Why we publish this
Most agency proposals begin with a paid audit. Ours begins with a free diagnostic, and the checks are not secret — they are the same standard checks any competent practitioner runs. What you pay for is fixing what the checks find, not the checks themselves.
Work through this in order. Stop at the first thing that fails, because problems higher in the list invalidate everything below them.
1. Measurement, before anything else
If measurement is wrong, every other conclusion you draw this year will also be wrong — and confidently so.
- Submit your own contact form. Did it arrive in the inbox? Did exactly one conversion register?
- Search your page source for your GA4 measurement ID. It should appear once, not twice
- Compare last month's reported leads with the actual enquiries in your inbox
- Check that key events are marked as conversions in GA4 — recording an event is not the same as counting it
2. Can Google actually see your site
Surprisingly often, the answer is partly no.
- Search site:yourdomain.com and count the results. Roughly your page count, or far fewer?
- Open Search Console's page indexing report and read the excluded reasons
- Check robots.txt is not blocking anything important
- Confirm your sitemap contains only live, indexable, canonical URLs
3. The mobile reality check
Do this on your own phone, on mobile data, not on office wifi with a desktop browser resized.
- How long until you can read something useful?
- Can you tap the phone number and have it dial?
- Does the contact form work with a thumb, including the dropdowns?
- Does anything cover the content — a chat widget, a popup, a cookie banner with no visible close?
4. Does each page match what the search wants
Take your five most important keywords. Search each one in an incognito window, set to the UAE.
- What type of page ranks — service page, listicle, comparison, directory?
- Does your page match that type, or are you offering a service page where Google is rewarding a guide?
- Are two of your own pages targeting the same term and splitting the signal?
5. Local signals, if you have a location
For most UAE service businesses this is the highest-value area on the list and the most commonly neglected.
- Is your Google Business Profile claimed, verified and complete?
- Are name, address and phone identical everywhere they appear online?
- When did you last get a review, and does anyone reply to them?
- Does each location have its own page, or one page mentioning several?
6. Where paid spend is going
If you run Google Ads, the search terms report answers most questions in ten minutes.
- Read the actual search terms. How many had genuine commercial intent?
- Is there a negative keyword list, and has it been updated recently?
- Does each ad group point at a page that answers that specific search?
- Are conversions being imported and counted twice?
What to do with what you find
If everything passes, you have a distribution problem rather than a foundation problem, and more traffic will actually help. If several fail, buying traffic now means paying to send people into something broken.
Either way you now know which conversation to have, which is the entire point of running a diagnostic before a proposal.
Common questions
How long does this checklist take?
An afternoon if you work through it in order. The measurement section alone takes twenty minutes and is where most sites fail.
Do I need paid tools to run it?
No. Search Console, Google Analytics, your Google Ads account and your own phone cover everything on this list.