How to audit your online presence in an afternoon

Your business exists in more places than you put it. Directory listings you never made. A Yelp page someone else created. An old Facebook page with the wrong hours. A Google Business Profile with a photo from four years ago.

An online presence audit is just going and looking at all of it, in order, the way a customer would. It takes an afternoon and it usually turns up something embarrassing. Here's how to do it properly.

What an online presence audit actually covers

Three things, and most people only check the first.

Your website — not whether it loads, but whether someone who's never heard of you can tell what you do and how to contact you within a few seconds.

Your profiles and listings — Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, Instagram, and whichever industry directories matter in your category. These are what people check before they visit your site, which makes them higher-stakes than most owners assume.

The gaps — places you should be and aren't. This is the part nobody thinks to audit, because you can't see what isn't there.

Step one: find everything

Before you can review it, you need the list — and it will be longer than you expect.

Search your business name. Not on your own computer, where Google knows you. Open a private window and search your name, then your name plus your city, then your name plus your main service. Write down everything on the first two pages.

Search your phone number and your address. This surfaces listings that don't use your exact business name — the ones created by aggregators, or by an employee in 2019, or by a customer.

Check the obvious platforms directly. Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, Instagram, Apple Maps, Bing Places, and whatever is standard in your industry.

Write it all in one place. A spreadsheet is fine. One row per property, with the URL and who controls it. Half the value of an audit is just having the list.

Step two: the consumer pass

Now go through the list once as a customer would — quickly, impatiently, without any inside knowledge.

For each property, three questions:

Can I tell what this business does? In about three seconds, without scrolling.

Can I tell whether it's still open and real? Recent photos, recent reviews, current hours. A listing that looks abandoned reads as closed, even when it isn't.

Can I contact them the way I want to? Some people call. Some fill in forms. Some message on Instagram and expect an answer. Every one of those paths should work.

Be honest here. It's harder than it sounds to look at your own business as a stranger, and the whole exercise fails if you grade generously.

Step three: the marketer pass

Second time through, looking for what's broken rather than what's confusing.

Consistency. Name, address, and phone number identical everywhere. Not "Street" in one place and "St." in another. Search engines treat inconsistency as uncertainty.

Completeness. Most profiles are half-filled. Categories, service lists, attributes, hours including holidays, photos. The fields exist because they get used.

Broken things. Dead links, 404 pages, forms that don't submit, a phone number that goes nowhere. Test the contact form. Actually submit it.

Reviews. Not just the rating — whether anyone replied. Unanswered reviews, good or bad, read as nobody's home.

Ownership. Can you actually log in and edit each of these? Unclaimed listings are the most common finding in any audit, and they're usually the easiest fix.

What to fix first

You'll finish with a long list and limited time. Order it like this:

Anything factually wrong. Wrong hours, wrong phone number, wrong address. These actively cost you customers today.

Anything unclaimed. Claim it before you improve it. You can't fix what you don't control.

Broken contact paths. A form that doesn't send is worse than no form.

Incomplete profiles on platforms that matter. Usually Google first, then whichever platform your customers actually use — which may not be the one you assume.

Everything else. Photos, descriptions, secondary directories. Real value, but none of it matters while your phone number is wrong somewhere.

What most audits miss

The gaps. You'll naturally review what exists. Ask separately: where should we be that we aren't? A missing profile on the platform your customers use is invisible in any review of what you already have.

Mobile. Check every property on an actual phone. Not a narrow browser window — a phone. Things break there that look fine on a desktop.

The path between properties. Someone finds your Yelp listing, clicks through to your site, and lands on a homepage that doesn't mention the thing they were looking at. Each property being fine doesn't mean the journey is.

Old accounts. A Twitter account last posted to in 2021 isn't neutral. It suggests a business that started things and stopped.

When it's worth having someone else do it

Doing this yourself is entirely reasonable, and if you've got an afternoon, do it. Two situations make it worth handing over.

You can't see it fresh. You built it, so you know where everything is and what it means. That's exactly the knowledge that makes it hard to spot what a stranger would find confusing.

You want the fixes done, not just found. A list of twenty problems is only progress if someone works through it.

That's what our digital presence audit is — a person, not an automated scanner, going through everything the way a customer would, then handing you a prioritized document. We can make the changes too, or you can. Either way you keep the document.