We called every phone number on a client’s website. One was dead.

We recently audited the website of a multifamily property whose leasing had slowed. The site looked fine. The title tag and description were fine. Most audits would have stopped near there.

We called every published phone number instead. There were three. One rang the office. One reached a call-tracking line that played a recording, asked for permission to send texts and made the caller wait before the phone even rang. The third was not in service at all.

The dead one was printed in the header and footer of the online application portal, the exact place renters land when they are ready to apply.

Why dashboards miss this

Analytics tools measure what happens on your website. They cannot tell you that a phone number goes nowhere, that a form submits into an inbox nobody reads, or that a third-party portal contradicts your own site. Those failures happen off the page, so they never show up in a report. The only way to find them is to act like a customer and test every path by hand.

What else hand-testing turned up

That one audit produced more than 40 findings. A few of the ones no dashboard would catch:

• The portal said “Join Waitlist” on every floor plan for a property that wanted more leases, and showed different prices and square footage than the website
• Three different phone numbers across the website, the Google Business Profile and the portal, with no clear primary line
• The Google Business Profile showed “Own this business?”, so ownership had to be confirmed before anyone could reply to reviews or fix the listing
• The mobile header had no phone link and no apply button, on the device most renters use
• Broken pages quietly redirected to the homepage, hiding errors from both visitors and search engines
• The page contradicted itself on whether a unit was a studio or a one-bedroom

Run the same test on your business

Set aside thirty minutes and use your phone, not your desktop.

• Call every phone number published anywhere: website header, footer, contact page, Google profile, booking or application tools, and directory listings
• Note what each caller hears. Does the greeting name your business? How long until a person answers?
• Submit every form with a real email address, then check whether it arrived and how fast someone followed up
• Start from a Google search for your business and try to book, buy or apply. Count the steps
• Compare the prices, hours and details on your site with every third-party tool your customers touch

Fix the cheap things first

Most of what turns up is fast and inexpensive to fix: a wrong number, a broken form, a misleading button label. In this case, the dead number could be corrected in minutes. Fixing those first usually returns more than any new campaign, because you stop losing the customers you already paid to attract.

Read the full sample audit (PDF, client details removed)

Sean Stafford

Founder of Hunley Media Group. Co-founded El Toro and led TRIM NuLu’s rebuild as CEO. More about Sean