What should a marketing audit actually check?

Start with the business problem

Before opening a dashboard, explain what you want to improve. More relevant enquiries, more profitable orders, stronger repeat business and a clearer growth plan are different objectives. An audit should establish the offer, buyer, market, delivery capacity and economics that make a result worthwhile.

It should also say what has not been assessed. A website review without advertising access can still be useful, but it cannot establish which campaign caused a sale. Missing access is a limitation to describe, not permission to fill the gap with a confident assumption.

Check the promise, audience and channel together

• Offer: can a suitable customer explain what they receive, what it costs or how it is quoted, and what happens next?
• Audience: do actual enquiries match the customers the business can serve?
• Channel: is there evidence that the channel reaches that buying situation?
• Creative and message: do the ad, website and conversation make the same promise?

These checks prevent a narrow technical fix from distracting from a commercial problem. A faster page will not make an unsuitable offer relevant to the wrong audience.

Inspect the website a real customer receives

Review the important destinations on mobile as well as desktop: service or product, evidence, pricing information and enquiry or checkout. Check what actually loads, whether links work, whether the language is right, and whether a buyer can complete the next step. A design file or successful software build is not the live customer experience.

For search discovery, Google's Search Essentials provides the technical and content baseline. Meeting requirements does not guarantee crawling, indexing or rankings. An audit should distinguish an unavailable page, a deliberate exclusion, an indexing issue and a page that simply does not answer the buyer's question.

Check the evidence behind the numbers

Ask what counts as a conversion, where it is recorded, whether it can duplicate, and whether it represents a useful outcome. Compare a small authorised sample with the business's own records. Keep form submissions, qualified leads, bookings and customers separate.

For an international business, separate the markets and languages that matter. An overall traffic increase can hide a fall in relevant enquiries from the country you can actually serve. For ecommerce, consider stock, cancellations, refunds and margin rather than gross order value alone.

Include search and AI visibility without overclaiming

Review whether people can identify the business and verify its expertise. Look at clear public facts, useful service information, real evidence and relevant professional references. Sample customer questions in search or AI tools with the method recorded. Do not call one favourable answer a stable recommendation position.

The aim is to find a specific gap you can act on. That might be an unpublished language page, contradictory service descriptions, missing proof or poor measurement. The recommendation should follow the evidence rather than a predetermined package of extra pages and markup.

What the final report should contain

1. Observed problem: the affected page, campaign or process, with dated evidence.
2. Business consequence: who is affected and why it matters.
3. Diagnosis and uncertainty: the likely explanation, alternatives and missing information.
4. Recommended change: a specific action with an owner and dependencies.
5. Completion check: how to verify the fix and which result to review afterwards.

Prioritise faults that stop a suitable customer from finding, understanding or buying the offer. Then improve the relevant content and distribution. A checklist with 80 issues is less useful than three supported priorities if nobody knows where to start.

Questions to ask before commissioning an audit

Ask which channels and markets are included, what access is needed, who reviews the findings with you, whether implementation is included and what the handover looks like. Your accounts should remain under your ownership, with access appropriate to the agreed work.

My marketing audit is the starting point when existing activity needs diagnosis. If you are planning before launching, a growth strategy may be the more useful first engagement. The right choice depends on the problem and evidence you already have.