If I want to know if your marketing is working, I’ll look at your website and ask these 51 questions.

1. When I land on the site, is it immediately obvious I’m in the right place? Is the logo obvious, the branding in keeping with expectations and the overall design as I would expect from the brand? Does it look professional (if appropriate)?

2. Is the .com the primary domain? If not, why not? Does the company own the .com and .co. uk? If using silly TLD / domain extension, why?

3. Does the site have an obvious first step to lead visitors into the system / funnel?

4. Is there a funnel?

5. Is the pre-determined outcome for the visitor obvious if I follow the logical process through the site?

6. Content architecture sound? Does it provide / encourage inertia?

7. Does the navigation make sense?

8. Is there a single conversion metric, or are there alternatives? Do we want newsletter sign-ups? Is the site optimised for this?

9. Does the site use a question to pull me in?

10. Does the site represent the brand well?

11. Is the brand itself any good?

12. Does it load in a reasonable time? Score on page speed insights?

13. If Wordpress or similar, is it built properly or does functionality rely heavily on plugins?

14. Does it have a clear message?

15. Has the owner correctly identified what he needs to tell the client, and what types of information are superfluous? E.g., resin floor site. Is the sales copy angle correct? Does the site convince for the supplier, or just the product?

16. Is the site about the customer, and not about the business? Does it represent a proper business, or a vanity project?

17. Can I easily identify the businesses point of differentiation and USP from the site?

18. Is the point of differentiation and USP sound?

19. Is the product good? Is there a clear reason to buy?

20. Price in line with expectations, or if not, justifiable (from clients, not businesses perspective)?

21. Does the site provide and leverage social proof?

22. Does the site provide and / or facilitate the gain of social currency for the client?

23. Is there a narrative to the business, the products, and the site? If so, who’s the hero?

24. Analytics installed, used and understood?

25. SEO basics? Evidence of long tail targeting, competent copy and appropriate tags and titles?

26. Case studies all categorised and published as individual posts?

27. Google search console used?

28. Good internal linking structure?

29. Content regularly updated?

30. Copy written by someone competent who has obviously been briefed by a strategist?

31. Any linked social media accounts operated by a competent person and in line with the strategic marketing plan? Is there a social media style guide and a posting guide in place? For larger companies, is there a social media policy statement in place?

32. Site built with most popular devices in mind, given the target market?

33. Effort made not to ‘build on rented land’?

34. Are there plenty of believable reviews and / or testimonials?

35. Brand awareness / vanity site, or designed to bring in money?

36. Plenty of well thought out landing pages and a strategy in place to avoid home page landing?

37. Are there alternative landing pages set up for A/B testing? Has the site been optimised for A/B testing?

38. Evidence of competent competitor analysis? Make sure they know they have competitors, even if they are not obvious. Everybody has competitors.

39. Remarketing set up and running?

40. Bidding on brand searches, even if no full PPC campaign in place?

41. If PPC being used, do they have a massive neg list? Does it seem to be well done?

42. Lifetime value considered, and increase encouraged.

43. Obvious up-sell / cross-sell strategies in place?

44. Decoy product use? Decoys used strategically, effectively?

45. Does the content make a FAQ section superfluous? If not, does it at least negate the need for ‘customer service’?

46. Has the business registered appropriate trademarks?

47. Does the site match the preconceived ideas regarding target persona / avatar?

48. Proper calls to action? Not the usual nonsense?

49. Stock or unique images?

50. Stock or unique product descriptions?

51. Evidence of real world FAQ analysis, eg WI questions example?