Free SEO audit: what the report you get within 24 hours actually contains, block by block

You type your web address into a free SEO audit tool and you get a score. Sixty two out of a hundred, a red dot next to something about meta tags, an orange one for load time and a list of technical terms you cannot do anything with. You close the tab and you still have no idea why that one competitor two streets away sits above you when someone searches for your trade and your town.

That is the problem with almost every free SEO audit you find online: it measures a website, not a business. It does not know where you work, who ranks above you there, whether your Google Business Profile is complete or whether ChatGPT knows your name when someone asks. So this article does it differently. We take a real report we produced this month, black out the name of the business and walk through it block by block. You see what we measure, what came out, and what each fix costs.

The short version

A free SEO audit from Offlow has seven blocks, always in the same order. This is what each block measures and what it turned up for the landscaper from the Waasland region who serves as the example in this article.

Block	What we measure	What came out
1. Rankings	Where you sit in Google for ten keywords your customers use	Not in the top ten for a single keyword
2. Competitor	Who ranks above you and why	A garden firm with 70 reviews and a page per service
3. ChatGPT test	Whether AI names your business when someone asks	Five names given, his was not one of them
4. Business Profile	What is missing on Google Maps	One review, against 64 for the number two in the map pack
5. Speed and technology	Load time on mobile and what Google can read	Fast, but the text is not in the source code
6. Copy and button	Whether a visitor understands what you do and where	No town and no business name in the title
7. The five fixes	What to tackle first, with a from price per fix	From €0 yourself to from €175 per page

Every figure in this article was measured in the first week of October 2026. Prices are ours, excluding VAT, as of October 2026.

What does a free SEO audit from Offlow include?

The report is a document of a few pages that you read in ten minutes. At the top sits what you should fix first. Below that come the seven blocks from the table, each with the measurement, the cause and what it costs you to leave it. At the bottom, each fix carries a from price if we do the work, so you decide for yourself what to outsource and what to pick up yourself.

We build it with tools that pull rankings, search volumes and load times, and then Silvio checks the results himself. That last step is the difference from a score out of a hundred. A tool cannot see that your town appears nowhere on your site, or that three of your pages compete for the same keyword and pull each other down. You do not need to give us access to your website, your Search Console or your Business Profile. Everything in the report comes from what is publicly visible, exactly as your customer and Google see it. On working days you have it within 24 hours. Why a score from a tool does not get you any further is also explained on our page about the SEO audit.

Whose report is this?

A landscaper in the Waasland region. He does garden design and maintenance, tractor work such as flail mowing and delivering soil, a skip hire service for waste, wood and rubble, and fencing. For private customers and businesses. He contacted us this spring for a quote for a new website, and has since put a site online himself with the AI website builder from his hosting company. One page, 263 words, six photos, one button at the bottom.

We leave out his name, nothing else. In the first week of October 2026 we ran the full audit on that site, exactly as we do for every request that comes in through our free website audit form. The keywords below come from his own services, the competitors are named, and the figures have not been rounded to make the story look better.

Block 1: which keywords do you rank for, and who ranks above you?

This is the first block of the report, and almost always the one that hits hardest. We pick ten keywords per business: every service it actually sells with the town added, one or two terms for the wider region, and one trade term without a town that sets the business apart, such as flail mowing. Never the company’s own slogan, because you always rank first for that and learn nothing. For each term we pull the number of monthly searches in Belgium, then we check on a phone in the business’s own town who ranks at the top. Not on our own laptop in Stekene, because Google shows a different list in every town.

Keyword (Dutch)	Per month	His ranking	Who ranks at the top
klepelmaaien (flail mowing)	70	not in the top ten	klepelmaaien.be, with a Google AI answer above it
tuinaanleg sint niklaas (garden design Sint Niklaas)	50	not in the top ten	Rreac04, with its own page for Sint Niklaas
tuinman sint niklaas (gardener Sint Niklaas)	50	not in the top ten	Groen@home
tuinonderhoud sint niklaas (garden maintenance Sint Niklaas)	40	not in the top ten	Droomtuinen, with a page for garden design in Sint Niklaas
tuinaannemer sint niklaas (landscaper Sint Niklaas)	20	not in the top ten	map pack with Tuinsolutions, Alltuin and Green Solei, then Tuinen D’hondt
containerdienst sint niklaas (skip hire Sint Niklaas)	20	not in the top ten	Mels Containers, with a page per town
container huren sint niklaas (rent a skip Sint Niklaas)	20	not in the top ten	Grondwerken Tom Dierick
tuinaannemer waasland (landscaper Waasland)	10	not in the top ten	map pack with Tuinsolutions, Alltuin and Tuinwerken Thom, then Rreac04
tuinaanleg waasland (garden design Waasland)	under 10	not in the top ten	Tuinwerken Thierens
afsluiting plaatsen sint niklaas (fencing Sint Niklaas)	under 10	not in the top ten	Luc Driesen

