Most marketing problems are not strategy problems. They are maintenance problems: a conversion tag that broke in March, a sitemap nobody has opened in a year, ad spend drifting onto queries that never buy. This checklist walks the six areas where money quietly leaks, in audit order.
Work top to bottom. Score one point per item you can verify today — not assume, verify. If you cannot confirm an item inside five minutes, it fails. An audit measures what you can prove, and "probably fine" is how most of the failures below survive for years.
Section 1: Technical SEO Health
Start with whether Google can find, crawl, and trust your pages at all. Everything else here is decoration if the foundation is cracked. If this section scores badly, repair it before touching your ads — our SEO service work begins at exactly this layer.
- Every important page is indexed: Search site:yourdomain.com and compare the result count against your sitemap. What good looks like: the totals roughly match, and no money page is missing from the index.
- The XML sitemap is current and submitted: Open it. What good looks like: only live, canonical URLs — no redirects, no 404s, no stale locations — and the sitemap registered in Search Console.
- Canonical tags point at the right version: View the source of your homepage and two key service pages. What good looks like: one canonical per page, self-referencing, on a single preferred host — www or non-www, picked once.
- No redirect chains: Run your top ten URLs through a redirect checker. What good looks like: every old URL reaches its destination in one hop, not three.
- Core pages load fast on mobile: Run the homepage and top landing page through PageSpeed Insights. What good looks like: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds and no content jumping while the page loads.
- Mobile rendering is complete: Browse the whole site on your own phone, forms included. What good looks like: no cut-off buttons, no text running off the screen, tap targets a thumb can actually hit.
Two failures outrank everything else here. An unindexed money page and a broken sitemap cap every other channel you run, silently.
Section 2: Local Presence
If you sell into a geographic market, your Google Business Profile is a landing page whether you treat it as one or not — most customers judge it before they ever reach your website.
- Profile is complete and verified: Every field filled — categories, hours, services, attributes, photos. What good looks like: the primary category names your highest-value service, not your trade in the broadest sense.
- Name, address, and phone match everywhere: Compare the profile, your website footer, and the main directory listings, character by character. What good looks like: one consistent format; mismatches blur Google's picture of who you are.
- Reviews arrive on a rhythm: Read the dates, not just the average score. What good looks like: a steady trickle of recent reviews, not forty in one month and silence for a year.
- The average is defended: What good looks like: 4.3 stars or better, with a reply on every negative review within a few days. Prospects read your worst reviews first; your answers are part of the pitch.
- Photos are real and current: What good looks like: your premises, your team, your work, uploaded inside the last six months — not stock, not the logo repeated ten times.
- Services are listed individually: What good looks like: each core service has its own entry with a short description, so the profile can match specific searches instead of only your business name.
Local presence fails quietly. Nothing breaks; the phone just rings less each quarter while a competitor with a tidier profile takes the call.
Section 3: Paid Search
Paid search waste rarely looks like waste. It looks like a busy account. These checks separate spend that buys customers from spend that buys comforting reports.
- Conversion tracking is verified, not assumed: Place a test conversion or read the diagnostics tab this week. What good looks like: conversions in the ad platform match your CRM or order count within a small, explainable margin.
- Search terms are reviewed weekly: Open the search terms report for the last 30 days. What good looks like: at least 80% of spend sits on queries you would happily buy again, and the rest get negatives.
- Structure mirrors intent: What good looks like: campaigns split by service and buying intent, brand terms fenced into their own campaign, and no ad group forcing one ad to serve two different mindsets.
- Budget matches conversion volume: Count conversions per campaign over 30 days. What good looks like: smart bidding campaigns see roughly 30 conversions a month; starved campaigns get consolidated, not sprinkled thinner. Check the sums with our ROAS and profit calculator before you raise or cut a budget.
- Enhanced conversions are switched on: Check the settings and the diagnostics tab. What good looks like: the feature shows active with matched records flowing, so conversions blocked by browsers still reach the bidding algorithm.
- Landing pages keep the ad's promise: Click your own top three ads. What good looks like: the page headline repeats the offer, the form sits high on the page, and nothing asks for information the first conversation does not need.
The most common finding in inherited accounts is tracking that broke months ago — with bids still optimizing against the silence.
Section 4: Paid Social
Social platforms hide decay better than search does. Reach keeps flowing while signal quality rots underneath, and the reports look calm until they do not.
- Pixel and Conversions API both fire: Send test events in Events Manager. What good looks like: browser and server events arrive deduplicated, with match quality rated good on your key actions.
- Creative refreshes on a cadence: Check the launch dates of your active ads. What good looks like: new creative enters the account every two to four weeks; no single ad has carried the budget for a whole quarter.
