Before launching advertising or investing in SEO, it is useful to check whether your website is ready for visitors. A page may load and look polished, yet its form fails to deliver enquiries, the mobile menu covers a button, or analytics records an enquiry as soon as someone clicks it.
An audit helps identify these problems and decide what to address first. Its useful outcome is a list of verified findings, each with an explanation of its impact, a recommendation, and a way to check the fix.
This article covers what to check before promotion, how to assess the issues you find, and what a report needs to turn diagnostics into specific tasks.
Start with what the website should do for the business. For a service company, this might be a quote request, consultation booking, or contact with the sales team. For an online store, it might be a completed order.
Then agree on:
The objective determines the order of checks. For an advertising landing page, alignment with the ad, form functionality, and enquiry tracking are particularly important. For SEO, you also need to check whether search engines can access important pages and whether the content is organised appropriately.
On a large website, choose different page types: the homepage, key service pages, articles, categories, product pages, and checkout. Check shared elements, such as menus, footers, and forms, as well as individual templates. Sampling can reveal systemic problems, but does not establish that every URL works correctly.
Before making changes, save baseline data: organic impressions and clicks, traffic to key pages, enquiries, current settings, and technical check results. If historical data is unavailable or tracking is unreliable, record this as a limitation rather than reconstructing figures from assumptions.
Open the page as a new visitor would see it: without administrator access, on both a computer and a phone. Start from the actual entry point, such as a service page used in an advertising campaign.
Check the entire journey:
A “Thank you, your enquiry has been sent” message does not confirm that the enquiry was delivered. Check what happens after submission: whether a record was created, the details were saved, and the staff member can identify where the customer came from.
Agree on test submissions with the person handling enquiries and label them as tests. Also check validation errors, repeated clicks, and alternative contact methods. If submission fails, visitors should understand how to correct the error or get in touch another way.
Having a tracking tool installed does not mean its data is suitable for evaluating promotion. Check which event is recorded and what triggers it.
Distinguish between a button click, successful form submission, a delivered enquiry, and a qualified lead. These are different stages. Clicking a phone number does not confirm that a conversation took place either.
In Google Analytics 4, an action that matters to the business can be marked as a key event. Google describes an example of setting up a separate event for a confirmation page in its key event tutorial. However, the configuration you choose must match how your website works.
During the check, make sure that:
Compare events with enquiries actually received. Analytics and CRM records may not match exactly because of tracking methods, consent, and blockers. The audit’s task is to investigate discrepancies and avoid treating unreliable tracking as a business result.
For SEO, first establish whether Google can access and index the pages you want to promote. Check specific URLs, including the relevant language version.
Key checks include:
Inspect URLs in Search Console and compare Google’s stored data with the current published page. A successful live test does not guarantee indexing or rankings. The tool’s purpose and limitations are explained in Google’s URL Inspection guidance.
Not every URL excluded from the index needs fixing. Utility pages, legitimate duplicates, and old URLs with redirects may be excluded intentionally. A finding should explain which important page is inaccessible and why this affects the chosen promotion activity.
A technically functional page may still fail to answer a customer’s questions. Check whether its content matches the ad’s promise or the task behind the search query.
On a service page, visitors should understand:
Check headings, SEO titles, descriptions, and internal links. They should help distinguish pages and find the right section. Identical SEO titles on several pages are a reason to review the template and the content differences, but do not by themselves prove that enquiries are being lost.
For a multilingual website, check menus, forms, error messages, and language switching. Visitors should reach the corresponding version of the relevant page, and service terms should match the market for which they are published.
Separate facts from hypotheses. “The page does not explain the scope of work” is an observation. “This is why visitors do not enquire” is a hypothesis that needs investigating through enquiries, user behaviour, or audience research.
Review key pages on real phones. Check menus, readability, buttons, forms, the on-screen keyboard, and pop-ups. The entire journey to an enquiry matters, rather than just the first screen.
Run PageSpeed Insights for the main page types. The tool provides lab test results and, when sufficient data is available, information about real users’ experiences. These sources can differ: a lab test runs under specified conditions, while real-world data reflects different devices and networks. Read more in the PageSpeed Insights documentation.
Do not reduce the audit to a requirement to achieve the highest score. Identify what gets in a visitor’s way: main content appears late, the page does not respond to a tap, or elements shift during loading.
For a performance finding, record the page, test conditions, observed problem, and suspected cause. A large image, video, or third-party script may need further investigation: its presence alone does not prove that it caused the delay.
“Fix SEO and improve UX” is not an actionable task. Each finding needs:
If the cause is not yet known, create an investigation task. Do not present an assumption as a confirmed defect or recommend a major rebuild without justification.
Assess each issue against four criteria:
You can use three levels: fix before launching the relevant channel, include in the next stage, or schedule as an improvement. This is a working approach to adapt to your project.
Below is an illustrative report example. It does not represent an audit of an actual client website.
Priority depends on context. An error on the only advertising landing page may need resolving sooner than a similar issue in a rarely visited archive. However, a lack of traffic data does not mean an issue is unimportant.
Account for dependencies. First restore the form’s functionality, then check successful submission tracking. After changing the structure or URLs, check internal links and redirects again.
Before commissioning the work, clarify what the price includes: which pages and journeys will be checked, what access is needed, the report format, and whether a follow-up check is included.
Diagnostics, fixes, and post-implementation verification are separate types of work. A recommendation appearing in the report does not mean its implementation is already included in the audit fee.
For individual improvements, you can use our website support and design service with hourly billing. We work with Tilda, WordPress, and Webflow; the tasks, time estimate, and budget are agreed according to the platform and the website’s requirements.
A task is complete after its outcome has been verified. For a form, that means a delivered test enquiry and the correct event. For a mobile menu, it means working on the agreed devices. For an SEO restriction, it means the published setting has been corrected; Google’s subsequent processing of the page is monitored separately.
Continue monitoring the website after promotion begins. Form functionality can be checked immediately, while conclusions about lead quality and channel effectiveness require data over a suitable period. An improvement in metrics cannot automatically be attributed to one change if advertising, content, or the offer changed at the same time.
If you need a systematic review before advertising or SEO, explore our website audit service. The scope should be agreed according to promotion objectives, page types, and available data.
An audit supports decisions when every finding relates to a specific journey, is verified, and becomes a task with a clear acceptance check. This kind of report provides an understandable order of work and helps you plan improvements on a sound basis.