Founder & Chief Executive Officer
The last time I said this online, I ended up in a brawl with a pile of other marketers. It will probably happen again. I am saying it anyway, because it just happened to another one of our clients.
If a marketing company wants to charge you for an audit before they have had a single free conversation with you, they are looking for a transaction rather than a partnership.
I warn people about this in advance whenever I can, because as a small business owner you need to be certain the marketing company you are considering is actually on the same page as you. Marketers are a dime a dozen these days. Everybody is a marketer. Which means there is an enormous spectrum in how people approach this work, and if you and your provider are not aligned, you can hand over $2,000 for information that is not sustainable for your business or not even applicable to your situation.
A discovery call is not a sales formality, and treating it as one misses what it does.
It is where a provider finds out what your business actually is, what you have tried, what your constraints are, and whether they can genuinely help. It is also where you find out how they think, whether they ask good questions, and whether they understand your situation well enough to be useful. Both sides are qualifying each other, and both sides should be willing to walk away.
A company that skips straight to an invoice has decided the qualifying step is unnecessary, which tells you they intend to deliver the same thing regardless of what your business turns out to be. That is the part that bothers me. The order of operations reveals the business model.
Summary A discovery call is where both sides find out whether the fit is real, with each qualifying the other. Skipping it signals that the same deliverable is coming regardless of what your business turns out to be.
This is where I can stop arguing from opinion, because the research on agency relationships is unusually damning on exactly this point.
Setup’s Marketing Relationship Survey, which has tracked agency and client sentiment for eight years, found that 44% of clients who ended an agency relationship cited that the agency did not understand their business. On the agency side of the same survey, only 3% identified that as a reason the relationship failed.
Sit with that gap. Understanding the client’s business is one of the most common reasons these relationships collapse, and it is almost invisible to the agencies themselves. The same research found dissatisfaction with value and delivery each cited by around 61% of departing clients.
So when I say the conversation matters more than the deliverable, this is what I mean. The single most under-addressed failure point in this industry is providers not understanding the business they are working on, and a free discovery call is the first and cheapest opportunity to fix that.
Summary Setup’s eight-year survey found 44% of clients who left an agency cited that the agency did not understand their business, while only 3% of agencies identified that as a reason. The gap shows how invisible this failure is to providers.
Here is the practical consequence for your money.
An audit produced without any understanding of your business tells you what is technically imperfect about your website or your marketing. What it cannot tell you is which of those things matters for you, given your market, your capacity, your budget, and where your customers actually come from. You end up with a 40-page document listing 60 issues, no indication of which three would move anything, and no sense of whether the recommendations suit a business of your size.
I have watched clients arrive with exactly that document, having paid well for it, unable to act on any of it. The findings were often accurate. They were simply not usable, because the person producing them never learned enough about the business to prioritise.
A good SEO company or SEO agency doing a genuine audit asks about your customers, your sales process, and your goals first, because the technical findings only become useful once somebody knows what you are trying to achieve.
Summary An audit produced without context lists what is technically imperfect without indicating what matters for your business. Clients frequently arrive with accurate findings they cannot act on, because nobody learned enough to prioritise them.
Let me take on the counterargument directly, since I know it is coming.
Plenty of respected consultants charge for diagnostic work, and they are right to. A thorough audit is real labour, it produces something genuinely valuable, and giving it away free devalues the expertise behind it. Some firms also charge specifically to filter out people who are not serious. None of that is unreasonable, and I have no issue with any of it.
My objection is narrower than it probably sounded. The problem is charging before any conversation has happened at all. Paid diagnostics after a proper discovery call, where both sides have established the fit and you know what you are buying and why, is an entirely legitimate way to work. Paid diagnostics as the first point of contact, with no conversation offered, means the deliverable was decided before anyone knew anything about you.
So the test is the order, not the invoice. If somebody will talk to you first, understand your business, and then propose paid work including an audit, that is a professional relationship. If the only available entry point is a credit card, you are a transaction.
Summary Charging for diagnostic work is legitimate and the labour is real. The objection is charging before any conversation has happened, since that means the deliverable was decided before anyone knew anything about your business.
The reason this matters more than it used to is that the barrier to calling yourself a marketer has collapsed.
That means the spectrum of what you might get is enormous. Somebody genuinely excellent and somebody who watched a course last month present almost identically online, use the same vocabulary, and charge in overlapping ranges. You cannot tell them apart from a website.
A conversation is the cheapest and fastest way to tell them apart. Within twenty minutes, somebody who knows what they are doing will have asked you things nobody else asked, and somebody who does not will have talked mostly about themselves. That signal is free, and it is remarkably reliable, which is exactly why it is worth insisting on before money changes hands.
Summary The barrier to calling yourself a marketer has collapsed, so excellent and inexperienced providers look nearly identical online. A conversation separates them quickly, since good providers ask questions nobody else asked.
Assuming you get the free conversation, use it properly rather than letting it become a pitch.
Ask how they would approach a business like yours and listen for whether the answer is specific or generic. Ask what they would need to learn before recommending anything. Ask what they would tell you not to do, since a provider willing to talk you out of something is showing you how they think. Ask who owns the accounts and the work if the relationship ends. And ask what results look like and over what timeline, because anyone promising certainty is telling you something useful about themselves.
If you want help assessing a provider before you commit, a marketing consultant or fractional CMO can review a proposal with you, and some marketing training will give you enough grounding to ask these questions with confidence. Either costs considerably less than $2,000 spent on a document you cannot use.
Summary Ask how they would approach a business like yours, what they would need to learn first, what they would tell you not to do, who owns the work, and what timelines look like. Generic answers reveal a generic deliverable.
Before you spend two grand on an audit, make sure the companies you are considering will at least offer you a free call. If they will not, run the other way, because it is likely a transaction rather than a partnership.
The research backs this up more strongly than my opinion does. Clients leave agencies over not being understood far more often than agencies realise, and a conversation is where understanding either starts or fails to.
Charge for the audit if you like. Talk to the person first.
And yes, I am looking forward to the many arguments that may or may not come.
Sources:
Setup, Marketing Relationship Survey, eight years of agency and client data (44% of clients who ended an agency relationship cited that the agency did not understand their business, while only 3% of agencies identified that as a reason; dissatisfaction with delivery and with value were each cited by approximately 61% of departing clients). https://setup.us/blog/why-do-clients-end-agency-relationships-8-years-of-surveys-point-to-a-clear-pattern
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