I Ran An Audit On My Own Marketing And Scored 62/100. Here's What Happened Next.

When I first built the marketing audit for Independent Financial Advisers, I was pretty proud of it. 22 points across 6 important categories. It felt a little like birthing my third child. This is exactly what I would want if someone was assessing my digital presence and telling me what was great and what needed improving.

Not one to put something out there without some serious stress testing, I thought it only fair to run my own digital presence through the audit. I made a few adjustments to the criteria first, most notably removing the compliance section, since I'm not a financial services firm regulated by the FCA. Then on 29 July, I ran 3060 Marketing's own website, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile and social channels through the same, remaining, 16-point Digital Footprint Audit we use with clients. No softer rubric. No benefit of the doubt for being the one who wrote the checklist.

The result: 62 out of 100. Yikes. Not quite a disaster. But not the polished, practising-what-I-preach digital footprint I'd have assumed I had either.

A couple of caveats worth flagging: my firm is new, so there's only a few months' worth of data to work with, and I'm one person, which means I've prioritised certain areas over others. But in the interest of transparency, here's exactly what the audit found, what I did about it, and where the score sat three weeks later.

Where we actually started

The framework scores five categories: Messaging & Positioning, Content & Engagement, Website Technical & UX, Trust Signals & Reputation, and Social Media. On 29 July, the breakdown looked like this:

- Messaging & Positioning: 20.5/25

- Content & Engagement Evidence: 4/10

- Website Technical & UX: 20/25

- Trust Signals & Reputation: 10.5/25

- Social Media: 7/15

The messaging and technical basics were solid. The other three categories told a less flattering story, and these weren't the kind of gaps you spot from a casual scroll. You only find them when you actually go looking.

1. The structured data was broken.

   Buried in the homepage's schema markup, the field that's supposed to point Google and AI search tools to our logo was still set to a placeholder: `your-logo.png`. A file that doesn't exist. Invisible if you're just browsing the site... but it matters a lot if you care how AI tools and Google's Knowledge Panel represent your business. And as a marketing consultancy, I very much do.

2. There was no LinkedIn Company Page.

   Just my personal profile, doing double duty as the entire brand presence on the platform that matters most for B2B and professional services. This definitely sat at the bottom of my to-do list. If you've ever read my early posts on LinkedIn, you'll know it wasn't my favourite social channel, and in all honesty, I was probably avoiding completing the profile and posting.

3. The blog looked staler than it was.

   The sitemap timestamps were current, but every visible post was dated the same day, back in May, when I originally published the site live. The audit read this as two months of silence. That turned out to be a technical read issue though, and after a few tweaks, the audit correctly picked up the blog posts published since the site launched on 18 May, and the score adjusted accordingly. This is the whole point of stress testing the framework. It needed real data to test the process.

4. Small errors had crept in.

   The site footer listed our Companies House registration number as "SC7975", a typo, two digits short of the real one (SC797547). One page's LinkedIn link pointed at a random template showcase instead of, well, LinkedIn. Not exactly the trust signals I'm trying to build.

5. And nobody had reviewed us anywhere except Google.

   No Trustpilot profile. No listing on any of the directories a prospective client might actually check before booking a call with a marketing agency.

   
   

   I think Google is one of the best trust signals a firm can have, it's usually the first thing a prospective client checks. But it's always prudent to have more than one review source reinforcing that message, because relying on a single platform means one bad week, or one algorithm change, and the only proof you've got disappears with it. Trustpilot and a relevant industry directory are next on my list.

What I did about it

Nothing dramatic. Just the unglamorous, one-thing-at-a-time work the audit itself recommends: fix what's broken, build what's missing, keep checking. Here's the thing about this kind of work: it's never as satisfying in real life as it looks on a strategy slide. It's almost anticlimactic.

The footer link and the truncated company number were five-minute fixes. The LinkedIn Company Page took an afternoon to set up properly. The blog got a new post, then another.

The structured data logo was the interesting one. I fixed it. Checked again a few days later: still broken. Fixed it again. Still broken. This happened six separate times before it actually stuck, on the seventh check, in early August. Turns out a single wrong field in a settings panel can be more stubborn than it looks, and "I already fixed that" isn't the same as "that's actually fixed."

Where are we now

By 17 August, three weeks and roughly a dozen re-checks later, the score sits at 81/100:

- Messaging & Positioning: 23/25

- Content & Engagement Evidence: 8/10

- Website Technical & UX: 23.5/25

- Trust Signals & Reputation: 11.5/25

- Social Media: 14/15

Content & Engagement nearly doubled. Social Media jumped from 7 to 14, driven by an actual LinkedIn presence, including a shift into short-form video that's picked up more reach in two weeks than the old personal-profile-only setup managed in months. Google Business Profile added a review. The structured data has now held for over a week straight across multiple checks, which, after six failed attempts, felt disproportionately satisfying to confirm.

Trust Signals & Reputation is still our weakest category, at 11.5 out of 25. I need to raise the bar on third-party mentions, fill in a few directory profiles, and build more connections across the digital landscape. Some gaps close in an afternoon. Others take building relationships over time and asking people for things. That's a different, slower kind of effort.

The number

A score is just a snapshot, and it's important to remember that. The audit isn't the holy grail, but it can give a specific, evidenced list of exactly where the gaps exist between what we think we look like versus what we actually do.

Every one of those gaps was fixable. None of them needed a rebuild or a big budget. They needed someone to actually check, fix what they found, and check again to make sure the fix had stuck.

That's the whole premise of the audit, and I wasn't going to ask clients to sit through something I hadn't been willing to sit through myself.

If you're curious what a properly evidenced look at your own firm's website, social presence and online reputation would actually turn up, that's exactly what we do. Get in touch and we'll run the same audit on your firm that we ran on our own*. I promise I'll be just as honest about your score as I was about mine.

*You don't have to be a financial services firm