Over two years I looked inside the digital operations of 55 small and medium businesses. Different sectors, different sizes, different ambitions. The problems were almost always the same.
- The programme
- Who were these businesses?
- What I found: the common problems
- The state of their websites
- SEO: the free traffic nobody claimed
- Social media: activity without purpose
- CRM: the spreadsheet problem
- The Covid factor
- Five businesses that stuck with me
- What I’d tell every business owner
- Further reading
The programme
Between January 2020 and October 2021, I delivered digital audits for 55 businesses through the Digital City programme. Each audit was typically three to five days of work: reviewing the business’s website, SEO, social media, CRM, analytics and competitor landscape, then producing a report with specific, actionable recommendations.
These weren’t theoretical exercises. Every business had real problems they wanted solved. Some needed more customers. Some needed better systems. Some had a website that hadn’t been touched in years. A few had no website at all.
The businesses ranged from sole traders with turnover under £50k to a company doing £30m a year. The programme ran across the full span of the first Covid lockdown and its aftermath, which shaped many of the challenges I encountered.
What follows is everything I learned, anonymised to protect client confidentiality but drawn entirely from real data across all 55 reports.
Who were these businesses?
The spread surprised me. I expected a cluster of tech startups or digital-native businesses looking to optimise. Instead I got a brass instrument manufacturer, a woodturner who trains military veterans, a company that analyses explanted medical devices, an escape room, a gin distiller, a theatre company and a charity building a food waste redistribution app. Among others.
Almost none of them had an in-house digital team. In most cases, one person was responsible for the website, the social media, the analytics, the email marketing and everything else, on top of running the actual business. That’s the reality for most small businesses and it explains a lot of what I found.
The busiest period was Q1 2021. By that point, businesses had survived the initial shock of lockdown and were looking at their digital presence with fresh urgency. Many had cobbled together emergency solutions in March 2020 and were now realising those stopgaps needed replacing with something more considered.
What I found: the common problems
Here’s the thing that struck me hardest across 55 audits. The businesses were wildly different. A £30m container hire company has nothing in common with a sole-trader hypnotherapist, on the surface. But their digital problems were almost identical.
Three quarters of the businesses I audited had basic SEO issues. Nearly seven in ten were managing their client relationships through spreadsheets. Two thirds had mobile usability problems on their websites. More than half had Google Analytics installed but weren’t looking at the data.
None of this is complicated to fix. None of it requires a large budget. The gap isn’t between businesses that can afford digital and those that can’t. It’s between those that have had someone point out the problems and those that haven’t.
The state of their websites
Every audit started with the website. Not the design, not whether it looked good. I was checking whether it worked.
The most common website issue wasn’t technical. It was that homepages talked about the company instead of the customer. “Founded in 2015, we are a leading provider of…” was practically a template. Nobody visiting a website for the first time cares about your founding date. They care about whether you can solve their problem.
One business had a beautifully designed site where the contact form’s submit button sat behind the keyboard on mobile. Impossible to submit an enquiry from a phone. Another had their main call-to-action button disappear below the fold on mobile. Their primary conversion action was invisible to the majority of their visitors.
Every single business said their website was mobile friendly. Most of them had never actually tried to use it on a phone.
The fix for most of these issues costs nothing. Pull your website up on your phone. Try to do the thing you want customers to do. If it frustrates you, it’s frustrating them too. They’re just not telling you.
SEO: the free traffic nobody claimed
42 out of 55 businesses had SEO problems. Not competitive ranking issues. Basic, foundational things that take minutes to fix.
Pages with no meta descriptions. Page titles that just said “Home” or “Services.” One business had 22 pages and not a single custom page title. Every page showed the same generic company name in Google results. Even if someone searched for exactly what they sold, there was nothing in the search listing to make them click.
Another had a decent blog with useful content, but the posts had no structure, no headings, no internal links. Google couldn’t tell what they were about. All that effort, invisible.
Writing a good page title takes two minutes. A meta description takes three. Doing it across your whole site might take an afternoon. That afternoon could bring in traffic for years. SEO isn’t glamorous. But it’s the closest thing to free advertising that exists.
