What the Bellmark Audit Found
Presence, technical audit & operations · Paducah, KY · about 7 minutes
Before asking a client to trust me with their marketing, I ran my own playbook on Bellmark Projects. The audit found four problems on my own site, including a template store quietly selling $99 consulting from a team that doesn't exist.
Before you read on
If someone else built your website, or you built it yourself from a template, there is a reasonable chance it is publishing something you don't know about. Mine was. Nothing here requires any technical knowledge to follow, and there's one thing at the end you can check on your own site in about thirty seconds.
The short version
- I ran the same technical audit on my own site that I run on client sites. It found four problems.
- The worst was a leftover template store, live and indexed by Google, advertising fake $99 consulting from a staff of consultants I don't have.
- Google was also writing my search listing for me, because not one page on the site had a description. It pulled a price from that fake store into the listing.
- All four are fixed and verified against the live pages. The same discipline runs behind every client engagement, which is the actual reason this page exists.
Why I audited myself first
Someone hears the name Bellmark Projects, from a referral or an invoice or a comment on a post, and searches it. What they find in the next thirty seconds decides whether they get in touch. I had never checked what that search actually returned.
So I ran the three things I sell on myself first: the presence build, the technical site audit, and the operating system that runs every engagement. This is what each one was worth.
What the audit found
Every Squarespace, Wix and Shopify theme ships with demo content: placeholder pages, sample products, filler copy, working titles. You build your real pages on top of it. The demo content stays published, stays in the sitemap and stays crawlable, because nothing in the interface tells you it's still there. Most template-built sites are carrying some of it right now. Mine was.
A sitemap is the list of pages your site hands to Google, saying "these are mine, please index them." You never see it. Google reads it every time it visits.
I ran the same technical audit on bellmarkprojects.co that I run on client sites. It found four things.
A template store, live and indexed
A leftover Squarespace demo page sat in my own sitemap, publicly crawlable, titled "Store 2." It held four placeholder products priced from $99 to $249, with boilerplate copy, stock photography, a live Add to Cart button and a working contact form. Four product URLs were separately indexed. It advertised prices roughly 90% below my real rate card and referred to "our consultants," a team that doesn't exist.
Zero meta descriptions
Squarespace's own SEO panel reported 0 of 5 pages carrying metadata. With nothing supplied, Google writes its own search snippet. The one it wrote for me trailed off mid-sentence into a price fragment from the fake store.
Working titles shipped to production
Page titles read "Services New," "Pricing New," "Store 2." Placeholder names sitting in the strongest on-page SEO field there is.
A duplicate homepage
Two homepages, both published, both in the sitemap, competing with each other for the same searches.
What that was costing: anyone who searched the business by name could land on a page quoting a tenth of the real rate, from a company with staff it doesn't have. Google had indexed it. The missing descriptions meant Google was writing my search listing for me, and pulling the price fragment from that same fake store into it.
What I did: deleted the store and its four product pages, removed the duplicate homepage, wrote titles and descriptions for all five remaining pages, and set the site-level title format to carry both the positioning and the location.
Worth doing on your own site: open yoursite.com/sitemap.xml and count the URLs. If there are more than the pages you built, the difference is template debt, and it's competing with you.
The name collision
Being findable now means two things: ranking in search, and being described correctly when someone asks an AI assistant about you. More prospects start there every month, and unlike a page of search results, an AI answer is a single paragraph with no second option.
I tested my own. Asked about "Bellmark Projects," Google's AI Overview opened by suggesting I meant Belmark, a packaging manufacturer building a $99 million plant in Scottsville, Kentucky. A larger, near-identically-named company in my own state, offered as the correction to my name.
"Did you mean Belmark? A packaging manufacturer building a $99 million plant in Scottsville, Kentucky."
An accurate description of Bellmark Projects as a marketing consultancy, with the services listed correctly. No misdirect.
The collision runs deeper than the summary. Every autocomplete suggestion for the name returns Belmark. "People also ask" is entirely Belmark. Belmark holds the second organic result for my exact brand name.
