Measuring the revenue your website is losing

Indexed or not, read off the page indexing report — rules out a page Google never had. Impressions and clicks per page, from the performance report — rules out a page nobody sees. Calls, counted, through call tracking — rules out the uncounted-call problem. Forms, counted somewhere countable rather than only an inbox — rules out lost submissions.

Do them in that order, because each one makes the next interpretable. A page with no impressions does not have a conversion problem. A page with impressions, no clicks and a good position has a title and description problem. A page with clicks and no calls is a conversion problem.

In our experience measurement three is the one that changes the answer: a phone number rendered as text and dialed from a phone produces a call with no record, so "no leads" and "no recorded leads" look identical in analytics and have opposite fixes.

Once those four exist, the arithmetic runs on gross profit rather than revenue: leads times close rate times average job times gross margin gives the monthly gross profit from the site. Compare that against what the site and its retainer cost.

Break even on gross profit, not on booked work — a retainer is paid out of margin, and dropping margin out of the sum is a common way these numbers get flattered.

The honest shape of the answer. In our experience sites that "lose money" are not losing it at the conversion step. They are losing it at step one or two — pages that are not indexed, or are indexed and invisible — which is cheaper to fix than a redesign and almost never what gets sold.