Ten keywords, ten times outside the top ten. The tool we use keeps track, for every website, of the keywords it ranks for anywhere in the first hundred results, and for this domain that list is empty. Even someone typing the business name itself sees the Google map and, below it, the Facebook page of a namesake, but the website itself does not appear among the results.

Across these ten keywords, roughly 280 people a month search for exactly what this business does. Today, not one of them lands on his website.

Look at the right hand column again. Whoever ranks at the top almost always has a separate page for that one service in that one town. Rreac04 has a page for Sint Niklaas. Droomtuinen has a page for garden design in Sint Niklaas. Mels Containers has a page per town. That is no coincidence, it is the pattern we describe as step six in our nine steps to rank higher on Google. A site with one page cannot follow that pattern, however good that one page is. Our article on local SEO for tradespeople explains why a town page often brings in more than your homepage.

Block 2: who is the competitor by name, and why do they rank above you?

A ranking means nothing as long as you do not know who sits above you. So we pick one competitor that ranks at the top for several keywords and explain what they do differently, because that is who you learn from fastest.

In this report that is Haagmans from Sint Niklaas. For landscaper Sint Niklaas, Haagmans appears in the map pack and in the organic results, and for garden maintenance Sint Niklaas they also run an ad on the same page. Their Google Maps profile has 70 reviews with an average of 4.9. Their site has a separate page for hedge trimming, for garden maintenance, for lawn laying and for seasonal work, and the page about laying turf literally says in its title that it is about Sint Niklaas. Anyone searching for that finds a page with exactly that name.

So the difference is not the quality of the work, which we cannot judge. It lies in three things you can measure: reviews, a page per service, and the town mentioned throughout the copy. All three can be copied, and none of them costs a fortune.

Block 3: does ChatGPT name your business when someone asks?

More and more people no longer ask Google but ChatGPT who they should call. So in every audit we ask the question a customer would ask and note who appears in the answer. For this business it was: which landscaper in Sint Niklaas would you recommend for garden design and maintenance?

The answer, on 7 October 2026, contained five names: Tuin Solutions, Herman & Herman Outdoor Projects, Intertuin Teugels, Z&M Tuincreaties and Tuinaanleg Vanseveren. The business in this report was not among them. More interesting than the names were the sources ChatGPT cited: almost all of them pages on Trustlocal and the Gouden Gids, the Belgian yellow pages. Not one of the five firms’ own websites was used as a source. So anyone who wants to appear in that answer first makes sure they are listed on those directory sites with a complete profile and reviews, and only then works on their own site.

If you want to check this for your own business, we wrote up a five minute test. What it then takes to get into such an answer is on our page about getting found in ChatGPT and AI answers.

Block 4: how is your Google Business Profile doing?

For a landscaper the map pack matters more than the organic results. For landscaper Sint Niklaas that block sits at the top with three businesses in it, before the first regular result. Whoever is in there gets the phone calls. So we look at the profile the way a customer sees it: does it exist, is the category right, how many reviews does it have, is there a description, are there photos and services.

This business’s profile exists and is correct: category gardener, phone number, link to the website and a one line description about year round garden maintenance. That is better than half the profiles we see. But it has one review. The three businesses in the map pack have 30, 64 and 9. Google picks that block on distance, relevance and prominence, and reviews weigh heavily in that last one. On that point this profile loses to everyone nearby.

This is also the block where the fix costs almost nothing. Message ten happy customers from the last few months with the review link, and in three months there will be ten to fifteen reviews. Which fields matter most after that is covered in the eleven fields of your Google Business Profile.

Block 5: how fast does your site load, and what does Google actually see?

