A Marketing Health Check for SMEs is often the fastest way to uncover where growth is being held back, where money is being wasted, and what improvements will generate the biggest, quickest uplift. For Charles Slater, this health check formed the foundation of developing a stronger brand, a clearer value narrative and a more effective digital presence — all essential for attracting SaaS founders, GTM leaders, HR directors and private-equity stakeholders.

Most SME websites evolve over time without structure. Pages are added as needed, competitors change their positioning, and customer journeys become disconnected. The result is a site that “works” operationally, but doesn’t rank, convert or provide insight.

This is exactly what the Charles Slater assessment revealed: the site was built with good intentions, but not aligned to personas, not optimised for ranking, and not able to scale future content or analytics.

The SME marketing health check process fixes that. It reviews the six foundations that determine whether a business can grow through digital:

1. Competitor benchmarking – analysing five direct competitors, importing their keywords and assessing ranking difficulty and opportunity volume.

2. Analytics and measurement – installing Google Analytics and Search Console to track actual behaviour, traffic sources and future ROI.

3. Technical performance – using Google Lighthouse to highlight speed problems, image compression issues and platform limitations (in this case, IONOS).

4. CMS suitability – ensuring the website is manageable, editable, scalable and suitable for interns or a marketing exec to run.

5. Persona alignment – mapping target audiences against current content and identifying gaps.

6. Content plan – building the roadmap that links personas, pain points, search demand and revenue priorities.

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For Charles Slater, the result was clear: the site needed migration, clearer persona-specific journeys, better measurement foundations and a structured plan for content and growth.