Digital Marketing Audit Checklist: 25 Checks, Starting Where Leads Get Lost

A digital marketing audit checks five areas: lead follow-up and tracking, website conversion, Google Maps, search and AI visibility, and paid media. This checklist runs them in fix order, bottom of the funnel first, because more traffic cannot help if inquiries go unanswered. Each of the 25 checks has a pass/fail signal and a free tool.

That order is the point of this list. Most audit checklists start with traffic, rankings and site speed, then rank fixes by effort. But a business can lose more customers in the hours after someone fills in a form than anywhere else in the funnel, and almost no checklist looks there. Most checks below take a minute or two. Two run in the background while you work: the form-reply timer and the after-hours call.

Before You Start: What to Have Open

Five minutes of setup stops the audit stalling halfway. Open these in separate tabs, and keep a note with a Pass or Fail column for checks 1 to 25.

• Google Search Console for indexing and search queries.
• Google Analytics 4 for key events (leads, calls, bookings).
• Your Google Business Profile, signed in as an owner or manager.
• PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) with your homepage and one service page.
• Your ad accounts, if you run Google or Meta ads.
• A phone that is not on your business account, for the call and mobile checks.

Lead Follow-Up and Tracking (Checks 1–5)

If an inquiry is not answered within the hour, the lead is far less likely to qualify, so time your own form reply before checking anything else. In a widely cited 2011 Harvard Business Review study, companies that contacted an online lead within an hour were nearly seven times more likely to qualify it than companies that waited longer. The study is old, but buyer behavior has only moved faster since: someone who fills in one form usually fills in several.

1. 1Submit your own contact form and start a timer. Pass: a person, or an automated reply that answers the question or offers a booking time, reaches you within an hour during business hours.
2. 2Call your main number after hours. Pass: the greeting names the business and says when you will hear back, and the missed call reaches someone the next morning.
3. 3Check that leads register in Google Analytics. Submit the form, tap the phone number, and start a booking, then look for each in GA4’s realtime report. Pass: each action appears and is marked as a key event.
4. 4Check that calls are tracked by source. Pass: you can tell which calls came from the website, the Business Profile, and ads. If every call looks the same, you cannot tell which channel is working.
5. 5Trace last week’s five newest inquiries. Pass: each one has a record in a CRM or shared inbox, an owner, and a reply. An inquiry that lives only in one person’s email fails.

A fail here outweighs any fail further down the list, because it wastes every channel above it. Instant acknowledgement, a booking link in the first reply, and a named owner for each inquiry are what our lead follow-up systems are built around.

Website and Conversion (Checks 6–10)

A website passes when it loads fast on a phone, shows the next step without scrolling, and makes contact easy from every page. Google publishes real pass marks for speed, so this is the one area where you can score yourself against a number.

6. 6Run your homepage and one service page through PageSpeed Insights. Pass, using the field data from real visitors: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, at the 75th percentile of visits. If a page has too little traffic for field data, the lab score is a guide, not a pass.
7. 7Open your main landing pages on a phone. Pass: the call or booking button is visible without scrolling.
8. 8Read every field on your contact form. Pass: you can name why you need each one to reply. If you would call the person back without it, remove it.
9. 9Check the footer and header of three random pages. Pass: your phone number and service area appear on each, and the number is tap-to-call on mobile.
10. 10Search for one of your services and follow the result. Pass: it lands on a page about that service, with its own next step, not a homepage that lists everything.

Speed and page structure are engineering problems more than design ones, which is why our website and tech foundation work starts with them.

Google Business Profile and Maps (Checks 11–15)

For a local service business, the Google Business Profile often decides the call before anyone opens the website, so it gets checked before search rankings. Google’s own rules are short, and most profiles fail on consistency rather than effort.

11. 11Check your primary category. Pass: it is the most specific category that describes the core business. Google asks businesses to choose the fewest categories it takes to describe the core business, so extra categories are not a bonus.
12. 12Compare your name, address or service area, and phone number on the profile, the website, and two directories. Pass: they are identical, and the name matches your signage rather than a keyword-stuffed version of it.
13. 13Check services, hours, and links. Pass: every service you sell is listed, holiday hours are set, and the website and booking links go to working pages.
14. 14Look at your newest photos. Pass: they show your current premises, team, or work. As a working rule, if the newest photo is more than a year old, record a fail.
15. 15Search your main service plus your area, and open the top three map results. Pass: your review count and the date of your latest review are not far behind theirs, and you have replied to your reviews.

Categories, reviews, and service-area relevance are the core of our Google Maps visibility work. For a worked example in one vertical, see how the map pack shapes dental marketing.

Search and AI Visibility (Checks 16–20)

Search and AI visibility come down to whether your pages are indexed, clearly written, and answer the questions buyers ask. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special markup or AI text files are needed, so this section covers both.

16. 16Open the Page indexing report in Search Console. Pass: every service page and location page is indexed. The Page indexing report lists anything Google found but left out, with the reason.
17. 17Search your business name. Pass: your site is first, your Business Profile shows the right hours and number, and no old listing appears.
18. 18Ask a buyer’s question in Google and in an AI assistant, such as “best [your service] near [your area]”. Pass: your business or one of your pages appears in either. Record the result; this one changes week to week, so treat it as a trend line.
19. 19Read the first two sentences of each service page. Pass: they say what the service is, who it is for, and where you offer it. Pages that open with a slogan are hard for search engines and answer engines alike to quote.
20. 20Check your page titles in the search results. Pass: each page has its own title that names the service, not the same brand name repeated on every page.

Search results move slowly after a fix, so judge this section over months rather than weeks. Our guide to how long SEO takes sets out a realistic timeline, and our search and AI visibility service covers the work itself.

Paid Media (Checks 21–25)

Paid ads come last in the fix order because they multiply whatever the rest of the funnel does. An ad account passes when it spends on searches your buyers make, counts real leads as conversions, and sends people to a page that matches the ad.

21. 21Open the search terms report for the last 30 days. Pass: the top-spending terms are ones a buyer would search. Jobs, free, how-to, and competitor names eating budget are fails.
22. 22Check what counts as a conversion. Pass: forms, calls, and bookings, the same key events from check 3. Page views or clicks counted as conversions fail.
23. 23Check location targeting. Pass: ads show to people in or regularly in your service area, not to people who are merely interested in it.
24. 24Click your own top three ads. Pass: each lands on a page about the thing the ad promised.
25. 25Separate brand from non-brand campaigns. Pass: searches for your own name are reported apart, so they do not make the rest of the account look better than it is.

If the question is whether you are spending the right amount at all, our breakdown of what digital marketing costs gives budget ranges by business size and channel.

Score It: Which Failures to Fix First

Fix from the bottom of the funnel up: follow-up first, paid media last. Count your fails in each area, then work down the table. The order is deliberate. Each fix in a higher row makes every row below it worth more.

When to Run It Yourself, and When to Get Help

Most businesses can run this checklist themselves once a month. A second opinion earns its keep in three situations: checks fail in three or more areas, so it is unclear which problem is causing the others; you cannot get access to the accounts to test them; or the fixes need engineering, such as speed or tracking work.

If that is you, a digital marketing audit in Austin from Velvo runs every area in one pass. You share read-only access to the site, Business Profile, analytics, and ad accounts; we benchmark against the competitors winning your searches; and you get written findings and a fix list ranked by what is costing you the most leads. You keep it either way, and it is built so any team, ours or not, can act on it. For the wider picture of how we work across the city, see our Austin digital marketing agency page.