We are going to talk about the total online presence audit. If you're trying to figure out why you're not generating leads from your website or if your competitors are gaining key keyword advantages on Google,whether they're in Google ads or on the first page of Google.
A good place to start is to conduct a total online presence audit. Now in a total online presence audit, there's a:- website review
- editorial content review
- SEO factors
- social profile review
- Google my business review
- Directory and citation review
- online reputation and
- competitive landscape.
Website Review
Now for your website review, is it mobile optimized? Go through and see on your home page and your about page whether there's a title tag, all texts on your pictures, a meta-description h one tags and schema.
You can use the website grader from HubSpot or Woorank to help you discover these website elements faster.
Editorial Content
Now for your editorial content, does the homepage actually address a problem? Is there a good call to action on your homepage to build trust and is there a target audience that your homepage is going after? That's very important for B2B businesses.
Is there also 300 to 400 words on the homepage because you need some words on your homepage for SEO so that Google and search engines can find you. Is there a good clear call to action in your header bar and in the top fold of your pages and are there content upgrades where people can swap their information for content upgrades such as to a white paper? You can put that on your homepage or put it deeper within your website.
SEO Factors
Finally, is there also a blog for your website? That's a good way to build SEO value as well. Now next is SEO factors and backlinks. We like to use Moz.com for our SEO research, figuring out what your domain factor is, whether or not you have any inbound links and how many index pages you have and what traffic you have. Those are really important factors for your SEO, particularly your domain. The number of inbound links you have and how many websites are linking to your website that builds trust and authority online in Google's eyes.
Social Profile Review
Now next for social profiles, you need to be where your target audience is hanging out online. For most B2B businesses, that would be LinkedIn. Now you want to have measures of your engagement, your activity, and your branding on your social platform. Now I recommend using LinkedIn if you're a B2B business, but you can also use Facebook too. It just depends on where your audience is. So you need to know where your audience is hanging out before you decide to choose LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter to hang out or even Instagram.
You also you want your website to have social icons to link back to your social profiles. We like using a tool called RivalIQ to see what your competitors are doing in the social space as well.
Google My Business Page
In the B2B space, I've seen a lot of knowledge blocks instead of Google My Business pages. But the good thing about having a Google My Business pages that you can collect reviews from your customers, which increases the trust that you have online. When your prospective customers or clients are doing research on you, they can go to your Google my business page and look at the reviews on there. Is the category accurate? Is your name, address and phone number, accurate and consistent? Are there reviews for your business and are their photos and posts to see? So your prospective clients can see that you're an actual business and you're actually human as well.
Directory and Citation Review
We use a tool called Yext to make sure that all of our directories and citations are the same across the Internet. And we also use Yext for schema markup as well. So schema markup would be put under the SEO category, but we use Yext for Schema markup as well.
Are you maintaining the constant name, address and phone number across the web, like in Yelp and Facebook and other platforms?
Online Reputation
What are, what is your review saying on Google, Facebook and even on LinkedIn and your personal reviews? What are, what are they saying? We like to use a tool called Birdeye to keep track of our reviews and reputation and we do that for our clients as well.
Competitive Landscape
Who are your competitors and what are their top posts on social media? How are you comparing to them in terms of follower accounts and engagement on their posts? You can see where they're doing better than you, so you can get better and hopefully do better than your competitors. Now, a lot of people say that the followers and likes are kind of like vanity metrics and they are in a sense, if you don't have your ideal customer or ideal client engaging with your post. We use a tool called Rival IQ to monitor our competitors’ social media. That includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube. And you can monitor what they're saying across different timescales, such as six months to a year.
That’s the Total Online Presence Audit in a nutshell! Book your free assessment here.