Social media: activity without purpose
37 out of 55 businesses had social media issues. The pattern was predictable. Someone set up a Facebook page a few years ago, posted for a while, then it went quiet. The odd post every few weeks when someone remembered. No plan, no tracking, no idea whether any of it did anything.
But the businesses that were posting regularly often had a different problem. They were posting a lot and saying nothing. Generic motivational quotes. “Happy Friday!” every week. Activity without purpose.
The businesses getting results from social media had three things in common: their own stories, a consistent rhythm and they replied to every comment.
I’m not convinced every business needs to be on social media. Several of the B2B companies I worked with would have been better off spending that time on LinkedIn outreach or fixing their SEO. But if you’re going to do it, do it with intent. A considered post every week beats a flurry of nothing every day.
One finding that surprised me: very few businesses were connecting their social media activity to their website analytics. They had no idea whether their Facebook posts were driving any traffic, let alone any sales. Social media existed in a bubble, disconnected from the rest of their digital presence.
CRM: the spreadsheet problem
38 out of 55 businesses were managing client relationships through spreadsheets. Some through paper folders. One had its entire client base in a locked filing cabinet in a single building. If that cabinet went missing, so did the business.
I get why it happens. When you start a business you have five clients and a spreadsheet works fine. Then fifty, and it still sort of works. Then two hundred, and you can’t remember who you spoke to last week. Leads fall through cracks. You spend evenings updating a spreadsheet instead of doing the work that earns you money.
The turning point isn’t a particular number of clients. It’s when you first lose a piece of business because you forgot to follow up. That’s when the spreadsheet has cost you more than a CRM ever would.
The real barrier isn’t cost. HubSpot’s free tier handles most of what a small business needs. Capsule CRM is about £14 a month. The barrier is the afternoon it takes to set one up and move your data across. That afternoon pays for itself within a week.
The Covid factor
20 of the 55 businesses were directly affected by Covid in ways that demanded immediate digital change. Not the general sense that everyone was affected. These were businesses whose entire model had to pivot.
Translation services
A translation service that delivered 90% of its work face to face suddenly couldn’t. Hardware and files were spread across three offices. Nothing was set up for remote working. Data security concerns made the transition harder.
Retail
A clothing retailer went from 50% of sales online to over 70% practically overnight. Their back-end systems weren’t built for that volume. Stock management, fulfilment, customer service processes all needed rethinking.
Events
A theatre company saw a year of work cancelled in a single week. They pivoted to digital delivery of performances and workshops, having never delivered anything online before. Emergency Arts Council funding kept them going.
Health & wellbeing
A fitness business had just secured two large corporate clients for in-person delivery. Lockdown hit. Within weeks they were delivering sessions via Facebook Live and Google Meet, platforms they’d never used professionally.
What struck me wasn’t the crisis itself. It was what happened afterwards. Nearly all these businesses had adapted, messily and imperfectly, but they’d done it. The problem was that the emergency digital solutions cobbled together in March 2020 were still running unchanged a year or two later. The stopgap had become the strategy.
The turning point isn’t a particular number of clients. It’s when you first lose a piece of business because you forgot to follow up. That’s when the spreadsheet has cost you more than a CRM ever would.
The real barrier isn’t cost. HubSpot’s free tier handles most of what a small business needs. Capsule CRM is about £14 a month. The barrier is the afternoon it takes to set one up and move your data across. That afternoon pays for itself within a week.
If your digital setup is still based on what you threw together during lockdown, you deserve better than emergency infrastructure.
Five businesses that stuck with me
Some audits taught me something I didn’t expect. Here are five, anonymised but real.
Manufacturing / e-commerce
Already number one in their sector nationally with £30m turnover, this company didn’t need a basic audit. They wanted an Amazon-style customer journey: real-time order tracking, customer account areas, proactive communication at every stage. When a business that’s already winning wants to be better, it tells you something about the gap between them and the businesses still arguing about whether they need a website.
Musical instruments
A manufacturer moving production back to the UK, making it the only large producer of its kind in the country. Their biggest growth market? Japan. An international fan base that followed a sponsored musical group with an almost cult-like devotion. The digital challenge was building an e-commerce experience worthy of instruments costing thousands, optimised for an audience on the other side of the world.
