I run online presence audits for a living. Here's mine, unedited.
An online presence audit is a list of every place the internet describes your business, and a judgment about whether each one is right, wrong, or missing. That’s it. It is not a strategy document and it is not an SEO report. It’s an inventory.
I sell them. I had not run one on my own business.
So I ran one. Here is the whole thing.
The Google Business Profile
The profile is claimed and one hundred percent verified. That’s the step most owners get stuck on, and it was done.
Everything after that was not:
- No phone number.
- No hours.
- Category: “Branding agency.” I don’t sell branding. I sell a fixed-price fix for local businesses whose information is wrong online.
- Most recent photo: not current.
- 330 views.
That last number is the one that matters, and it’s the one most people misread. Three hundred and thirty people found the listing. The problem was never that nobody came. The problem is that when they arrived there was no phone number to call, no hours to check, and a photo that no longer showed the business as it is.
A presence problem does not look like an absence of traffic. It looks like traffic that arrives and leaves.
The fix was four fields. Category, hours, a contact route, photos. Under two minutes of actual work against a listing that several hundred people had already looked at.
Everything that isn’t Google
I keep a registry of every surface my business could appear on — owned, unclaimed, or absent. On the day I counted, it held 36 rows:
- 14 I own or have claimed
- 9 are flatly absent — no YouTube, no X, no TikTok, no Reddit, no Instagram
- 5 I have never checked at all — Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Yelp among them
“Never checked” is the interesting category. Not neglected. Not deprioritized. Never looked at once. My LinkedIn company page has three followers and no posts. The Instagram handle for my own company name was sitting unclaimed and available — free, and I simply hadn’t gone and taken it.
The one that undoes the others
No Google Search Console property.
My keyword registry has 45 terms in it. The search-volume column on every single one reads unverified, because there is no measurement attached to any of it. I had opinions about what I ranked for. I had no data.
This is the failure that makes the other failures invisible. You can neglect a listing and still notice the phone isn’t ringing. You cannot notice what you were never counting.
The contradiction
My Clutch profile positions a $200–300/hour enterprise brand partner. My website sells a fixed-price system to small businesses starting at $39.
Both are live. Both are mine. They disagree with each other in public.
The reviews there are real — 5.0 from two verified clients, and those two are the only clients I can point to by name, because they published the reviews themselves. But if you’re a local business owner and Clutch is the first thing you find, you’ve priced me out before you ever reach the page with the actual price on it. AI answer engines read that profile too.
There’s also a company in Wales with the same name, on a profile nobody has claimed, that outranks mine. I can’t edit that one. I can only make mine better.
What this costs a business that isn’t mine
I’m a marketing company and my own listing was wrong. A plumber or a nail salon has a considerably better excuse than I do.
But the cost is not symmetrical. When BrightLocal surveyed consumers in 2023, 62% said they would avoid using a business if they found incorrect information about it online. That’s stated intent in a survey, not observed behavior — people don’t always do what they say they’d do. Still, the direction is not really in dispute, and it lands hardest on exactly the businesses least equipped to notice: the ones with no analytics, no agency, and no reason to go looking.
One honest caveat on the fixes, because this is where presence services oversell. Not every duplicate listing can be merged. Apple currently documents no route for merging duplicate pins. Where a platform supports merging, you merge; where it doesn’t, you claim the correct listing, correct it, report the duplicate, and tell the owner it’s outstanding rather than calling it done. Anyone promising you a clean merge across every platform is promising something the platforms don’t offer.
Run it on yourself
None of what I found was hard. It was unclaimed, unfilled, uncategorized and unmeasured, and it stayed that way because nobody ever sat down and listed it out.
The list is the entire product. That’s not a modest claim about the work — it’s the actual mechanism. Most presence problems are not difficult once written down, and are invisible until they are.
So here’s the same checklist I ran on myself. Eight pages, fifteen minutes, scored out of 44. It’s free and there’s no call attached to it.
If the Google section is where your score falls apart, the GBP Optimization Kit is $39 and includes a 30-day activation calendar and review-request templates.
If you’d rather not do it yourself, the Presence Fix is $349 — I run the audit, fix what can be fixed, tell you plainly what can’t, and re-check it after 30 days.
Score yours. Mine was ugly, and I sell these.
Want this done for your business?
An online presence audit is a list of every place the internet describes your business, and a judgment about whether each one is right, wrong, or missing.