What to check on a website before you pitch it.

A pitch that starts with "here is what your website is costing you" changes the conversation. The business owner sees a specific gap in their own site, not a generic promise about SEO. You do not need expensive tooling for this first pass — most of it is visible in the page source, or in how the page behaves in a browser.

The point of the checklist below is not a technical score. It is a short list of things a business owner can care about, phrased in their terms: a title nobody reads, a phone number you cannot tap, a cookie banner that covers the enquiry button.

Open the homepage on your phone, not your desktop. Check the things a visitor feels before they can explain them:

HTTPS — is there a padlock, or a browser warning? A missing certificate is both a trust problem and a browser warning screen.

Mobile viewport — does the site reflow to the screen, or does the visitor pinch and zoom? Most local searches happen on a phone.

Page title and meta description — the first (often only) thing a searcher reads. A missing or very long title quietly costs clicks.

One clear heading — a page without a single h1 makes the visitor work out what the business offers.

Page weight — a homepage measured in megabytes loses mobile visitors before the offer appears.

Images without alt text — invisible to most visitors, but a signal of neglect, and an accessibility issue.

This is where the audit becomes a sales conversation. Look for how a visitor makes contact: a tappable phone number, an email link, an enquiry form, a chat widget, a booking link. Then ask the owner which of those their customers actually use.

A missing tappable phone number is not automatically a business problem — on a site with a good enquiry form it is a technical detail. On a page with no contact route at all, it is the whole pitch.

In the EU, three signals are worth checking on the audited page: a privacy-policy link, an imprint or company-identification page (Impressum in Germany and Austria, mentions légales in France, colofon in the Netherlands), and a cookie-consent tool that actually appears before third-party scripts fire.

Treat these as signals to verify with the client, not as findings you present as facts: a link can live in a place your scan did not reach, and consent tooling can be home-made and invisible to a quick look. They are still worth raising, because the agency is the one who fixes them — a missing imprint is both a compliance risk and a credibility gap in front of the client.

The checklist becomes a pitch when the gaps carry an estimate. The honest way to do it is arithmetic, in the open: the site's monthly visits, a stated assumption for how much a better-converting site reduces lost enquiries, the share of enquiries that become bookings, and the average revenue per booking. Multiply, present it as a range, round down, and say clearly which inputs are the client's own numbers and which are assumptions.

Never present the result as a forecast. It is an opening number for a conversation — and the client's own booking figures, once they share them, are the only defensible source.

Everything above is checkable by hand, and the first time you do it for a real prospect, you should. The second and tenth time, it is the same evening spent again.

PitchGap runs this checklist automatically and writes the result as a client-ready report in Dutch, French, German or English: the five pillars of website experience, local visibility, social presence, competitor gap and EU compliance, a transparent score of the checks it actually ran, and the euro scenario built from stated assumptions — refined with the client's own numbers once they share them. You can run a free audit on any prospect's site, or read a complete sample report first to see exactly what a client would receive.

PitchGap itself is built and operated end to end by AI agents on

NanoCorp

, which is how a one-person company ships a multilingual audit product.