Gaming / software
A gaming studio with hundreds of staff needed help with remote working creativity tools, not marketing. The problem wasn’t digital visibility. It was that the spontaneous “looking over someone’s shoulder” moment, where a developer spots something on a colleague’s screen and a conversation starts, had disappeared when everyone went home. Not every digital problem is about websites.
Charity / tech for good
A foundation wanted to build an app connecting surplus food from shops and restaurants with families in need. The concept included a suggestion algorithm that would learn what kinds of food different communities would actually use. A pallet of coconuts is useful to some communities, less so to others. Tech for social good, built on a charity budget.
Crafts / social enterprise
A woodturner running commercial manufacturing alongside training programmes for military veterans and people with mental health difficulties. He needed a website that could handle both sides of the business without confusing either audience. He’s dyslexic, which made written blog content a genuine barrier, so I recommended video blogs shot on a phone. The stories he tells about the people who come through his workshop are extraordinary. Those stories were the marketing. They just needed capturing.
What I’d tell every business owner
After 55 audits and 728 pages of reports, certain things keep coming back. If I had to distil what I learned into the advice I’d give any small business owner, it would be this.
Test your website on your phone
Not on a testing tool. On your actual phone. Try to do the thing you want customers to do. Buy something, fill in the form, find the phone number. If any of it frustrates you, it’s frustrating your customers. This takes five minutes and costs nothing.
Write your meta descriptions
The single most common fix across every audit. Two lines of text that control how your business appears in Google search results. Most businesses have never written them. Search for your company right now and look at what shows up. That’s your shop window for the internet.
Stop posting on social without a plan
A post every week with intent behind it beats daily posting of borrowed content. Share your own work, your own expertise, your own stories. Reply to every comment. And connect your social media to your website analytics so you can actually tell if it’s working.
Write one case study this month
20 of the 55 businesses I audited were sitting on brilliant stories they’d never written up. What was the situation before you got involved, what did you do and what changed? 300 words and a photo. It’ll do more for your credibility than any amount of service description rewriting.
Set up a proper CRM
If your client data is in a spreadsheet, a paper folder or your head, you’re losing business. HubSpot is free. The afternoon it takes to set up will pay for itself within a week.
Look at your analytics
If Google Analytics is installed on your website, log in. Just the overview. How many visitors this month, where they came from, which pages they looked at, where they left. Ten minutes, once a month. Make decisions based on evidence rather than guesswork.
Start collecting email addresses
Your email list is the one audience you own. Social media followers belong to the platform. Search rankings can change overnight. But your email list is yours. Even a simple sign-up box is a start.
Further reading
This case study covers the broad patterns. Over the coming weeks I’m publishing a series of deeper pieces, each focusing on a single topic from the audits. Here’s what’s coming.
- The mobile usability gap: why 64% of small business websites still fail on phonesA detailed look at the most common mobile problems I found across 55 audits, with before-and-after examples and a self-assessment checklist you can run on your own site in ten minutes.
- SEO for small businesses: the quick wins that take an afternoon and last for yearsA practical, non-technical guide to the SEO fixes that appeared in 76% of my audits. Page titles, meta descriptions, heading structure and internal links. No jargon, just actions.
- Your homepage is about your customer, not your companyWhy most small business homepages lead with the wrong thing, what the high-converting ones do differently and how to restructure yours without a redesign.
- From spreadsheet to CRM: a small business guide to making the switchA comparison of CRM options for businesses with fewer than 20 employees, drawn from the recommendations I made across 34 audits. Includes the specific features to prioritise and the ones you can ignore.
- Social media strategy for businesses that don’t have a marketing teamA realistic approach to social media when you’re the founder, the marketing department and the person who answers the phone. Based on what actually worked for the businesses I audited.
- The case study your business hasn’t written yetHow to write a case study that converts, with a simple three-part structure and real examples of the difference a single case study can make to SEO, trust and inbound enquiries.
- What a digital audit actually involves (and whether you need one)A transparent look behind the process: what I check, what tools I use, how long it takes and what you get at the end. Includes a self-audit framework for businesses that want to start on their own.
Not sure where to start?
Most clients begin with a conversation. No pitch, no hard sell.
Just a straightforward discussion about where you are and whether I can help.