Online presence review framework: Reviewing my online presence

You never fully understand the presence your brand has online until you write your online presence review. Looking at your company website from the perspective of a prospective client or customer, changes the way you look at your own brand identity, allowing you to remove any personal attachment and critique your current online presence. The biggest challenge of writing this review can come in many shapes and sizes. So what is an online presence review, what are the challenges it brings, and how can you overcome them? 

By taking stock and evaluating your online presence, your review is a chance to ask fundamental questions about where you are currently, and where you want to be in the future. 

It’s all too easy to let your online presence become dormant, so to give you structure, use these 5 main pillars:

• Positioning
• Content
• Creativity
• Demand Generation
• Engagement

Check out the “9 Steps To Perform An Online Presence Review” for the useful tools and metrics that will add the figures to the facts you find out below.

Increase your Positioning

Streamlining your positioning will maximize your SaaS offering, clearly defining your target market from the perspective of your audience and assessing the service and benefits you are currently promoting.

When assessing your online messaging and positioning, ask yourself these questions: 

• Are we clearly defining our brand voice and message?
• Are we clearly defining our ideal customer persona’s (ICP)?
• What benefits can our customers gain from our solution?
• Are we presenting what’s unique about our products?
• Are these benefits and features hitting our ICP’s pain points?

Review your Content

The content you produce has one goal; to resonate with your audience right where it hurts. Your overarching goal here is to create content that connects directly with your audience’s pain points. If your content is currently written with a passive, descriptive tone, don’t be afraid to rejuvenate past posts and get them singing the features of your product actively. This, combined with the back up of your customer’s voice, will stop your content from just describing what it can do, to what it actually has done. 

Home Page

The first page of your website is the first impression you might be making. Ask yourself the following questions to assess the utility and impact of your SaaS home page

• A short description of your SaaS offering? 
• What industry does it serve?
• Do you present its purpose? What does it fix? What pain point does it solve?
• What are the key benefits?
• What do you like? What do you not like?
• Is it clear and concise?
• Remove navigation bars distract the viewer
• Do you have a call to action?
• Do you have a contact form front and center?
• Do you offer value to the reader/prospect?

Photography & Graphics

A picture is worth a thousand words. If your imagery is inconsistent with your brand voice and value proposition, you might be sending the wrong impressions and confusing your audience  

Assess your photography & graphic design with the following questions in mind: 

• Is the site text dense? Can we reduce this through relevant graphics and photography?
• Are the current graphics and photography appropriate?
• Does the resolution become pixelated?
• Are they aiding or hindering the text and overall presentation of the website.
• Does it work on Mobile?
• Could your imagery be compressed?
• Does it become pixelated when viewed through different browsers and screens?
• How does your site perform? Can you encode your content, so it loads faster and uses less bandwidth?

Mediums - Testimonials, Infographics, Case Studies, Blogs, Videos

Media and content is your strongest ally, bringing your stated gains with the social proof to back the claims up. 

Assess the impact of your media with these main questions and find ways to optimize by considering the following:

• Are we making the most of our customer success stories, blogs, case studies, and testimonials? Do we present them, so they highlight the features and benefits of our product?
• Are we using Infographics and or Videos? They provide a fun option to encapsulate your messaging and keep the attention of the audience.
• Is the content intuitively picking up and making the most of our customer’s journey with us?
• Does the content relate back to the industry? Does it touch upon the pain points it was built for?
• Do our testimonials reflect our value proposition pillars?
• Are your competitors using that medium? If not, then consider it as an advantage you can exploit.

Check the Creativity

So your website isn’t receiving the clicks it deserves. This could be due to the way you present the Positioning and Content, overall formatting from fonts to colors, and how you navigate it should be clear, consistent, and concise.

Photography & Graphics

You’ve covered the Content side of things, now ask if they make sense, you want to make sure your graphics and photography are complimenting your text, not detracting from it.

• What’s the impact of the photography and graphics being used? 
• Are they engaging and relevant? 
• Do they aid or hinder your SaaS offering and brand voice?
• Do they help tell the story of the associated piece of content?
• Do the graphics follow the colour use of your site?
• Would the graphics work as a set without the website?

Branding, Colour Use, and Space

Consistency is vital, check you are keeping to your brand style guide.

• Is your logo presented clearly, in the same position across the navigation of your site?
• Do the colors used throughout the site complement the branding, are they garish or too faint?
• Consider the use of white space, Is there too little or too much? Can it offer more impact if complemented with your color set?

Fonts & Grammar

Communicate your messaging effectively.

• Are there mistakes?
• Are the same fonts and sizes used consistently, depending on context? Banners? Headers? Bulk text?
• Is the grammar used describing? If so, make sure it brings action.
• Past or present tense?

