A marketing audit is a report on what people find when they look your business up. It checks six areas: your Google profile, your reviews, where you rank on the map, how fast your website loads, whether customers can reach you the way they prefer, and what’s set up to measure your marketing. Everything comes from public sources, so there’s nothing to log in to and nothing to fill in about your own business.
Each area answers a question a customer is already asking, usually without noticing. Here’s what each one looks at, why it matters, and how to check it yourself.
What Does a Marketing Audit Look At?
Six things, and all of them are visible to anyone with a phone.
| Area | What it looks at | Why a customer cares |
|---|---|---|
| Google profile | Your listing on Google Search and Maps | It’s often the first thing they see |
| Reviews | Count, rating, and your replies | It’s how they decide whether to trust you |
| Map rankings | Where you appear in nearby searches | If you’re not on the map, they never find you |
| Website speed | Load time on a phone and a computer | A slow page gets closed before it loads |
| Contact basics | Texting, chat, and replies to reviews | They want to reach you their way |
| Marketing tools | Analytics and ad tracking on your site | It tells you which marketing is working |
The first three decide whether someone finds you. The last three decide what happens once they do.
What Does Your Google Profile Tell a Customer?
It tells them whether you’re open, where you are, and how to reach you, often before they ever see your website.
When somebody searches for what you do plus their town, the panel that comes up with your name, hours, phone number and photos is your Google Business Profile. For a lot of people, that panel is the whole decision. They tap call or directions and never visit your site at all.
The audit checks that the basics are there and correct: your address and phone number, your website link, your opening hours, photos, and whether the profile is live and visible in the first place.
Each missing piece costs you in a slightly different way. Missing hours make people guess, and a guess of “probably closed” sends them to the next result. A phone number that doesn’t match the one on your website makes you look less established than you are. Few or no photos leave the listing looking unfinished next to competitors who’ve added theirs.
This is also the area that’s quickest to fix. Most of it is filling in fields you already know the answers to.
Why Do Your Reviews Matter Before Anyone Calls?
Because reviews are how a stranger decides whether to trust you, and they read them before they call, not after.
The audit looks at how many reviews you have, your average rating, where they are (Google, and Facebook as well), and how often and how quickly you reply.
Your rating matters, but so does the count behind it. A handful of perfect reviews is a thinner signal than a long record of good ones, and anyone comparing you with the business above you on the map is weighing both, whether they mean to or not.
Your replies matter too, and they’re the part people overlook. Prospective customers read how you answer, especially when a review is critical. A calm, specific reply to a bad review can do more for you than the next five-star one. If you’re unsure how to handle a difficult one, we wrote about that separately.
Reviews are also the slowest area to move. You can fix a listing in an afternoon. Building a steady stream of reviews takes months of asking, which is why it’s worth starting early.
Why Does Your Map Ranking Change Across Town?
Because Google ranks local businesses partly by how close they are to the person searching, so the same search gives different results on different streets.
The audit runs one search the way a customer would type it, for example “roofer near me”, from nine points spread across your area. It records where you come up at each point and which businesses rank around you.
That grid is the useful part. It’s entirely possible to rank first for people near your shop and not appear at all two towns over, and you’d never know from searching on your own phone, because your phone searches from where you’re standing.
The businesses ranking around you are worth a look as well. Sometimes they’re genuine competitors. Sometimes they’re businesses from further away that simply have a more complete profile and more reviews, which tells you what’s winning the map in your area.
Treat this area as a direction rather than a verdict. Map results shift from day to day, so a single run is a snapshot.
How Fast Does Your Website Need to Load?
Fast enough on a phone that nobody gives up waiting, which in practice means a few seconds, not ten.
Your website is where a search turns into a phone call or a booking. The audit measures how long it takes to load on mobile and on desktop, checks Core Web Vitals (Google’s own measures of how quickly a page appears and how steady it is while loading), and lists specific issues to fix.
