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The One-Page Marketing Audit Format

Most audits are 28 slides long, open with a company overview you already know, and end with eleven recommendations in no particular order. Nobody acts on them. The audits that actually move a site are shorter — usually one page. They say what's wrong, show the number that proves it, and name the single thing to do first. This is that format, evergreen, and you can copy it below.

Why One Page

One page forces an opinion

A one-page audit can't hold hedging. There's no room for "there are several possible areas of opportunity" and the finding too. The constraint does the work: if you only have space for three problems, you have to decide which three actually matter — and that decision is the whole value. A long deck lets you avoid deciding, substituting coverage for judgement, and a reader can feel it. One page also survives being forwarded and skimmed; a 30-page deck dies in a folder.

The Rule That Makes It Work

Every finding names its number

Not a claim, not an adjective — a number, its source, and the window it was measured over. "My site is slow" is an opinion. "My top landing page has 4,100 impressions a month and a 0.9% click-through rate, against a 3.1% average for my other pages at the same position" is a finding. The first can be argued with over coffee; the second is a fact that sits there until someone acts on it. Rule of thumb: if you can't attach a number to a line, delete the line — don't soften it, delete it. That discipline is what keeps the page to a page.

The Template

Copy this, keep it to one page

Fill in the brackets. If it spills onto a second page, you haven't decided yet.

# Marketing Audit — [Your Site]
Prepared [Date] · Data window: [e.g. last 90 days]
Sources reviewed: [e.g. Google Search Console, verified property, last quarter]

## Headline finding
[One sentence. The single most important true thing about this site.
Example: "You rank on page one for 34 commercial queries and lose most of
that traffic to a title tag mismatch — the clicks are already there to win."]

## Scorecard
| Area              | Grade | The number behind it                          |
|-------------------|-------|-----------------------------------------------|
| Search visibility | [B]   | [12,400 impressions/mo, avg position 8.4]     |
| Click-through     | [D]   | [1.1% site CTR vs 2.8% expected at position 8]|
| Content coverage  | [C]   | [Ranking for 6 of 22 core service queries]    |
| Technical health  | [B-]  | [3 of 40 indexed pages return soft 404]       |
| Conversion path   | [n/a] | [No data yet — see "To go deeper" below]      |

## Three things costing you money right now
1. [Problem, stated plainly.]
   The number: [metric, value, window, source].
   What it costs: [estimate as a range, with the assumption named].
2. [Problem + its number + what it costs.]
3. [Problem + its number + what it costs.]

## Do this first
[One action. Not a list. What changes, who does it, how long it takes,
and what number you expect to move — and by roughly how much.]

## To go deeper, I would need
- [Data source 1] — so I can answer [specific question I can't answer today].
- [Data source 2] — so I can answer [specific question].

Why Each Part Is Shaped That Way

The three sections most people get wrong

The headline finding is the audit — everything under it is support. One sentence, specific to this site, and a sentence that would be wrong for the next site you look at. If you could paste it into someone else's audit unchanged, it's a platitude, not a finding. The useful shape is usually you're already winning X and losing it at Y: flattering and urgent at once.

The scorecard needs the third column. Grades are cheap — anyone can call something a C — so every grade must show the metric that produced it. The letter is the summary; the number is the evidence; ship them in the same row, always. And never invent a grade for data you don't have: write n/a and move it to "to go deeper." A single made-up grade poisons the honest ones. (A composite "health score: 62/100" with hidden maths is the astrology of audits — if you can't show the arithmetic, don't show the score.)

Do this first means exactly one action. Hand over a list and you've handed the prioritising back — which was the thing worth doing. Pick the best ratio of impact to effort, name what changes and what number should move, and stop. One real fix that comes true beats a table of contents for a project that never starts.

If You Run an Agency

The same format wins retainers

This format started life as an agency tool, and it still is one. If you audit client sites, the one-page format is the fastest way to turn a free audit into a signed retainer: it proves you opened their accounts, it commits to an opinion, and its "to go deeper" section describes the engagement without pitching it — so the prospect is the one who asks for the work. The voice above is owner-first on purpose, but the discipline is identical whether the site is yours or a client's.

What ARIA Shows You

The automated version of this format

ARIA is the automated version of the format above. You connect Google Search Console, and it produces a plain-English audit with graded scores — and, in keeping with the rule at the top of this page, every grade shows the metric that produced it. No composite health score with hidden maths; the number is always on the page next to the grade.

What ships today is the search-visibility half of this template — so the honest description is that ARIA automates the reading and the scoring, and you still write the headline finding yourself. Which was always the half that was yours to write. See what it produces on Features, and what it costs on Pricing.

Keep Reading

Get the audit half done for you

Use the template — it works without us. Or connect your site and let ARIA produce the graded, number-backed read, so you're left with the one part only you can write: the headline finding.

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