What I did: rebuilt the Google Business Profile with a description leading on Paducah and western Kentucky, added six marketing-specific services, cross-linked all three verified social profiles, and wrote the location and the discipline into every page title and description on the site.
What I'm not claiming
I'm not calling that a result. It's one query, tested once, and AI summaries don't give the same answer twice. Ask again next week and Belmark may be back. A complete profile probably helped. One test can't prove it did.
What I already know it won't fix is autocomplete. Those suggestions are driven by how many people search each name, and Belmark is a far bigger company than I am. No amount of profile work changes that.
So the realistic goal is narrower: when someone does land on me, every source should describe the business correctly. That is ongoing work rather than a one-time fix, which is why Search and AI Visibility is one of my five services rather than a footnote.
The build
What I built from scratch
The audit is the part of this story with a villain in it, so it gets the attention. Most of the work was building things that didn't exist at all.
Brand system
A palette, type stack and logo mark, documented as standards rather than left to drift per platform: ink, cream and bronze, a serif display face with no license to manage, and a single monogram that reads at 40 pixels in a feed where a wordmark can't. One positioning line used everywhere, trimmed from the end to fit a character limit and never rewritten. Before this, four channels were describing four different companies.
Public presence
A complete Google Business Profile with a defined service area and six named services, taken through video verification. A LinkedIn company page with positioning copy, twelve specialties and a published services list. A website that answers what I do, who it's for and how to reach me. Then a consistency layer over all of it: one exact name, one link destination, one logo, one line.
Search & AI visibility
Titles and descriptions written for every page, a site-level title format carrying both the discipline and the location, and a Google Business Profile rebuilt to lead on Paducah and western Kentucky. This is the work that changed what an AI assistant says when someone asks who Bellmark Projects is.
The operating system
One permanent home per client. A five-document backbone cloned on day one. Date-stamped versioning with a superseded-never-deleted rule. A four-phase engagement lifecycle with defined triggers at each step. A two-layer reporting cadence: client-facing monthly in a fixed shape, internal weekly.
Automation
The parts of running a consultancy that don't need a person doing them by hand: templated project spin-up, persistent client context carried between sessions, and report generation that starts from the last one rather than a blank page. A new client goes from signed to fully structured in about ten minutes, and a monthly report takes fifteen instead of an afternoon. This is the same question I ask on client work, pointed at my own desk.
What it cost
Total software spend across all of it was the website subscription. The rest is free infrastructure most businesses start and never finish. What it took was knowing the order to do it in, and finishing.
What a prospect finds now
Search the name today and every surface agrees. The same positioning line, the same logo, the same link. A complete Google Business Profile with a defined service area and six named services, taken through video verification. A LinkedIn company page with a published services list. Five site pages, each with a real title and description behind it.
What a client gets from this
The same system that runs Bellmark runs every engagement. In practice that means:
- You always know where a decision lives. One permanent project home holds every document, deliverable and decision, so nobody reconstructs a six-week-old conversation from memory.
- Reports arrive in the same shape every time: results by channel, what it means, this period's plan, what I need from you. Nothing to decode, and nothing buried.
- You can see what's waiting on you. A standing list of what's blocked and who is blocking it, updated weekly, including when the answer is me.
- Nothing gets quietly overwritten. Deliverables are dated and superseded rather than deleted, so there's a trail you can follow back.
- Your ad spend never runs through my invoice. It goes straight from your accounts to the platforms. You own the accounts and see the real numbers.
- A new engagement is fully structured in about ten minutes, instead of a first month spent on setup you're paying for.
Most consultancies build this years in, if ever. I built it before the second client, because it's what makes the second client's experience as good as the first's.
And I published what the audit found. The findings were ordinary, which is exactly why they were worth publishing. Template debt, missing metadata and placeholder titles are three of the most common problems on small business websites, and almost nobody checks for them, including, until I looked, me. That's the same audit you'd get.
Want this behind your marketing?
Start with what your own sitemap is hiding
The presence build and the technical audit are my Audit and Foundation and Search and AI Visibility services. The operating discipline comes standard with every engagement.
If you want to know what your own site is publishing without your knowledge, that's where I start.
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