Digital Marketing ServicesSEO · GEO · Paid · Content · Social

What should a digital marketing audit cover before you pay a retainer?

A useful audit answers five questions: where the site ranks now and for which terms, what is technically stopping pages from being crawled, rendered or indexed, which queries bring buyers rather than browsers, what competitors rank for that you do not, and whether AI answer engines can read and cite your pages.

It should also check the measurement itself. If enquiry forms are not tracked as conversions, no later report can be trusted, so repairing tracking comes before any campaign. The output is a priority-ordered list of what to do, what to skip and why. It belongs to you, and it should be usable by whoever you choose to run the work, including a different agency.

What is the difference between SEO and GEO?

SEO earns a position in a list of links. Generative engine optimization (GEO) earns a citation inside an answer that an AI system writes, where the searcher may never click at all. The two share most of their foundations: pages that crawlers can fetch and render, clear structure, accurate structured data and content that shows first-hand expertise.

GEO adds a few demands of its own. Key facts need to sit in short passages that can be quoted without their surrounding page, the business needs to be described consistently wherever it appears, and AI crawlers have to be allowed in. MoxSEO publishes free diagnostic tools, including an AI answer extractability checker, if you want to test a page yourself first.

When is paid search worth running, and when is it not?

Paid search is a margin question before it is a marketing one. Start from what a new customer is worth, multiply by the share of enquiries that become customers, and you have the most you can pay for an enquiry. Compare that with what clicks cost for your terms in your market and how many clicks it takes to produce one enquiry.

If the numbers work, paid search is the fastest channel there is, because it buys attention from day one. If they do not, better ad copy will not rescue it. That is why the channel plan can say no to paid search outright, and why an audit that skips this arithmetic is not finished.

• Lifetime value of a customer
• Share of enquiries that close
• Cost per click for your buying terms
• Clicks needed per enquiry

Why do technical SEO fixes stall, and what changes when engineers are involved?

Most technical findings are engineering work: a template that loads too slowly on mobile, pages that only render in the browser, redirect chains, duplicate URLs created by filters, or structured data that breaks when a plugin updates. An agency without developers can only write these up and pass them to whoever maintains the site, where they queue behind feature work.

Because MoxSEO sits inside Miracuves, a finding goes to engineers in the same organization, and the fix ships as a code change that can be reviewed and reversed like any other. It works the same way whether or not Miracuves built the site originally.

How should digital marketing results be reported?

Against the outcomes the business is judged on: qualified enquiries, sales and revenue. Rankings, impressions and traffic still appear, but as inputs that explain why the outcome moved, not as the result itself.

That only works if tracking is joined up. Conversion events have to fire on every form and call button, campaign tags have to survive to the CRM, and what counts as a qualified enquiry has to be written down before the work starts, so the definition cannot drift later to flatter a month. A report with rising impressions and no enquiries tells you something is wrong with the plan, not that the plan is working.

What should you own when you hire a marketing agency?

Everything that would be expensive to rebuild. The ad accounts, analytics properties, tag manager container, search console, business profiles and social pages should be created under your company, with the agency given access rather than ownership. The same applies to the content, the keyword research and the audit itself.

Ownership is what makes switching agencies a decision rather than a rescue. With MoxSEO, accounts are set up in your name from the start, and if an engagement ends, you keep the history, the data and the work. Ask any agency, including this one, where your accounts will live before you sign.