A Digital Marketing Checklist for Small Business

Every item on this list is something we did, flagged, or are honestly still stuck on while standing up our own properties. A brand-new business starts with none of it. An operating business usually has about half, and which half varies. The point of the list is finding out which half is yours.

Mark each item done or needs-done. The needs-done column is your work list, already in rough priority order, and nothing on it requires hiring anyone to complete. Where an item has depth, it links to a piece that closes the gap properly. This is real work, which is a different thing from complicated work.

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0 of 16 done. Saved in this browser, nowhere else.

Foundationsown your ground

Nothing in this phase is visible to a customer, and every later item breaks quietly when one of these is wrong. Each is also about ownership in the plainest sense, meaning accounts and addresses the business controls, not a vendor, not a contractor, not whoever set things up.

One web address, everywhereTo a machine, www and no-www are two different websites. Pick one, forward the other permanently, and make every part of your site agree. Ours disagreed three ways before we noticed.
A phone number you can keep foreverThe number spreads to listings you will forget exist, so publish one you own and can carry anywhere. Ours is a Hushed line, a few dollars a month, forwarding wherever we are. Changing it later means chasing it across everything you have built by then.
Email on your own domain, configured to deliverMail from you@yourbusiness.com looks like a business; mail from a free address looks like a hobby. Three DNS records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) tell the world your mail is really yours. Without them, invoices and replies quietly land in spam.
A written inventory of who owns whatRegistrar, DNS, hosting, Google profile, socials, analytics — the owner should hold every one, with recovery paths written down. A business should not lose its own website because the person who set it up stopped answering.

Presencebe findable

The places people and machines check to decide you are real. The job at this stage is accuracy and consistency, not posting. Every listing is a witness, and the witnesses need to agree.

Google Business ProfileThe highest-leverage listing a local business has. Exact name, true category, honest hours, and a description that follows Google's rules.If you have a storefront: publish the address and real hours. If you don't: verify with a hidden address, declare service areas, and set appointment-required. That is how ours is configured.
Social profiles, claimed and consistentAt the baseline a profile is a public record that vouches for your identity, to customers and to the machines cross-checking it. Claiming takes minutes; posting is a separate decision for later.
Listings beyond GoogleApple Business Connect, Bing Places, Yelp, and your chamber directory feed maps, assistants, and search. Same name, number, and address, character for character, on each.If you work without a public address: support for hidden-address service businesses varies by platform and changes without notice, so check each platform's current help pages when you claim, and where one demands a street address you don't have, skip it and note why. This one is still on our own needs-done list.
Real photos, no stockStock photography reads as the national chain you are competing against. A profile with a logo and no humans reads as a shell.If you have a storefront: the front, the inside, the people. If you don't: you, the work itself, and the places it happens.
A messaging kit for every platformThe same positioning, pre-written at each platform's character limits, with images at each platform's sizes — so every profile says the same thing without anyone rewriting it from memory at a keyboard.

Paths inbe reachable

Being found is wasted when the path from interested to in-contact is broken, and both items here fail silently. Nobody calls to tell you your form is down.

Forms that actually deliverSend yourself a test through every form on your site, monthly, and confirm it arrives. A form can look perfectly live and deliver nothing — the customer believes they wrote you, and you believe nobody did.
A booking pathA way onto your calendar without phone tag, for the customer who decides at 9pm.If you have no walk-in door: this item weighs double, because for an appointment business the booking path is the door.

Instrumentsknow what's happening

An installed instrument counts only once somebody reads it. This phase is three tools, one awareness item, and one habit, and the habit is the item that does the work.

Analytics and webmaster baselineThree free tools with three different jobs. Search Console is the report card, analytics is the census, and session replay is the camera. Only the first can tell you whether Google has even filed your pages.
AI-answer visibilityAssistants quote what they can extract and attribute what they can identify. Ask one what your business does and read the answer the way a stranger would. Ours had a British planning firm in it.
A review flowThe ask, the link, and an answer to every single one. Reviews are the public evidence machines and strangers both weigh most. What a year of them tells you about your own operations is its own subject.
Backlink awarenessLinks from other sites are votes machines count, and spam votes count against you. Search Console shows what links to you for free; a formal disavow is rare medicine for a real infestation. We reviewed 250 spam domains pointing at one of our properties and drafted the disavow, and submitting it is still on our own list.
A monthly reading habitFifteen minutes, three questions, written down in advance: did anything break, what did search send, where did people struggle. Checking more often produces mood swings; checking less often is flying blind.

Four small items ride along without numbers: a favicon, share images, a web manifest, and HTTPS. Whoever maintains your site finishes all four in an afternoon, and the check is simply that they exist.

If the needs-done column looks long, that is the list doing its job. Most of these are an evening each, and they compound. Every witness you straighten out makes the next one count for more.

If you'd rather hand it off

This is real work, and we do it for people. If your needs-done column is longer than the time you have for it, that is worth a conversation.