clear-eyed about what’s actually happening: the free audit is the bait, and the sales call is the point. The report itself is rarely built to be genuinely useful sitting on its own, because generating a useful, business-specific report was never really the job it was designed to do.
We’ve deliberately not built our own version of that. The £699 fee means the audit itself is the product, not a way of getting you on the phone. You’re paying for a result you can use, not for access to a salesperson — and because it’s a fixed fee agreed upfront, there’s no pressure to turn the conversation into a longer contract before you’ve even seen what’s wrong.
What you get from a paid, human audit instead
When Plan A Marketing runs an audit, a person looks at your actual website and your actual business — not a generic checklist run against a database of rules. In practice that means:
- A plain-English explanation of what’s actually stopping your site bringing in calls, leads or sales, not just a list of technical flags with no context
- Judgement about what genuinely matters for your business versus what’s a minor issue that isn’t worth your time or budget right now
- A prioritised action list, so you know what to fix first, second and third, and roughly why each one matters
- The freedom to act on it however suits you — do it yourself, have your own team trained up on it, or have us do it for you
So which one should you use?
Honestly, both have a place. A free tool is a fine first step if you just want a rough sense of whether anything’s obviously broken, and there’s no harm running one before you talk to anyone. But if you actually want to know why your site isn’t converting, in plain English, and what to do about it in the right order, that takes a person looking properly at your specific business — which is exactly what a website audit from Plan A Marketing is built to do. It’s a common pattern, too: plenty of sites we look at have decent traffic but next to no enquiries, and a scan alone won’t tell you why.
If you’ve already run a free scan and come away with a list of warnings you don’t fully understand, that’s often the best possible starting point for a proper conversation — bring it along, and we’ll tell you honestly which of those warnings actually matter for a business like yours.
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Stop guessing why your site isn’t working.
If your website isn’t bringing in calls, leads, or sales, we can tell you exactly why. For a fixed fee of £699, Plan A Marketing will perform a complete, plain-English diagnosis of your site and hand you a prioritised action list of fixes.
From there, you decide how to execute it: do it yourself, let us teach your team, or have us do it for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
A free website audit tool runs an automated scan and gives you a generic technical score with no understanding of your business. A paid audit from Plan A Marketing is carried out personally by Nick, who reviews your actual site and business and hands you a plain-English, prioritised list of what to fix and why it matters.
They're often technically accurate but contextually blind — they can flag a genuine issue and a trivial one with equal urgency, and they have no way of knowing which problems are actually costing your business enquiries. They're a reasonable first check, but not something to base real decisions on.
Because the audit itself is the product, not a way of getting you on a sales call. Charging a fixed fee upfront means the report has to stand on its own and actually be useful, with no pressure to sell you anything further before you've seen the results.
Yes, and it's often the best place to start. Bring the free report along — Plan A Marketing will tell you honestly which of those warnings actually matter for a business like yours, and which ones you can safely ignore, then build a proper prioritised action plan around the real issues.
