I reached out to a freight carrier in North Dakota after running a crawl on their site. They are a real operation with multiple terminals, a carrier network, and a driver recruiting presence. The kind of company that depends on its website to attract both shippers and drivers. I had twenty years in the industry behind the email and a documented audit in front of me.
The findings were specific. Twenty six pages crawled. Nine orphaned pages including the about us section and the carriers landing page. Fourteen missing meta descriptions. A missing H1 on the homepage. A duplicate page title. Not catastrophic individually. Collectively a site that was leaving visibility on the table across nearly every page.
I sent the audit, linked the full crawl report, and offered to help at non-contractor pricing from someone who understood the industry.
The general manager responded the same day. He was adding his website team members. They would tell me if my email carried weight or not.
I thought that was a reasonable process. Let the people who manage the site evaluate the findings. That is exactly what should happen.
What The Website Team Did
Four days later I ran the crawl again.
Six pages had been removed from the sitemap. The site went from twenty six pages to twenty. The duplicate title was fixed. That is the full scope of what changed.
The homepage still has no H1 tag. Nine meta descriptions are now missing across twenty pages, meaning nearly half the site still has no description for Google to work with. Six pages are still orphaned. Among them the driver application page, the logistics coordinator position, the carriers overview, and the driver testimonials page. For a carrier actively recruiting drivers, an orphaned application page is not a minor oversight. It is a door with no path leading to it.
One of their website "experts" looked at this and said the site is fine. Good enough.
What I Did Next
I could not help myself. I ran a crawl on the website of the company that "expert" works for.
Six pages. Built on Squarespace. Critical SEO score.
Zero meta descriptions. Not some. Not most. Every single page on their site is missing a meta description. The homepage has a bad canonical tag sending the wrong signal to Google on the most important page they have. One page is orphaned.
And on the thank you page that visitors see after submitting a contact form, the H1 reads: Message recieved.
Not received. Recieved.
Misspelled, laid over a stock image that makes the text hard to read in the first place.
The person who reviewed a documented professional audit of a freight carrier's website, dismissed the findings, and told the general manager the site was fine, has not written a single meta description for their own six page business website and cannot spell the word received on their own thank you page.
That is my competition.
What Good Enough Actually Costs
They are a functioning business. They move freight. They have terminals and carriers and customers. The website does not need to be perfect for the operation to run.
But the driver application page is orphaned. A driver in their area who goes looking for how to apply has to stumble onto that page by accident or know to type the URL directly. The page exists. The path to it does not. Every driver who gave up before finding it is a recruiting cost that never showed up on a spreadsheet because nobody connected the dots between an orphaned page and an empty application.
Good enough is expensive when you know what to look for. Most people never look.
What The Audit Was Worth
I did not get the client. I did not really expect to. I do many audits where I am sure I will not get the client.
Their "expert" said the site was fine and the general manager took that at face value. That is a reasonable thing to do when you trust the people you hired to manage your digital presence.
The problem is, I am not in the business of telling people what they want to hear about their website.
I am in the business of showing them what is actually there.
Sometimes that email carries weight.
Sometimes the "expert" gets the last word.
The site is still critical.