- Audiences do not overlap themselves: Review your campaign layout or the overlap tool. What good looks like: prospecting and retargeting fenced apart, ad sets never bidding against each other.
- Retargeting is segmented by intent: What good looks like: product viewers, cart abandoners, and casual visitors get different messages and different windows — not one pool and one generic ad.
- Frequency is watched: What good looks like: prospecting frequency stays in a sane band and tired ads are retired early. Rising frequency with falling CTR is the fatigue signature.
- Spend ties back to revenue: Compare platform-reported conversions with actual orders or CRM leads every month. What good looks like: the gap is known, stable, and explainable — not a year-end surprise.
Section 5: Website Conversion
Traffic is rented. Conversion is owned. One point of conversion rate beats the same money spent on extra visits, and it compounds across every channel.
- Message match holds from click to page: Read your top ad and its landing page side by side. What good looks like: same offer, same words, same next step — the visitor knows they landed in the right place within five seconds.
- The page loads fast on a real phone: Test on mobile data, not office Wi-Fi. What good looks like: content visible in about two seconds, with no spinner standing between the visitor and the form.
- Forms ask only what the next step needs: Count the fields. What good looks like: a name, one contact method, one qualifying question. Everything else can be collected after the first reply.
- Proof sits next to the ask: What good looks like: reviews, results, accreditations, or guarantees beside the form and the call buttons — not buried on a separate page nobody visits mid-decision.
- One primary action per page: What good looks like: one dominant button repeated at natural stopping points, with competing offers and exit links stripped off landing pages.
- The thank-you page closes the loop: Submit your own form. What good looks like: a confirmation that sets expectations, fires the conversion event, and offers a next step instead of a dead end.
Section 6: Analytics and Reporting
Every section depends on measurement you can trust. This is the shortest part of the audit, and the one whose failures corrupt all the others.
- GA4 is installed on every page: Browse five random pages with a tag checker or debug view open. What good looks like: the tag fires everywhere, including landing pages built outside your main template.
- Key events are defined and tested: What good looks like: form submits, calls, and purchases exist as key events, and you have watched a test conversion land in the real-time report.
- One source of truth is named: What good looks like: the whole team judges results from one report, with its known gaps written down — not three dashboards arguing with each other.
- UTM naming is consistent: Check campaign URLs across channels. What good looks like: one lowercase convention for source, medium, and campaign, so last quarter's data still parses cleanly.
- A monthly review rhythm exists: What good looks like: a fixed monthly session comparing spend, conversions, and pipeline against the previous period, with decisions written down.
- Access is owned by the business: What good looks like: your company owns the analytics, ads, and Search Console accounts outright, and every vendor — including us — holds granted access rather than the keys.
How to Score Your Audit
Add up your passes per section: six points each, 36 in total. But weight the sections differently. A low score in Technical SEO or Analytics is a stop sign, because those two corrupt the evidence every other decision relies on. Fix them first, even if your ads look worse on paper.
Where most businesses fail first, in order: conversion tracking that silently broke after a website change; a Google Business Profile left half-finished since the week it was claimed; and search-term waste in accounts with no negative-keyword pass in months. Notice the pattern. None needs a bigger budget. All three need an hour of maintenance nobody scheduled.
Under 20 points, you do not have a traffic problem — you have a plumbing problem, and more spend leaks faster. Between 20 and 28, the foundation is sound and the gaps are specific: work the lowest section first. Above 28, your remaining gains live in testing and creative rather than repair.
Marketing Audit FAQs
How long should a self-serve audit take?
Ninety minutes to two hours for a first pass, less once the routine is familiar. The checks are deliberately shallow: you are hunting breakpoints, not writing a strategy. Anything you cannot verify within five minutes scores as a fail.
How often should I repeat this audit?
Run the full checklist quarterly. Run two sections monthly — tracking integrity and search-term waste — because those decay fastest and break silently. A tracking failure caught in week one costs a week of data; caught in month three, it costs a quarter of decisions.
What if my ads look profitable but I fail the paid media checks?
Then the reporting is probably flattering you. Verify the ad platform's conversion count against your CRM or order book before trusting the profit figure. Accounts with broken tracking often look efficient precisely because the algorithm is optimizing toward a partial signal.
When is a professional audit worth paying for?
When the fix list needs judgement, not just labour: conflicting numbers across platforms, a website migration, or spend large enough that recovering 10% of waste funds the fee many times over. A professional audit also reads account history and the competitive set — the two things a checklist, by design, cannot see.
Run the audit honestly and you will end up with something most businesses never have: a fix list ordered by evidence instead of opinion. Work it top down. And if the scoring raises more questions than it settles, send us your results — we will tell you plainly which items matter now and which can wait.