We measure load time on a phone and on a computer, and we look at exactly what the source code contains before a script is allowed to change anything. Every free tool skips that second part, and in this report it is the most important technical point.

The speed is good. The file the server sends is 2.7 kilobytes and arrives in a quarter of a second. The problem is that the file contains nothing: no title, no heading, not a word of text. Everything is drawn by a script afterwards. Google can run that script, as Google’s own documentation on JavaScript websites explains, but it happens in a second pass and not always completely. On this site you see the consequence straight away. Type site: followed by the address into Google and the page appears with the web address itself as its title, not the business name. Google has not picked up the title.

On top of that, the whole site has 263 words. Five services across 263 words means about fifty words per service, and with fifty words you will not win a single keyword from a competitor who devotes a full page to it.

Block 6: what is wrong with your copy and your button?

Here we read the site the way a customer does: on a phone, in ten seconds. Do you immediately understand what this business does, where it works and how to reach it?

The page title, the piece of text Google shows in the results, names three services. No town, and not the name the business uses on Google Maps. The large heading at the top of the page names the same three services and ends with we take care of it. No town there either. Nowhere on the page does it say which towns this business covers. So Google does not know where to show this site, and a visitor from Temse does not know whether to call.

The button sits right at the bottom, under the last heading asking for a quote, and on a phone you scroll for quite a while to get there. Someone standing on a building site who needs a skip quickly never reaches that button. A clickable phone number at the top and a short button next to the first heading solve that. Those are one hour jobs, and they often do more for the number of enquiries than a month of SEO. Why that is so is explained in your website gets visitors but no enquiries.

Block 7: the five fixes in order, with a from price

This is the block the report opens with, but it reads more logically here, after the measurements. Five fixes, in the order in which they deliver the most. Each one shows what it solves and what it costs if we do it.

Fix	What it solves	From price
1. Ask for reviews, two a week	From one to fifteen reviews in three months, the fastest route into the map pack	€0, do it yourself
2. Name and town in title, heading and copy	Google and AI know where the business works	€0 yourself, or in the one off SEO package from €349
3. A page per service, with Sint Niklaas in it	Garden maintenance, garden design, skip hire, tractor work and fencing each get a page that can win a keyword	from €175 per page
4. Connect and complete the Google Business Profile	Services, service area and photos on the profile, linked to the new pages	from €49
5. Button and phone number at the top	Anyone who does find the site calls in one tap	from €99

One honest note, which also appears in the report this way. Fixes three, four and five are not something we can carry out inside the AI website builder this site runs on, because we cannot get at the source code there. Nor does that builder solve the problem of the text not being in the source code. That leaves two routes. Either the owner enters the copy and pages himself within his builder and we write them for him. Or we move the site to a website we manage, from €750, and include the five fixes in that. Which of the two is best depends on how much time he wants to put in himself. We would rather say that up front than send an invoice for work his builder does not allow.

How quickly do those five fixes deliver results?

A report without timelines encourages procrastination. So each fix comes with the point at which you can expect the first movement. These are the timelines we consider realistic after more than 160 websites, and they go into the report exactly like this.

Fix	First movement	Where you see it
Button and phone number at the top	immediately	more calls from people who already find the site
Asking for reviews	1 to 3 weeks	shown more often in the map pack
Name and town in title and heading	2 to 4 weeks	more clicks on the keywords with a town
Completing the Business Profile	1 to 3 weeks	higher in the map pack, more route requests and calls
A page per service	2 to 5 months	rankings for the keywords in block 1

The order is deliberate. The quick fixes cost almost nothing and move within a month, so you see that it works before you invest in pages. Anyone who gives up after six weeks has paid the costs and just missed the return.

A worked example: what does this bring in for a landscaper?

A report without a calculation is an opinion. So we work it out, with the figures from block 1 and with assumptions we state clearly.

The ten keywords together account for roughly 280 searches a month. Suppose the business, with a page per service, reaches the top three for half of those keywords within four to six months. A top three spot takes roughly a third of the clicks, so around 45 visitors a month from that half. If three percent of them ask for a quote, that is one to two enquiries a month through the site. Calls from the map pack come on top of that, because they are not in this figure.

Take an average garden project of €4,000 with a margin of fifteen percent, so €600 profit per job. One garden job a month from the site then comfortably covers the local monthly package from €249, and every skip or maintenance contract on top of that is profit. Fill in your own average job and you will see in a minute whether this adds up for you.

