Digital marketing doesn’t stand still, and there are definitely times when you need to adapt. For example, every new Google update seems to come with headlines claiming SEO has changed forever. However, the reality is that many of the fundamentals haven’t changed much at all.
Some of the best advice about SEO today is exactly the same as it was 10 or 15 years ago – create useful content, understand what your audience is searching for, build a technically sound website and earn your reputation.
For smaller marketing teams, it can definitely be difficult to step off the hamster wheel and take stock of things.
This list of ‘10 questions every business owner should ask their marketing team’ could also be used by the marketing team themselves to ensure they are seeing the woods from the trees. They certainly aren’t designed as trick questions to catch anyone out.
Think of them as conversation starters. Good marketers should enjoy talking about this stuff, and if nothing else, both they and the business owner will come away with a better understanding of what’s working, what isn’t, and what should happen next.
1. What is GA4 actually telling us?
While I say these aren’t trick questions, this one has a secondary purpose – ensuring that you do actually have GA4. It’s impossible to give any sensible reply to this, unless you have GA4 or a similar analytics platform set up.
Hopefully, the answer to the above isn’t just, “We’ve had more visitors this month.” Traffic is nice, but it’s only part of the story.
A good answer should include things like:
- Where visitors are coming from.
- Which channels are driving enquiries or sales.
- Which pages people spend the most time on.
- Where visitors are dropping off.
- Whether there are any interesting trends over the past few months.
The important thing is understanding why things are happening, not just reporting the numbers.
2. Are we making the most of what Google Search Console is reporting?
Search Console is one of the best free tools Google gives us, but plenty of businesses barely scratch the surface.
Your marketing team should be using it to understand things like:
- Which searches you’re appearing for.
- Which pages are gaining or losing visibility.
- And keeping an eye on technical issues might need fixing (even if they can’t fix them themselves)
If they’re only checking it when something goes wrong, there’s probably more value to be had.
3. Are we doing anything differently because of AI-generated results?
This is the hot topic in digital marketing right now.
You’ll probably hear terms like AI Overviews, GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) or AI SEO. There seems to be a new acronym every week!
The answer shouldn’t be, “We’ve rewritten the whole website because AI has changed everything.”
It also shouldn’t be, “We’re ignoring it.”
What you really want to hear is something like: We’re keeping a close eye on how AI search is developing, but we’re not chasing every new trend. We’re continuing to create genuinely useful content that answers real customer questions, demonstrates expertise and helps people. AI hasn’t changed the fact that good content wins, it’s just changed some of the ways people discover it.
4. What have we done to improve our SEO in the last six months?
SEO isn’t something you can do once and forget about. It’s a long-term and ongoing process. And you’re continually in competition with others, so if you sit tight and do nothing, you will fundamentally be going backwards because your competitors are still active.
In answer to this particular question, you’d hope to hear about things like:
- Refreshing older content.
- Fixing technical issues.
- Improving internal linking.
- Optimising pages that are nearly ranking well.
- Creating content around new customer questions.
- Monitoring competitors and spotting opportunities.
Small improvements made consistently often deliver far better results than chasing the latest trend.
5. Where are our leads coming from?
This is one of my favourite questions because it cuts to the core of why you’re doing marketing in the first place.
Your team should know:
- How many leads you’re getting.
- Which channels they’re coming from.
- Which sources generate the best quality enquiries.
- Whether those numbers are improving or heading in the wrong direction.
If you don’t know where your best customers come from, it’s very difficult to know where your marketing budget should go.
6. Which pieces of content are performing best?
Not every blog post will be a winner, and that’s absolutely fine but your team should know which content is doing the heavy lifting. Some will be written for top of the funnel – high-level queries where there is a lot of traffic, and the more detailed, more specific content might not generate as much attention but might help turn a prospect into a real lead.
Ideally, the response will include:
- Pages bringing in the most organic traffic.
- Articles generating enquiries.
- Content people spend the most time reading.
- Pages that consistently help people move towards becoming customers.
7. Which social media platforms are actually working for us?
Notice I didn’t ask which platform has the most followers. Followers are nice. Likes are nice. Comments are nice. However, unless they’re helping people discover your business, visit your website, buy into your brand and eventually become customers, they’re not working for you.
Social media does often tend to be higher up the marketing funnel, so may not generate a significant amount of traffic or leads but you should definitely have a feel for how each channel is performing.
8. What technical SEO improvements are we working on?
This is a good way to gauge whether your team appreciates that the technical health of your website matters. They should be keeping an eye on things like broken links, crawl errors, duplicate content, indexing problems and missing structured data.
They won’t be able to fix everything overnight and may not be able to fix the issues themselves, but they should know these are the sorts of issues that need regular attention, not just something to worry about when rankings start to fall.
9. What have we tested recently?
Good marketing teams are always learning. They have ideas, they test them, and they learn from the results. I’ve said in other blog posts that what we do, particularly in SEO, is part art and part science. Sometimes the best ideas come from analysing the data, other times they come from trying something completely different. Either way, testing and experimenting is part of good marketing.
That doesn’t mean making wholesale changes for the sake of it, every significant change should be monitored carefully to make sure it has a positive impact on traffic, enquiries or sales, and rolled back if it doesn’t. But even the best websites can improve. Those small, incremental gains often add up to make the biggest difference over time.
10. What’s changed in digital marketing over the last six months?
Things change, but that doesn’t mean your marketing team needs to react to every new trend or announcement. In fact, sometimes the best approach is to do nothing at all. If you’re running an experiment in one area of your marketing, it’s often important to keep everything else consistent so you can properly measure the results, rather than introducing too many variables at once.
That said, in-house marketing teams can sometimes become a little inward-looking. When they’re busy juggling day-to-day priorities, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s happening in the wider digital marketing world. Your team should be aware of changes to regulations, emerging best practice, new technologies and fundamental shifts such as AI, even if they’ve decided those changes don’t warrant any immediate action. The important thing isn’t reacting to everything, it’s understanding what’s changing and making informed decisions about what matters to your business and focusing their time accordingly.
Conclusion
No one expects an in-house marketing team to know everything. That’s impossible, especially when they’re busy juggling all areas of marketing – not just SEO.
What you should expect is curiosity.
If some of the answers are a little shaky, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you and they take this as the start of a useful and regular conversation.
The best marketers aren’t necessarily the ones who think they know everything; they’re the ones who never stop learning.