I ran a Growth Investigation on my own business — and published all of it

Anyone can say they find what a website is quietly losing. It is harder, and more convincing, to show it on your own business — including the awkward parts. So I ran the full investigation on MyLedgerBook, my Irish bookkeeping software, exactly as a paying client would receive it. Here is what it found, and the three moves it ended on.

The first lesson came straight out of data I already had. Google Search Console showed that two pages were already close to page one — a guide on the Return of Trading Details (RTD) sat around position 14, and "VAT invoice requirements Ireland" around position 16 — while the broad term everyone wants, "accounting software Ireland", languished down between positions 77 and 90, firmly owned by Xero and Sage. The instinct is always to write more, or to bid on the big term. The evidence said the opposite: improve the two assets Google already rated, and leave the broad fight until later. Most businesses never open the report that would tell them this.

The investigation also found something I would rather it had not. My own Terms page — the version showing in search — still carried an old "early access" clause and a defunct .eu contact address, left over from an earlier stage and out of step with the live product. That is cosmetic right up until you remember that a cautious buyer of financial software reads the legal pages as a trust check. It is exactly the kind of quiet contradiction an owner stops seeing on their own site, and an outside pair of eyes catches in a minute. Finding it on my own site was uncomfortable. That is rather the point.

Just as useful was what the report told me not to do: do not buy more traffic until each click teaches you something, and do not turn every search query into an article. Restraint is part of the method. A review that finds a hundred things to fix is not a review — it is a to-do list nobody completes.

It ended, as every investigation does, on three moves rather than a long list. One: fix the remaining trust contradictions. Two: strengthen the VAT-invoice and RTD pages that were already close, before chasing broad software terms. Three: turn the gaps competitors leave — unlimited invoicing, euro-first pricing, a genuine switching path — into specific comparison and Irish-compliance content. Win the narrow Irish problems first, and let that authority carry the broader pages later.

That is the whole method, applied to my own business and published unedited: the evidence, what it means, and three moves — not 147 warnings. The complete report is below. If you want to know what the same investigation would find on yours, that is what the free brief is for.