Page Links & Navigation

No one likes getting lost, so don’t lose them through your site, test your User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design.

• Is your content nestled under the appropriate headings? Are they lengthy or snappy? 
• Is the navigation complex? It should be simple with a click-through bringing you to new pages and content.
• Do you use buttons or links? Do they work?
• Are you creating an easy to use UX?
• Does the UI of the site make sense? Are things where you would expect to find them?

Demo, Support, and Training

New and returning customers want to find answers quickly, so test the following.

• Do you have a Demo button? Are those Demo options brought home in no more than two places?
• Do you provide Support and Training? Consider blogs or the use of contact forms and portals?
• Do you have a frequently asked questions section?

Generate Demand 

So it's time to back your findings up by running your site through some tools and testing your forms to see how they are responded to. You want your website to shine, so are you making the most out of your value proposition, keywords, and definitions in bringing your site to the top of the endless search results that will take that shining light away from you. Test your demo request or contacts page, SEO ranking, and overall presentation of your website before it has been clicked through. You have gone to all that trouble of making an attractive and connecting user experience, so why lose it to an algorithm?

Mystery Shopping

Test your Sales team by setting up a dummy run, enabling you the chance to see response times and how you present your product. This could be the make or break for bringing that new customer on board, so consider?

• Do you have a contact form? Does the contact form request all relevant information to give your sales teams multiple options for return contact?
• Does it run alongside an email sequence? Keeping your user in the loop is vital, so they know you have actively received their request. We all appreciate knowing we have been heard.
• Once submitted, how long does it take to receive a response?
• Is it geographically locked to your region, or is it open to all?
• Do you utilize content for intuitive ways to gain potential MQLs?
• How easy is it to get through to someone? Do you make use of a bot or have the contact information readily available?

SEO Rating

Run your website through an SEO tracker like Woorank. It’s free to use and will provide you with a ranking for lots of metrics like ranking, loading times, and the use of your keywords and how it affects things like your META Description and Content.

• Where does your site rank in its Google listings or other such Search Engine?
• Do you make use of Google Ads? Paying to push your site to the top of its desired search fields is a great tactic to utilize, isn’t expensive, and gives you another layer of analytics to track.
• How does your description rank? Is your META description hitting between the 70 - 160 character mark? Does it justify your offering and its competitive differentiation? 
• Look at your keywords or organic research, the SEO will show you how often these words pop up across the site. Ask yourself if your keywords are coming up multiple times and evaluate their ranking? Consider how you are using these throughout your content and whether they can be used more effectively?

Engage with your Audience

By far and away, one of the most important things you could request from a partner is a testimonial. You and your team put all that time and energy into making your product perfectly fit them, but you haven’t shared that success. In B2B SaaS, your product was built to fix a problem, so talk about it. Your audience wants to hear it, especially when they relate to the question or challenge you helped overcome.

Case Studies / Testimonials / Articles / Blogs

It’s time to make your SaaS offering shine, prove it works.

• Have you implemented any success stories in any of the forms above?
• Are they up to date and relevant?
• Do they sing your ICP’s?
• Do they promote the doing of what you built your SaaS offering for?
• Is the content concise and rich while expanding on your key features?

Social Media

Social Media lets you engage with your audience and cross the boundaries of generation in a variety of ways.

• Are you engaging with your audience across multiple platforms?
• Do you have the main three, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook?
• Are you presented anywhere else? In what way?
• How is your SaaS offering marketed on these sites? If its negative can fight back and offer a new perspective or update it with how you combatted this?
• Is your brand consistently represented across each platform? Consider your banners, profile pics, and company info, etc.
• Are you using sites like Youtube, Quora, and Reddit? The more you engage in different ways, the more you open up to finding new prospects.

Reviews

No one buys blindly online anymore, we live in a world that is influenced by the words of others, so take stock of what others are saying. 

• How are your reviews on Google? Could they be improved?
• Are your appraisals consistent across your social media platforms? 
• Do your reviews offer the chance to click through to your website, ebook, or demo?
• Do they promote the benefits and features of your product?
• Are you reviewed anywhere else? Can you be reviewed anywhere else?

Content

Engage with your content, ask questions, and make recommendations on how it could be improved.

• Take the opportunity to ask if your content is thought-provoking?   
• Does your content connect with the ICP’s?
• Is it singing the benefits your product has? Does it show how it fixes the problem?

Final Words

Don’t fall into the trap of ticking your website off your to-do list once it’s up and running, your website should change and grow as your SaaS offering does. It is your opportunity to shine a light and bring tangibility to your product. So regularly check in on your online presence, asking yourself the above along with the “9 Steps To Perform An Online Presence Review”. You can rest assured your online presence will be your biggest asset rather than your biggest liability.