Looking beyond likes and pretty websites - digital audits

Auditing a company's digital presence, doesn't start by asking how many followers it has but with a much simpler question:

If I knew absolutely nothing about this company, what would its digital presence tell me?

Within a few minutes, a potential customer is forming an impression of the business. They may arrive through Google, LinkedIn, Instagram, an advert, or a recommendation. They may then move between several of those touchpoints before deciding whether the business is credible, relevant and worth their time.

That means a company's digital presence isn't really a collection of individual channels.

It's one customer experience spread across multiple places.

This isn't simply looking for things that are "wrong". It's looking for friction, missed opportunities and inconsistencies between what a company wants to be and what its digital presence actually communicates.

Here's what I look at.

1. The first impression: "Who are you, and why should I care?"

Before getting technical, I look at the overall impression.

If someone landed on the company's website, LinkedIn profile or Instagram account for the first time, could they answer three questions quickly?

Who are you?

What do you do?

Why should I choose you?

This sounds obvious, but companies can make these surprisingly difficult to answer.

• A website can be beautifully designed and still communicate very little.

• A LinkedIn page can be regularly updated but say almost nothing about what differentiates the company.

• A social feed can contain excellent individual posts but feel completely disconnected from the website.

I'm particularly interested in the gap between what the company thinks it is communicating and what a stranger would actually understand.

This is where my design background becomes useful. Visual communication isn't decoration. Typography, imagery, colour, layout and motion all influence what someone notices first and what they perceive to be important.

2. Brand clarity and consistency

The next thing I look for is whether the company feels like the same company everywhere.

Not identical. Consistent.

There's an important distinction.

A LinkedIn post shouldn't necessarily look like a website landing page. An Instagram Reel shouldn't feel like a corporate brochure. An email doesn't need to use exactly the same format as a sales presentation. But the underlying brand should still be recognisable.

I look for consistency across:

• Visual identity

• Tone of voice

• Messaging

• Photography and video (authentic and original)

• Brand personality

• Value proposition

• Positioning (where are you in your market)

The question I ask is:

Would I know this was the same company if the logo disappeared?

If the answer is no, there may be a brand consistency problem. But I also look for the opposite problem: consistency without personality.

A company can follow its brand guidelines perfectly and still feel generic. That's why an audit shouldn't simply ask, "Are we following the brand guidelines?" It should ask:"Are the guidelines helping us become recognisable?"

3. The customer journey between channels

One of the biggest mistakes I see when thinking about digital presence is treating channels independently.

• Website.

• LinkedIn.

• Instagram.

• Google.

• Email.

• YouTube.

• Advertising.

They're often managed by different people, sometimes even different agencies, with different objectives. But the customer doesn't experience those departments.They experience the company.

So during an audit, I deliberately follow the journey.

For example: Google search → website → LinkedIn → team member's profile → enquiry form

or: LinkedIn post → company website → service page → case study → contact

I want to know:

• Does the message remain consistent?

• Does each channel answer the next question?

• Is it obvious what I should do next?

• Are there dead ends?

• Does one channel undermine another?

• Does the customer have to repeat information?

• Does the journey gradually build trust?

This is where a digital audit starts becoming a growth audit.

Because every unnecessary obstacle is potential lost demand.

The website: can someone actually use it?

Navigation

Can I find what I'm looking for without thinking too hard?

Messaging

Is it immediately understandable? Does the structure make sense from the customer's perspective rather than the company's internal organisational structure?

Content

Does the site answer the questions a potential customer actually has?

Trust

Are there reviews, case studies, credentials, client logos, testimonials, people, evidence or other signals that reduce uncertainty?

Conversion

Is there a clear next step?

Mobile

Does the experience work properly on the device most people are likely to use?

Accessibility

Can people with different abilities actually navigate and understand the site?

Performance

Does it load quickly and behave properly?

Good design should reduce cognitive effort, not create more of it.

SEO: can people find the company before they know the company?

SEO is another area where I think audits can become overly technical. Of course, technical SEO matters. But I also want to ask a much more commercial question: What does the customer search for before they search for this company?

That's where SEO becomes genuinely interesting. If I only optimise for the company's name and its own description of its services, I may be optimising for people who already know it exists. Instead, I want to understand the information journey.

