A digital marketing audit is a check of how well your website and online marketing turn visitors into enquiries, ending with a ranked list of what to fix first. A proper one looks at speed on a phone, whether your pages explain what you do, technical SEO, where you show up in search, what competitors are doing and whether your tracking works. You should come away knowing what to fix first and why.
What does a digital marketing audit check?
Most audits cover the same ground. What differs is how deep they go and whether a person or software does the looking. A good website audit should cover these areas.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Google measures page experience with three Core Web Vitals. Google’s guidance on web.dev says a page should show its main content within 2.5 seconds (Largest Contentful Paint), respond to a tap within 200 milliseconds (Interaction to Next Paint) and keep its layout steady, with a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less.
Plenty of sites miss those marks. The HTTP Archive’s 2025 Web Almanac, published in January 2026, found only 48% of websites had good Core Web Vitals on mobile. An auditor should run your key pages through Google PageSpeed Insights, then explain in plain terms what’s slowing them down. It’s usually oversized images, too many plugins, a slow host or a chat widget that loads before anything else.
Mobile experience
Ofcom’s Online Nation 2025 report, published in December 2025, says most of the time UK adults spend online is on a smartphone. So the audit should start on a phone. Can you tap to call? Does the menu make sense with one thumb? Can you fill in the form without zooming?
Whether the page explains what you do
This is the check software can’t do. Someone landing on your homepage should know within a few seconds what you sell, who it’s for, where you work and how to get in touch. Headlines like “Solutions for your business” cost you enquiries. A good auditor will say so and suggest better wording.
Technical SEO
This covers anything that stops Google crawling and understanding your pages. Common finds include duplicate pages competing for the same search, missing or broken schema markup (code that describes a page to Google), pages blocked from search engines by mistake, broken links and redirects left over from an old site. The Page indexing report in Google Search Console is usually the first place to look.
Search visibility and competitors
Where do you appear for the terms customers actually type, such as “accountant in Huntingdon” or “commercial cleaning Cambridge”? Search Console shows the queries you already get impressions for. The audit should then compare you with the handful of businesses that keep beating you, looking at their service pages, reviews and Google Business Profile.
It should also look beyond the blue links. Ofcom found that about 30% of searches now show AI overviews, and 53% of adults say they see these summaries often. If competitors are being quoted in those answers and you aren’t, that’s worth knowing.
Tracking with Google Analytics 4 and Search Console
Check that Google Analytics 4 is installed once, not twice, that enquiries are recorded as key events (GA4’s name for conversions), and that Search Console is verified for the right version of your domain. Some sites still carry only the old Universal Analytics tag, which Google says stopped processing hits on 1 July 2023. They’ve recorded nothing since. If you can’t see where enquiries come from, every other marketing decision is a guess.
Free automated report or a manual audit?
Free tools have their place. Run PageSpeed Insights or a free SEO checker and you’ll have a score and a long list of warnings in a minute. The trouble is that they can’t tell a cosmetic warning from the problem that’s costing you work, and they can’t read your homepage the way a customer does.
| Free automated report | Paid SEO tool | Manual audit by a person | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | Monthly subscription | One-off fee |
| Reads your offer like a customer | No | No | Yes |
| Ranks problems by cost to the business | No, every warning looks urgent | Partly, by severity score | Yes |
| Compares you with real competitors | Rarely | On keywords and links | Yes, including their pages and reviews |
| Who turns it into action | You | You or your developer | The auditor, with you |
The tools aren’t wrong, but they only report symptoms. A manual audit uses the same tools, then a person decides which findings matter for your business.
What should you get at the end of an audit?
The output matters more than the checklist, so ask to see an example report before you pay. A useful one includes the following.
- A written report in plain English, not a 60-page export from a crawler.
- A short action plan ranked by the difference each fix will make, with quick wins marked.
- For each issue, what’s wrong, why it matters and who’d normally fix it.
- Evidence you can check yourself, such as PageSpeed results, screenshots and the search terms tested.
- Time on a call to go through it and ask questions.
That’s how our digital marketing audit works. It’s a manual review by a person, written up as a plain-English report with a prioritised action plan and walked through on a one-hour call. It costs £395 +VAT, fixed, with no upsell. If you work with us afterwards, the £395 is credited against your first invoice.
Red flags in a website audit
- A score out of 100 with no explanation of what’s dragging it down.
- Hundreds of “issues” listed with no order of importance.
- A promise of first place on Google once you’ve paid for the fixes.
- A quote for a full rebuild before anyone has asked what you need.
- No mention of tracking, so nobody will know whether the changes worked.
- Jargon nobody has translated into plain English.
How to prepare for a digital marketing audit
- Give viewer access to Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console.
- Share access to your Google Business Profile if you serve customers locally.
- Name the three or four competitors you most often lose work to.
- List the services that make you the most money, so the audit focuses on those pages.
- Say what’s changed recently, such as a new site, a new host or a sudden drop in enquiries.
- If you run Google Ads or Meta ads, say so. Our audit doesn’t include a full line-by-line review of an existing ad account, so raise it early if that’s your main worry.
When is a marketing audit worth paying for?
It’s worth the fee when you’re about to make a decision without the facts. For example, in these situations.
- enquiries have dropped and nobody can say why
- you’re about to pay for a redesign, SEO or paid ads
- you’ve taken over a site someone else built
- an agency sends reports you can’t make sense of
It’s less useful if you already know what’s wrong, or can’t act on what it finds. If the audit shows search is the main gap, that’s where ongoing SEO services come in.
Two areas an audit often points to are local search and paid ads. Our guides to local SEO for small businesses and what paid ads management should include go into both.
Common questions about digital marketing audits
Is an SEO audit the same as a digital marketing audit?
Not quite. An SEO audit focuses on search, covering technical issues, content and links. A digital marketing audit is wider, and also covers your offer, the site on a phone, tracking and competitors.
Can I audit my own website?
You can do part of it. Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights, check the Page indexing report in Search Console and try your site on your own phone. Then ask someone who doesn’t know your business to tell you what you do after ten seconds on the homepage. The hard part is deciding which problems to fix first.
How often should a business have a marketing audit?
Once a year is sensible for most small businesses, plus after any big change such as a new site, a move to a new domain or a sharp fall in enquiries. In between, a quick look at Search Console each month will catch most problems early. If you’d like a person to do the full check, our fixed-price marketing audit covers everything above.
See the digital marketing audit More from the Learning Centre
