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Adplorer has recently developed an audit tool to evaluate the performance level of end customers on important local digital marketing actions. In this article, we will explain how this tool works and how important it is for clients or prospects, and how it can help the sales team.
1. How does Adplorer’s audit tool work?
Adplorer’s audit tool compares the client or prospect level of performance for the main digital marketing actions to 3 major competitors.
- Business position on the Google local pack
- SEA
- Facebook Page interest
- Website speed
To start the audit, Adplorer needs only 3 elements:
- Company name
- Company address
- Company Industry type
With this information, Adplorer will find on Google the 3 major competitors and compare their positions in the local pack.
Adplorer will give a score of 100 to the company at the top position on the local pack, 90 for the 2nd position, 80 for the 3rd position, etc.
Secondly, Adplorer will check the ads on Google, and see if the company and the competitors are buying the main keywords.
Third, Adplorer will look at the Facebook pages. The score attributed is the number of followers up to 100, a company that has more than 100 followers will get a score of 100.
The last part of the study is the website speed. Adplorer uses the score of a third-party tool for this measure.
2. What the audit looks like?
Here is the Audit of a client. A Vitality Bowls franchisee based in Salt Lake City. On the left, we can see a map with the company location and the competitors’ locations. On the right side, we have a double-entry tab with the companies studied and the 4 criteria. The layout of the audit result is really easy to read and understand. The client or prospect can see at the first glance its strengths and weaknesses.
3. How the audit tool can help the sales team?
The Audit tool analyzes the main digital local marketing levers that a local company can use to develop its business. With the audit result, the prospect can see in a glance where they stand among their competitors and what they need to do to be better. The seller has everything they need to easily show value to their prospect!
Google Business Profile is free and essential for a local business, it gives excellent visibility on Google and even more if the profile is good enough to appear in the local pack. If you want to know more about GBP, you can read our article.
Google Ads is the fastest way to be at the top of the Google page. If all of your competitors are using Google Ads, there is no better option than using Google Ads to try to show above them. If they don’t advertise on Google, it becomes even easier to show at the top of the page for the most interested searchers.
Facebook is a very important social network for local businesses as well. It’s important to have an active page and to generate engagement. The number of followers reveals the interest of the company for consumers. If the competitors have more followers they are certainly more attractive.
The website speed is also very important. Sites that load quickly are considered more reliable and professional than others. Speed is naturally associated with efficiency and trust. Slow loading gives a bad first impression.
Your user experience is good if your website visitors can easily find what they are looking for and if they find it quickly. Having a good loading speed is therefore essential for the user experience.
4. Let’s take an example.
For this example, we will look at another location of the franchise network Vitality Bowls, the Dallas location. Here is the result of the Adplorer audit.
We can identify in one second two points to improve. GBP and Website Speed. We can also see that Adplorer did not detect any Google Ads Campaigns.
How to interpret and take advantage of this audit?
If an internet user is looking for this type of restaurant, they will search Google for “healthy restaurant in Dallas”. With the local pack results, they already have 3 options for healthy restaurants, with a lot of very good reviews, well-located. Maybe that will be enough to select a restaurant, and the internet user will not even look at other results. 
In this case, this Vitality Bowls location doesn’t appear on the local pack results. Our advice is to improve and update their Google Business Profile regularly, try to get and respond to reviews to improve this position. Adplorer can help multi-location businesses improve the local SEO of each location with the feature bulk post. To be sure to be visible at the top of the page, the client should activate a local Google Ads Campaign to show their page above the local pack, like this beauty institute.
The internet user will certainly have a look on the Facebook Page, to get more information, and read reviews. If we look at this business’s Facebook Page, we can see that the company has 9 very good reviews, and almost 500 followers, which is good for a very local business.
But if we look at the Vitality Bowls from Salt Lake City, we see less than 10 followers and no reviews. We can recommend to this client to use Facebook Ads campaign to get new followers and create more engagement.
Concerning the last criteria, website speed, after the audit, the client or prospect can realize that his website is not fast enough to give a good user experience to the client. The agency can offer services to help the prospect on this part.
Conclusion
Using an audit tool can highlight the weaknesses of the client or prospect in terms of digital marketing compared to its main competitors. This way, sales representatives can have additional indisputable arguments to convince the prospect or customer to quickly activate this or that local digital marketing lever. This is why Adplorer has designed this tool, which is easy to use, with clear, understandable results. If you would like to know more about our audit tool and test it, please contact our team.