Someone might search: "employment solicitor Bournemouth" before searching:"Lester Aldridge employment team" or, "how much does a brand strategy cost?" before searching for a particular agency. The opportunity sits in those earlier questions.

Search remains a major source of brand discovery. I see it as understanding what your audience wants to know before they are ready to buy.

My expertise: Content - are we just posting or actually communicating?

This is probably one of the areas I pay the most attention to and I have lots of experience in.

A company can post three times a week and still have a poor content strategy. The volume isn't the strategy. I look for the relationship between content and the customer's needs. I usually want to identify several different content functions:

Educate: Help people understand something.

Demonstrate expertise: Show that the company knows what it is talking about.

Build trust: Show the people, processes, results and experiences behind the business.

Create relevance: Connect the brand to conversations its audience actually cares about.

Differentiate: Give people a reason to remember this company rather than another one.

Convert: Give people a reason to take the next step.

If every post is "here's another thing our company does", the content quickly becomes self-centred. In my experience, the strongest content often starts with the audience's problem rather than the company's desire to promote itself. In other words, people don't necessarily want to be marketed at and I've always found self promoting posts with no useful information for the audience perform the worst.

They want something useful, interesting, entertaining, reassuring or worth sharing.

One of the first things I'll look at when auditing social media is the obvious stuff:

• Followers

• Reach

• Impressions

• Engagement

• Video views

• Clicks

• Profile visits

• Follower growth

But I don't stop there.

Because a high-performing post isn't automatically a successful piece of marketing. A post can receive thousands of views and produce no meaningful commercial outcome. Alternatively, a post with relatively modest reach might generate an excellent conversation with exactly the right potential customer.

So I don't simply ask:

"Which post got the most likes?"I ask, "What did this post achieve?"

That's a much more interesting question.

People and personality

This is particularly important for B2B companies.

If I look at a company's website and social channels and see only:

• Logos

• Stock photography

• Corporate graphics

• Product shots

• Promotional messages

I start wondering:

Where are the humans?

People buy from organisations, but they also build relationships with people.

That might mean:

• Founders

• Employees

• Subject-matter experts

• Customers

• Partners

• Creators

• Community members

This doesn't mean every company needs to suddenly become an influencer brand.

It means the digital presence should demonstrate that there are knowledgeable humans behind the organisation.

This is also where LinkedIn becomes particularly interesting. A company's LinkedIn page might be perfectly optimised, but if its founder and employees are saying something completely different — or saying nothing at all — there is a missed opportunity.

For a professional services business especially, employee expertise can be part of the brand.

Trust signals:

Every digital interaction contains an element of risk for the customer.

"Can I trust this company?"

"Are they legitimate?"

"Has anyone else used them?"

That's why I actively look for trust signals.

These might include:

• Testimonials

• Reviews

• Case studies

• Client results

• Recognisable customers

• Awards

• Accreditations

• Media coverage

• Transparent contact information

• Consistent information

Trust is built through the accumulation of evidence.

Competitors: not just what they're doing, but what they're owning

I also audit the competitive environment.

But I don't simply make a spreadsheet saying:

Company

Instagram followers

LinkedIn followers

Posting frequency

I'm more interested in:

• What topics does each competitor own?

• What language do they use?

• What audience are they speaking to?

• What content gets attention?

• What do customers appear to respond to?

• What questions are nobody answering?

• What territory is available?

  
  

The objective isn't necessarily to copy whoever has the biggest following; it's to find a gap. A competitor's weakness can be an opportunity but so can their strength.

If everyone in an industry communicates in exactly the same way, simply being slightly better at the same thing may not create much differentiation. Sometimes the opportunity is to communicate differently altogether.

What I ultimately want from an audit

The purpose of a digital audit isn't to produce a 40-page document full of red, amber and green boxes.

It's to answer:

Where are we now?

Where are we losing people?

Where are we already strong?

Where are the biggest opportunities?

What should we change first?

And perhaps most importantly:

What will make the biggest difference to the business?

That's the mindset I've found most useful moving from design and content into brand and growth.

Design taught me to look at how something is communicated.

Content taught me to think about why someone would pay attention.

Social taught me to watch how people actually respond.

Digital taught me to think about the journey between touchpoints.

And growth has added another question:

What happens next?

Because ultimately, I don't think a digital presence should simply look good.

It should make a company easier to understand, easier to trust, easier to find and easier to choose.

And that's what I'm looking for when I audit one.