Most marketing failures are not execution failures. They are sequencing failures — the right activity performed at the wrong stage.
Every engagement runs this sequence — including the ones that end at stage six with us telling you not to proceed.
Channels, spend, lead volume, customer value. Most businesses cannot state their own average customer value — that single number determines everything downstream.
Live data, not opinion. Real search visibility, competitor positions, map-pack standing and technical condition, pulled from the same sources we use for paying clients.
The distance between where you are and where you said you want to be, expressed in your own numbers. We do the arithmetic you have not done.
SEO first, paid first, both, or neither — with the reasoning shown and drawn from your own answers. This is the stage that does not exist anywhere else in the industry.
Staged, dated and scoped. What happens in month one, month three, month nine. Built against current Google core updates and current AI-retrieval behavior.
Can you fund it? If yes, price and terms. If no, the phased path — fixed-fee work in priority order. A "no" here is a legitimate outcome, not a failed sale.
No price is quoted, and no service named, until the reading is done. A recommendation made before the diagnosis is a product pitch with a diagnosis attached afterwards.
Every claim in your plan traces to something measured — your numbers or live data pulled from your actual search footprint. Nothing rests on our judgment alone.
Doing more is not the lever. Doing things in the order that lets each one work is. Most stalled marketing is competent work stacked in the wrong order.
The model can conclude you should not hire us. That possibility is what makes the rest of it worth anything.
Live data on your actual site. No card, and you keep the findings either way.
Begin the diagnosticStraight answers
These are pulled from what Google is actually being asked in this market — not a list we made up. Answered the way we would answer them on a call.
Make them diagnose before they propose. Ask what they measured, what they would fix first, and what they would deliberately not do yet. An agency that recommends the same service to every business it meets is not choosing for you. The sequence they propose tells you more than the price does — most marketing fails because it was done in the wrong order, not because it was done badly.
Averages are close to useless here, because the same average covers a sole trader in a quiet niche and a multi-location operator fighting for a metro. What determines your number is the size of the gap between where you rank now and where you need to, the competitiveness of the terms, and how quickly you need it closed. Eskay Marketing quotes after the diagnostic has measured those, not before.
A diagnostic-first framework for deciding what to fix first. It evaluates six factors — search visibility, conversion capability, lead response, market competitiveness, economics, and funding capacity — and returns a sequence rather than a package. Its outputs include telling a business to wait, or to fix follow-up before buying traffic. We qualify our clients, not the other way around.