Pay most attention to the mobile result. Plenty of people looking up a local business do it on a phone, often on mobile data rather than wifi, and a site that feels fine on your office computer can crawl on a phone in a parking lot.
Speed tests vary from run to run, so don’t worry about small differences. A consistently slow mobile result, or a long list of issues, is the signal worth acting on.
Can Customers Reach You the Way They Want To?
The audit checks whether the easy ways of getting in touch are open: texting, chat, and a reply when someone leaves a review.
Some people would rather send a text than make a call, especially when they’re at work or it’s after hours. The audit checks whether your business number can receive texts, whether your website has a chat option, and whether you reply to reviews. It also notes where your website is hosted.
None of these are complicated, but each one removes a reason for somebody to move on to the next business. A customer who can’t text you, can’t find a chat box, and gets no answer on your voicemail isn’t going to try a fourth time.
What Should Be Measuring Your Marketing?
At minimum, analytics on your website, plus conversion tracking for any ads you run.
This area looks at what’s installed on your site to measure what happens there: Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, ad tracking for Google and Meta, and whether you’re currently running Google Ads.
It matters because without measurement, every marketing decision is a guess. If you spend money on ads, a mailer, or a directory listing, tracking is what tells you which of those actually brought in a call.
One caution. These tools are detected from the outside, so a missing mark means “not detected”, not necessarily “not there”. Some setups hide them from the scan. If the audit says something is missing and you’re fairly sure it isn’t, check with whoever built your site before you believe it.
Where Should You Start?
Google profile first, then reviews, then everything else.
That order comes from working through audits with business owners, and it holds up almost every time. Your profile and your reviews are what people see before they reach your website, so they affect every single person who looks you up. The profile is also the cheapest fix there is: an hour of filling in details you already know.
Reviews come second because they take the longest. Nothing about them is difficult, but they build slowly, so the sooner you start asking, the sooner the count grows.
Map rankings often improve as the first two do. Google’s own guidance says complete, accurate information and more reviews with positive ratings help a business show up in local results, alongside how close it is to the person searching.
The website and the technical areas are real findings, and they’re worth fixing. They’re just rarely worth fixing first. A page that takes seven seconds to load is a problem, but not appearing on the map at all is a bigger one, because it means nobody reaches the page to be annoyed by it.
Can You Check These Yourself?
Yes, most of it, in about 10 minutes. You won’t get the map grid from nine points, but you’ll find the things that matter most:
- Google profile: search your business name. Are your hours, phone, website link and photos all there and correct?
- Reviews: count your Google reviews and note your rating. Then do the same for the three businesses above you.
- Replies: sort your reviews by newest. How many of the last 10 have a reply from you?
- Map rankings: search what you do plus your town, the way a customer would. Where do you come up? Who’s above you?
- Website speed: open your site on your phone, on mobile data. Count the seconds until you can read something.
- Contact basics: text your business number from your own phone. Does it arrive? Is there a chat option on your site?
- Marketing tools: ask whoever runs your website whether analytics is installed, and who last looked at it.
Most people find at least two things they didn’t know were wrong.
What’s the Catch With a Free Audit?
There isn’t much of one, but it’s worth knowing what you’re getting, whoever you get it from.
The report is put together automatically from public sources, which is why a couple of areas deserve the caution above. Before you read any of it, check that the business on the first page is actually yours. Audits match businesses by name, names collide, and now and then a report describes somebody else entirely.
You’ll also be asked for a way to reach you, because the report has to be built for one specific business and sent somewhere. And whoever runs it for free is hoping some readers will want help fixing what it finds. That’s a fair trade as long as the report is yours to keep and walking away is a real option.
Run an audit for your business and the report lands in your inbox in about two minutes. It’s yours either way. If we never speak, you’ve still got a list of what’s worth fixing.
If something in it looks worth a conversation, book a call and we’ll go through it with you, starting with your Google profile.
