TL;DR

One of the great things about time served in digital is that you’ve seen, made and had to fix most of the problems that can impact a brand’s online performance. Over many years, the consultants that work with MMC Digital have developed detailed audits that they have carried with them, refined and polished through use, to give them the best possible framing of where they can make a difference to the bottom line.

Thorough audits allow brands to create prioritised lists of the issues and overlooked tasks that are likely to make the most impact on profitability, meaning that instead of trying to fix everything about a digital strategy at once, they can make faster improvements to overall performance, or focus on low cost incrementalism, or a mix of both – whatever suits the budget and timeframes the business is working with. 

While we love to get our hands dirty on the execution, we offer these audits as a service because we don’t like to gatekeep – if you want to bring in MMC Digital’s expertise just to audit one or more aspects of your current strategy, we can do that and leave you with the result – or we can help in-house teams to implement, or work with nominated third parties. The important thing is getting you the information you need to grow.

Pain points

If you’re having issues with any of the following, our audits may be what you need:

• Low or dropping site traffic
• Difficulty ranking new pages
• Irrelevant/poorly converting traffic
• Crawled vs. indexed issues
• Struggling to rank in new search environments (such as LLMs)
• Slow load times or failure to meet CWV metrics
• A new or struggling physical location
• Low area specific site traffic
• Geographically irrelevant traffic
• Low engagement with content
• Poor read times or time on page for your content

What we mean by audits

This has been a longstanding issue in search and digital marketing – there are a lot of agencies out there that are happy to brand up a report from Semrush or Ahrefs or one of the other SEO tools and call it an audit. Which it sort of is – but it’s not what we consider an audit. The problem with audits from tools is that they’re made to be useful to the broadest possible range of businesses – and as we’ve said elsewhere on the site, one-size-fits-all fits nobody very well.

When we refer to audits here at MMC Digital, what we’re talking about is a considered and thorough examination, using tools but mostly using experience, to discover potential issues with the use and/or implementation of your marketing strategy. Whether that’s the dreaded missing curly bracket (the bane of all developers) throwing out the measurement in your GTag container or a suspicious rise in the number of crawled-not-indexed pages in your Google Search Console, we’re looking for the large and small signs that there are things to do that will actually make a difference – to measurement, to revenue, to reach and anything in between.

MMC Digital’s auditing service

Clients choosing MMC Digital to conduct one or a series of audits can expect a thorough, detailed examination and explanation of the audited platform or area, with point by point explanation of the findings set out in a way that attempts to be easy to read (no 50 page list of issues is ever easy to read, but we try) and a conversation with one of our consultants to address the findings and help you decide what your next steps are.

Brands can choose from any or all of the following audits (but if there’s something you need us to take a look at that isn’t here, feel free to ask):

Google Analytics 4 Audit

Well, it looks like we’re stuck with it. In all honesty, while it’s still not as usable as Universal Analytics, GA4 has come a long way over the last 5 or so years – but, unlike UA, it requires a lot more customisation for the average business to get the best out of it. This audit will assess how well your current implementation is performing according to your business needs and make recommendations on how you can tweak your set-up to make sure you’re getting the information you need to make smart decisions.

Google Search Console Audit

Google Search Console has always been one of the most useful tools in the SEO toolbox, but despite some changes for the worst, its use is even more important as it represents one of the only available sources of 1st party search data most businesses have access to. The increase in the percentage of new/first time searches, searches via LLMs, the importance of Core Web Vitals, and so much more besides makes this channel vital to monitoring, maintaining and improving a website’s visibility and performance.

Full technical SEO audit

We cover what we consider to be technical SEO over on that service page, so we won’t go into excessive detail, but a full technical audit aims to investigate the overall health of the backend processes, techniques and tools that are the foundations of your SEO strategy – your pagination, canonicalisation, hreflang, navigation, internal linking, external link profile, content performance and more. Essentially it’s an MOT for your site – and it can make sure you save money as well as make more money – so if you’ve any doubts about the funny clanking sound you’ve been hearing from just under your footer, now’s the time for a technical audit.

Content audit

Part technical, part creative, a content audit addresses how your content is contributing to your visibility, whether the visibility it’s contributing is worth having and how you might improve it – but it also examines how your content conforms to your overall brand tone, whether it’s consistent, whether it’s pitched at a level that will work for your target customer and more. Don’t worry, we’re not looking to tell you how your content manages to “sublimate this, transcend that, and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of the other,” we remain squarely focused on the impact of your content on your business as a whole.

Local SEO audit

From important local schema types to your business profile, your location pages to important local keywords and everything in between, our local review aims to make sure you’re doing everything possible to appear for increasingly important location specific searches and in relevant rich results – as well as for inclusion in local searches using LLMs.

Link profile analysis

While they’re not as important as they used to be, anyone telling you your link profile isn’t important at all is just trying to avoid the hard work of link building – and it’s this that has changed the most over the last several years. Irrelevant links on sites that don’t even pretend to be tangentially related are mostly ignored in modern search – and as most agencies have dedicated themselves only to building that exact kind of link, they’re not prepared for the work that goes into modern link building (often called digital PR). Earning citations (linked and unlinked are both good) from seed publications and relevant industry publishers takes work on ideation, data-storytelling, original research and lighting fast reactions to news stories. We make sure your link profile reflects that kind of work – and, if not, where and what is going wrong.

Schema audit

Structured data is something the consultants at MMC Digital have been pushing for longer than we care to put down on the record (we’re worried about being retired Logan’s Run style), but the industry has made small improvements in that time. While there was a time that schema was essentially absent from the web, most sites that are serious about search now carry at least the minimal beginnings of on-site structured data – they have org schema, webpage, sometimes even location schema, maybe the odd one has some additional @types, but it pretty much stops there. Our schema audit will make sure the structured data you have is correctly implemented, but also how you can take the next steps in your schema journey – getting all that information connected to the wider web.

Google Quality Rater Guidelines audit

This is one that seems easier than it is (but we’re not going to stop you trying by any means – you can find a copy of the most recent guidelines here), and involves a review of your site to measure it against the human facing guide that is given to Google’s quality raters. This 180+ page document is the closest we get to transparency from Google – though it doesn’t give any algorithmic inputs, it gives measurement advice for outputs. While we can’t see what Google is doing, we can use it to make inferences about what it wants the outcomes to be, and our GQRG audit aims to make sure your site is set up to succeed against such a measurement, but also that it’s doing what it needs to meet inferred signals of quality.

Experience expertise authority trust review

In an ideal world, we’d have been able to send in some of the grey hairs we’ve earned in the industry to prove our own EEAT, but sadly it’s more complicated than that – and more than just the odd author profile. EEAT is made up of a lot of on-page, content and off-page signals and our audit runs through these signals to make sure your site is primed to let Google know you’re an authority in your sector.

What can audits do for your business?

Simply put (thankfully, for a page that’s close to hitting 2000 words), audits are a way of getting the lay of the land. Making great decisions is about knowing all of the available information, and audits are how you get there. There are schools of thought that say – just hire someone and let them get on with it, but the best results come when both sides of an agreement know and are comfortable with what’s going on and why it’s going on. Audits let us discover exactly what’s needed and discuss with you what the next steps should be.

Whether you want us to execute the work once the audits are completed is secondary – our audit service is solely about making sure that you’re ready to take your next steps with whoever you choose to partner.