An Events Page of Events Already Past

On the morning I ran this audit, the page on a South Coast business's own website titled Upcoming Events listed more than twenty events, and every single one of them had already happened. The most recent had finished a week earlier, and a few from the previous year were still marked as on sale.

The business is a working farm that also runs a seasonal events programme. Nobody had done anything wrong here. Somebody had been busy running a farm, which is a reasonable thing to be busy doing in August. But a stranger landing on that page, which is exactly the page the business would most want a stranger to land on, reads it as a programme that has stopped.

That is the shape of nearly every problem these audits turn up. Not bad work. Good work that quietly stopped being connected to the people looking for it.

What an audit actually examines#

An audit is not a review of whether your posts are any good. It is a check of whether the machinery around them is doing its job. I score twenty two things, grouped into five areas, and every one of them is checked from the outside using only what any customer could find.

Presence and coverage. Which platforms you hold, whether each account is a proper business account, and whether anything is sitting abandoned in search results carrying a phone number you stopped using three years ago.

Consistency and cadence. Whether your name, address, phone number and opening hours say the same thing everywhere they appear, and whether your posting has a rhythm a customer could predict.

Content quality. Whether the photography is yours or a stock library's, whether video exists, and whether what you publish speaks to the customer you actually need rather than to whoever already follows you.

Engagement and community. Reviews, ratings, replies, and whether anyone outside the business has mentioned it lately.

Discoverability and conversion. Whether you appear when someone searches your category plus your area, whether your listings are claimed, and whether a person who wants to buy something can actually reach the point of buying it.

Alongside those, three findings get named separately because they are usually the fastest and cheapest wins: accessibility, dormant profiles, and unclaimed or duplicate listings.

You can run a crude version of this yourself in an afternoon. Open every page a customer might land on, and click everything.

What the audit found#

I want to lead with what was working, because it was genuinely unusual.

Every photograph on the site was the business's own. The practical detail a customer needs before deciding to come was published as real, readable text rather than as a photograph of a sign, which is the single most common mistake I see in this category. Text can be read by a search engine, quoted in a result, enlarged by someone with poor eyesight and copied by someone deciding where to spend a Saturday. A picture of a sign can do none of that. Every social link on the site pointed at an account the business actually owned, which sounds like a low bar until you learn how often it is not cleared. Against seven comparable businesses in the region, on the measures that can be checked consistently for all of them, this one ranked first.

Then the gaps, and every one of them was mechanical.

The events page had nothing upcoming on it#

More than twenty entries, all of them finished. The online store was still selling tickets to something that had already taken place, which is worse than an empty page, because somebody can actually buy one.

The page selling the highest value thing had no way to buy it#

A second page, two clicks from the homepage and fronting the most valuable thing the business sells, told the reader in its own words to fill out the form below. There was no form on that page. No email link either, and no phone link. The instruction was the only thing that survived whatever rebuild removed the form.

Third parties were publishing the wrong opening hours#

A directory listing that showed as claimed published weekend closing times three hours earlier than the real ones, and listed no hours at all for one of the days the business is open. Four other listings sat unclaimed, including the neighbourhood one where its walk in customers live.

Three owned accounts were linked from nowhere#

Three accounts the business owns, on three different platforms, were linked from none of its own pages. Anyone who wanted to follow along had to already know they existed.

The numbers#

The overall score was low, and the category rank was first. Those two numbers disagree, and both went in the report rather than only the flattering one. The score measures an absolute standard. The rank measures the market this business actually competes in. The honest reading is that the business is ahead of its neighbours and still leaving money on a table it built itself.

Five things you can copy today#

None of this needs an agency and none of it costs anything.

Read the top of your own events or news page as a stranger would. If the newest item on it has already happened, that page is telling people you stopped. This is the most common single fault I find, and it takes ten minutes to fix. If you cannot keep it current, take the dates off and describe the programme in the present tense instead.

Click every button on the page that sells your most expensive thing. Forms go missing when a site is rebuilt or a plugin lapses. The owner never notices, because the owner never fills in their own enquiry form. Do it once a quarter, on a phone, and actually submit it.

Follow every social icon on your website rather than counting them. Check that each one lands on your account. I have found icons pointing at a website builder's corporate page, at a defunct account, and at a second brand the business had forgotten it created.

Search your own business name and look at who owns the first page. If directories you have never logged into are outranking your own homepage, claim them. Claiming a listing is free, takes minutes, and it is the cheapest local search work available to a small business.

Check what third parties publish for your opening hours, one day at a time. A stale record showing an early close quietly erases trading hours every week, and because directories copy from each other, one wrong entry tends to become several.

Across four consecutive categories and thirty nine South Coast businesses, the pattern has not changed. The neglected surface is never production. It is distribution. These owners had already done the expensive part, then left it unlinked, unpublished, unclaimed or uncorrected.

The full audit#

The complete anonymised report is here: Download the full audit (PDF)

If you want the same thing done for your business, it is free and there is no obligation. Reply to this article's author at joshua.amado@avalonpartner.com and say which business is yours.

Joshua Amado Founder, Avalon Partner AvalonPartner.com