How to Audit Your Own Marketing in One Afternoon

This is the sequence I run at the start of an engagement, given away. The value was never in the checklist. It is in knowing what to do with what you find, and you will get a long way on your own with the list below.

A small business marketing audit examines six areas in order: whether people can find you, whether your site is clear, whether you capture contact details, whether you follow up, whether you measure anything, and what your competitors are doing. The output should be a short prioritised list of what to fix and what to stop, not a report.

Before you start

Block one afternoon. Open a blank document with two headings: Fix and Stop.

The second list is the one people skip and it is usually the more valuable of the two. Every activity you are running has a story attached about why it might work eventually, and the audit is your one honest opportunity to test those stories against evidence.

1. Findability

Can the right person discover you at the moment they are looking?

• Search your business name in a private window. Do you own the first page?
• Search what you sell plus your city. Where are you, honestly?
• Open your Google Business Profile. Are categories set, services filled in, photos recent, Q and A used?
• Count your reviews and check the date of the most recent one.
• Ask ChatGPT for a recommendation in your category and area. See who it names.

For a local business this section usually produces the biggest single opportunity, and it is almost always the profile rather than the website. The full sequence is here.

2. The site itself

Run the five minute test, on your phone, on cellular.

Then two more things. Read your homepage headline out loud and ask whether a customer would use those words. And check whether every service you actually sell has its own page, because a service buried as a bullet on a general page will never be found by someone searching for that specific service.

3. Capture

Someone likes what they see and is not ready to buy today. What happens?

• Submit your own contact form from your phone. Does it work?
• Where does the notification go, and would you see it within an hour?
• Does the person get any acknowledgment, or silence?
• Is there any reason to give you an email address other than "contact us"?
• How many fields does the form ask for, and could you cut two?

This is the boring section and it is where the most recoverable money usually is. You already paid to get that person to the page.

4. Follow-up

Pick one real customer from the last few months and reconstruct what actually happened, step by step, with honest timings.

How long until someone replied to their first message? What happened after they bought? Did anyone ask for a review? Has anyone contacted them since?

Most businesses find two or three gaps here. The trace exercise in full is here, and it is the highest-return part of the whole audit for a business that already has inbound.

5. Measurement

• Is a conversion event firing when someone submits your form?
• Is Search Console connected?
• Can you say how many inquiries came in last month, and from where?
• Is anyone actually looking at any of it monthly?

If the answer to the first is no, stop the audit and fix that. Everything downstream is guesswork until it works. One hour, covered here.

6. Competitors

Pick the three you actually lose to, not the biggest names in your industry.

For each: what does their homepage headline claim? What do they charge, if you can tell? How many reviews, and how recent? What do they publish? And the useful one, what are they clearly not doing that you could own?

Do not copy them. Look for the gap. In most local markets there is an obvious unclaimed position, and it is usually the one that requires being specific about who you are for.

Turning findings into a plan

You now have a messy list. Sort it with two questions per item: how much would fixing this be worth, and how long would it take?

The bottom right quadrant is the important one. Slow and low value is where small businesses lose most of their marketing time, and it is populated almost entirely by things that felt productive when they started.

The three things you will probably find

From having run this a lot, the pattern repeats.

Your Google Business Profile is half empty. Free to fix, biggest single local gain available, and it is not the website.

Follow-up is inconsistent. Not absent, inconsistent, which is harder to see and just as expensive. Leads arrive and what happens to them depends on how busy that Tuesday was.

You are doing at least two things purely from momentum. Nobody remembers deciding to do them, they produce nothing measurable, and they consume real hours every month. Those go on the Stop list, and stopping them is how you find the time for everything on the Fix list.

Do this part or skip the audit

An audit that produces a document and no change is worse than no audit, because it costs an afternoon and creates the feeling of progress.

So finish with three specific commitments: one thing you will fix this week, one thing you will fix this month, one thing you will stop doing today.

Three items. Written down. That is the whole output, and it is worth considerably more than a forty-page report.

If you would rather have someone else do this and hand you the ranked plan, that is exactly what the Teardown is, and you keep the document whether or not you work with us afterward.