What	Figure
Monthly searches across the ten keywords	around 280
Visitors with a top three spot for half of them	around 45
Quote requests per month through the site	1 to 2
Profit per garden job, assuming €4,000 and a fifteen percent margin	€600
Cost of the local monthly package	from €249

For comparison: at Glenn Piessens, who does renovation and garden design in and around Veurne, 7 to 8 enquiries a month now come in for his main services, with a page per service, copy written for his region and €150 of Google Ads a month. That is what the same fixes do when you keep at them.

What can you do yourself this week?

You do not have to wait for a report. These are the seven things from this report you can check yourself, in half a day.

1. Type your main service with your town into Google, on your phone, and note where you rank. Do it for five keywords. That is your baseline.
2. Note which business ranks at the top and open their site. Count how many pages they have and check whether the town is in their title.
3. Type site: followed by your web address into Google. Do you see your business name as the title, or your web address? If it is the latter, Google is not reading your title.
4. Ask ChatGPT which tradesperson in your trade and your town it recommends. Note the names and the sources it lists.
5. Open your Google Business Profile and count your reviews. Send five customers the review link today.
6. Read the title of every page: is your town in it? If not, put it in.
7. Open your site on your phone and count how many times you scroll before you see a phone number or a button. More than once is too many.

The mistakes we see most often in these audits

After hundreds of reports, the same five things keep coming back.

A score out of a hundred as a report

A tool gives you 62 out of 100 and 47 points with no order. A missing alt text weighs as much as a service page you do not have at all. You start with the easiest, and that is almost never the most important.

The town is nowhere to be found

You know where you work. Google and ChatGPT do not. In this report the town was not in the title, not in the heading and not in the copy. Then nobody can connect you to a search with a town in it, and those are precisely the searches that bring customers.

Everything on one page

One page with five services cannot beat a competitor with a page per service for any of those five. A site with a single page is fine to start with, but not to get found for anything beyond your own name.

Leaving reviews untouched

One review against 64. It is the cheapest fix in the entire report and the one most often left undone, because nobody likes asking. Do it the moment the job is finished and the customer is happy, not three months later by email.

Reading the report and doing nothing

This is the most expensive of the five. A report without action is a PDF in a folder. So pick one fix, preferably the reviews, and start on it this week. The rest follows.

When is a free SEO audit pointless for you?

We would rather say no up front. There are four situations where you are better off not requesting a report, because you would read for ten minutes for nothing.

You have no website, only a Facebook page. Then we are measuring thin air. Start with your Business Profile instead, or with a website from €750. You only work as a subcontractor for two regular clients and want to keep it that way. Then you do not need to be found. You need turnover next month. Then SEO is the wrong channel, and we say so in the report too; in that case you are better off running ads for a while until the rest builds up. And you already work with an SEO agency that sends you rankings and competitors every month. Then you already have this, and a second opinion is only useful if you doubt the first.

In every other case the report is useful, even if you then do everything yourself. Where exactly the line between doing it yourself and outsourcing lies, with the hours involved, is in doing SEO yourself or outsourcing it.

What does it cost if you have it done?

The report itself costs nothing and commits you to nothing. If you want us to carry out the fixes, these are the options, as of October 2026, excluding VAT and cancellable monthly.

Approach	Price	For whom
Do it yourself with the report	your own time	anyone who wants to tackle reviews, titles and their Business Profile themselves
One off fix	from €349	a business in one town, foundations put right, then carry on yourself
Monthly, local	from €249 per month	your town and the towns around it, with a new page every month
Monthly, regional	from €449 per month	a whole region, several services
New website	from €750	if your current builder does not allow the changes

There are no setup fees and the audit beforehand is always free. How we approach SEO as a service is on our page about our SEO agency. What other Belgian agencies charge for it is compared in how much SEO costs in Belgium.

Frequently asked questions

Want a report like this for your business?

Request your free website audit. You enter your web address, that is all we need. Within 24 hours on working days a report lands in your inbox with your ten keywords, the competitor ranking above you, the ChatGPT test, your Business Profile and the five fixes to tackle first, each with a from price. You are welcome to take it and get to work on it yourself.

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Prefer to talk now? Send Silvio a WhatsApp, email info@offlow.be or call +32 495 46 80 90.