7 Steps to a Complete Visibility Audit

0:00Hey, this is John, and before we get started, I have a gift for you for being such an amazing listener. Everyone's talking about AI these days, but most of it's about tactics. We've created a series of prompts we use to create strategy, and you can have them for free. Just go to dtm.world slash free prompts and grab yours. Now let's get started.

0:30it. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Chance and no guests today. I'm going to do a solo show. I'm going to do, in fact, a couple shows on the whole broad topic of SEO, which depend upon who you talk to today is either dead or has at least a new name. And so I'm going to add to that conversation. SEO is definitely not dead. However, I'm going to add to that conversation that I think we need to think about it differently. It is more about visibility. That's what we're really trying to get our clients. Not so much rankings. It's visibility in a lot of the different ways that people are choosing to find their answers.

1:12Obviously, people are going to AI tools. Google and other search engines are showing them AI answers. So there's no question that has become a part of the game that we have to pay attention to, but not at the absence of many of the other things. I mean, people still make recommendations. They make referrals for a lot of businesses. They are definitely going to Google and looking in that map pack and they're looking at your reviews. So there's many things that lead to whether or not somebody is going to go on that journey with you or not. Obviously, one of the steps is about being seen and found, but it's a lot more, it goes a lot deeper than just that.

1:50So what I want to talk about today is actually doing a visibility audit. I'm going to give you the elements that I think are important and talk a little bit about how you might think about them and how you might do them as well. And then we'll have a checklist in the show notes for this. So if you want to head on over to Duct Tape Marketing, the podcast and find this show, the visibility audit, you will be able to acquire that checklist as well. So let's get into the steps in there. So the first one is, is your brand showing up in Google's AI overview? So pretty simple. Go to Google and search the top service products, questions in Google that are related to your company, your industry, your brand, and see if you get cited.

2:37in any of those. Now, as we go through these, and you do have the checklist, you can assign a score to that, do a dozen or so searches, and one to five, how'd you do? There's a tool out there that I've been playing around with that I'll tell you about. It's called Gum Shoe, like chewing gum, gumshoe.ai. And it will really give you, I think, some, you can run a report and get the very detailed information about where you show up in AI. All right, the next one, and this is, of course, hyper, hyper important for local businesses, and that is your local pack presence. So on the maps or when somebody searches and it's clearly a location-based type of search.

3:15I mean, sometimes people actually put a town in there, but even if they don't, if they're looking for something in a town, Google knows where they are. So do searches around your same thing, your business, your industry, your products and services, your brand, and do you appear in the Google Map pack? So do If you happen to be in that town, you can do your service near you. Checklisting, star reviews, optimization, not just of your own, but look at your competitors. What are they doing? All right. Speaking of reviews, volume, freshness, sentiment, all really count. Google doesn't want to see that you got 100 reviews one day and then haven't gotten any for three years.

3:57So are your reviews strong and recent enough to inspire trust? because it's not just Google. It's the, you know, if you go somewhere and nobody's reviewed a business for four years, doesn't that make you a little suspicious, right? So go to Google business profile, of course, but also today, you know, I used to kind of be negative on Yelp and I'm still not a huge fan of Yelp, but increasingly those reviews are being drawn in by AI. So we need to look at all the industry review sites, look at account rating, recency responses. Again, this can apply for your competitors as well. Media mentions an authority.

4:38A big part of the game and showing up today is really about authority. And most media sites, like it or not, are seen as authority. So if you get quoted in the local paper, if you get quoted in the Wall Street Journal, and they link back to your website, even if they don't link back to your website, but they mentioned your business, all the crawlers are now picking that kind of information up and really assigning a lot of authority. If the Wall Street Journal talked about you, you must know something. So is your business being cited in any credible resources or sources, I should say, beyond your own website?

5:15You can look in Google News. You can do podcast searches. You can use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush, you know, tools like that to find citations, backlinks, mentions of your brand. And again, right now, all we're doing is auditing. These are the key components. Once you have a sense of or a sense of dread or a sense of where you stand in these, then we can start talking about how to fix them. All right. You've probably heard people talk about this acronym EAT, E-E-A-T. So it stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trust. It's basically proof points, especially on your website. So are you adding experience, expertise, authority, and trust in any of your web pages, any of your blog posts?

6:06So do we have author bios? Do we have testimonials? Do we have pricing that's transparent? Case studies? Is there original research? Schema markup also helps identify what those various elements are. So even if you've written content three, four years ago, going back and thinking about how could we add a case study, an actual example of somebody getting a result that we're talking about here? How can we get quotes from clients or how can we get quotes from other experts that would really validate what it is that we're talking about? All right, content fit for AI. So is your content structured for AI?

6:45There is now a somewhat formulaic way to make your content more structured for AI. So things like lists, step-by-step how-tos, answers. You've probably heard people talk about answer engine optimization. And a lot of times people are going to AI tools and asking very long, detailed, filtered questions. So the more you can provide these short, structured answers to the types of questions that people are asking in conversation, it's totally different than ranking for some keyword term. You might show up for a percentage of searches on a very specific term because you've answered a very specific answer.

7:25So FAQs fit right into that as well. So you can, again, go back to your content if you've written it before and add a step-by-step how-to, add an overview of what the content is, add a table of contents to it, add some questions, even have some of your headlines be questions, and then answer the question in there. And then one simple way, let's say you're a remodeling contractor and you do kitchens, baths, and additions. Well, you hopefully have service pages for all three of those elements that demonstrate you do lots of great work in those categories. But why not have FAQs on every single one of those pages?

8:04People have questions. And so it's very useful content to be answering the specific questions that people have. But it's also amazing search content. It's amazing AI content. So make sure you're doing it. And lastly, what are your calls to action? I mean, once somebody finds you, is it clear what they should do next? So look at all of your top pages. Are there CTAs to call or to book or to actually buy or to contact you? Give people multiple options to just click on. Have that phone number up in the very top or have that email or have that evaluation form right there above the fold on the homepage so that they don't have to go looking for but also in context of when they're actually looking at a service.

8:49Maybe they're actually down to the part where they're reading the FAQs. Make sure you have CTAs there as well. So those are some things that you might want to audit as a visibility type of approach. Like I said, in the show notes, we'll actually have a checklist for this tool as well. So that's it for today. I'm going to do another show pretty soon also on the topics around visibility, the topics around how to create content that will rank for both the search engines. Again, got to rank for algorithms, for search engines, for AI bots. And let's not forget for people. So thanks for tuning in today.

9:31Hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

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