How to Run a 20-Minute Trust Audit on Your Own Practice

Marketing agencies will happily charge you $500 for a "digital presence analysis." Here's the truth: you can find out 80% of what they'd tell you in 20 minutes with a phone, a timer, and a willingness to be honest with yourself. That last part is the hard one.

This is the DIY version of the background check I described in The Four Trust Signals Patients Check. Set a timer. Grab a notepad. Do it in one sitting—spread across a week, you'll soften every score.

Minutes 0–3: Google yourself in incognito

Open an incognito or private window first. This matters more than it sounds: logged-in Google is a flatterer. It knows you visit your own site weekly, so it ranks you higher for you than for anyone else in town. Incognito shows you what a stranger sees.

Run three searches: your own name, your practice name, and "chiropractor near me" from your office (or "chiropractor [your town]"). Write down where you appear in each—and note the top three practices that appear when you don't.

Minutes 3–8: The reputation math

Pull up your Google listing and write down three numbers: your star rating, your review count, and the date of your newest review. Then do the same for the top competitor from your searches.

• Rating below 4.2? You have a rating problem. Above 4.5, you're fine—the difference between 4.7 and 4.9 moves almost no one.
• Newest review older than 90 days? You have a recency problem, and it's quietly worse than a rating problem, because it compounds every month it goes unfixed.
• Competitor has triple your review count? Volume gap. Note it, don't panic over it.

One caution while you're in there: if you're tempted to reply to a review on the spot, remember HIPAA. Never confirm that a reviewer is a patient—even a warm "thanks for coming in Tuesday!" is a disclosure.

Minutes 8–13: The presence pass

Open your Google Business Profile the way a visitor would and check for signs of life:

• Verified listing, with "Chiropractor" as the primary category
• Hours accurate—including holiday hours
• At least one photo added in the last 90 days
• Services listed, and matching what you actually offer
• No unanswered questions sitting in the Q&A section

Score a point per line. Four or five, you look open for business. Two or fewer, your storefront looks dusty—and patients read dust as doubt.

Minutes 13–17: The site integrity spot check

Now tap through to your own website like a skeptical stranger:

1. The padlock. Does your address bar show a lock, or does the browser say "Not secure"? This one is pass/fail.
2. The nav test. Click every item in your main menu. Any 404 or dead page is an automatic point off.
3. The speed test. Run your homepage through pagespeed.web.dev and note the Best Practices score. Under 90 means deductions.
4. The schema test. View your homepage source (right-click, "View Page Source") and search for "schema.org". Nothing found means Google is guessing about who you are.

If steps three and four felt like a foreign language, that's normal—I've unpacked the whole technical layer here.

Minutes 17–20: Grade yourself honestly

Here's the number I'd bet on: most chiropractors grade themselves a full letter higher than a stranger would. If you finished with straight A's and a nagging feeling, redo the audit as if it were a competitor's practice. The nagging feeling is usually right.

The signal you can't check in 20 minutes

You'll notice one signal missing from this audit: authority—who links to and vouches for your site. There's no honest way to eyeball it from your phone; it takes actual link data to see, which is exactly why it's the signal most owners have never looked at even once.

Don't let that stop you today. Twenty minutes, three honest grades, and you'll know more about how patients see your practice than most owners ever bother to learn. When you want the complete picture—including the authority score you can't check yourself—the free Chiropractic Trust Audit finishes the job for you.