So, you listened to countless advice and guides claiming the importance of a website for your business. You wait enthusiastically for the data to confirm that you reached more customers which led to more conversion for your business. In reality, your brand or website most probably drowned in a sea of competition from better optimized and well-known sites and you ended up with not much to show for it.

If you start wondering why you cannot generate more leads or why your prospective clients cannot find you in search engines, then you are starting to think on the right track. You might even stalk your competitors’ sites to discover this magical sauce of search engine visibility.

Getting the answers to these questions can drastically help improve your online presence, and to get these answers, you either need to conduct an extensive total online presence audit by yourself or you can hire a professional agency to do it for you.

What is Online Presence Audit?

Online Presence Audit (OPA) is one of the very first steps in identifying action items so that your prospects can find your business online. An audit produces a roadmap of your current online exposure. It maneuvers through various Key Performance Indicators (KPI) of a strong online presence like current ranking, keyword relevancy, and a review of your website, social media, and more. This gives you readable data to gauge where you stand among competitors.

Audits vary according to the industries or businesses it is carried out for, but most audits consist of a detailed report on one of the given topics:-

A complete and comprehensive review of your website

Analysis of your current Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Current keywords ranking data

Analysis of your content effectiveness

Social media presence

Review of online reputation

Competitive landscape

Critical website elements to fix (on-page and off-page fixes to be made)

Once all these steps are completed, you will be able to draw a clear picture of what is currently working for you and your business and what are the areas you can focus your marketing and lead generation efforts on.

So how exactly do you go about doing a complete Online Presence Audit of your website? Well, let’s dive further into the specifics and see the specifics involved in creating such actionable data.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of generating more organic traffic to your website by increasing the quality of the webpage such that search engines like Google and Bing ranks them higher.

SEO is generally categorized into two broad categories:-

On-page SEO

The rank of a website is greatly affected by the on-page elements of that website and as such, it is something that cannot be ignored. The primary goal of On-page SEO is to make it easier for the search engines and users to understand what your website is ultimately about. Some things that are focused on this topic include:-

Measuring the effectiveness and design of the home page which plays a vital role in grabbing the viewer’s attention and encourage him to explore other sub-pages.

Reviewing the code of the website to ensure that the title tag, alt text, meta description, H1 tags, schema, etc are all optimized and within their respective character limits.

Measuring whether the website is catering effectively to all the devices and browsers that try to access it.

Ensuring the website is using standard design guidelines which allow the users to quickly understand the navigation of the website. Some common design guidelines are clickable logo that brings you back to the home page, inclusion of business hours, address and phone numbers for local business, etc.

Off-page SEO

These are the sum total of actions taken outside of your own website that impacts your ranking within the search pages. Off-page elements that contribute to your rankings are:-

Domain authority

No of referring domains to your website

No of indexed pages on your website

How much traffic do you get and where are they coming from?

Gaining backlinks from sites with much higher authority and traffic than yours can certainly increase the search engines and user perception of your website’s quality.

Content and website structure

Quality content is a really effective medium to build relevance and authority in the digital world. During an audit, the following things are focused on:-

Does your website help to address a problem that the user might be facing?

Is the Call To Action (CTA) effective and manages to capture the audience’s attention?

Is there enough content on the homepage (300-400 recommended)?

Is there an opportunity to blog and create relevant and meaningful content?

Competitive landscape

This part might not be as prosperous, but it will still benefit you to learn the strategies being adopted by your direct competitors. You can get an idea of what keywords they rank high in, where their most profitable backlinks are coming from and what market they are trying to dominate.

Social media presence

Social media has had a tremendous impact on how clients and businesses have interacted in the past few years. Having a strong social media presence can bring a few advantages like building credibility with the clients, building strong relations with the customers and engaging your audience. In the audit, the focus is given to:-

The status of your social media page in terms of branding, audience engagement, and activity.

Whether you are you present on all social channels relevant to your business?

Whether your websites features all your social media icons

Online reputation

Managing a strong and positive online reputation helps to build credibility among existing and new customers. If people can trust the quality of service you can deliver and if you can provide ways to validate this, then you are sure to have a higher rank on search engines and attract more customers. Your online reputation stems from reviews and ratings provided by users on your social media profiles like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc or from directory listings like google, bing, yelp, etc.

There is no shortage of tools online that can help you carry out a full audit of your website but it’s hard to gauge how accurate and reliable these tools are. In the end, if you decide to hire a professional agency to carry out a complete Online presence Audit for your business, then our team is here to find out more about your business and analyze why your business is lagging behind the competitors. Once you submit an order for the audit, our team puts you at the forefront to research your business and analyze the information collected. At the end of the research, our team prepares a personalized online presence audit report to guide you to grow your business and help your customers find your business online.