A company owner knows the business so well that he no longer sees what a new customer discovers in a few minutes. A useful audit follows exactly that journey: search for the company, look at what it shows, compare its competitors and try to contact it like a genuine prospect.
The first bias to remove is the owner's own. He knows his products, his long-standing customers, his references, his know-how and the reasons why his sales staff win deals. He knows that a particular page of the website is old, that a certain catalogue needs updating and that the photos date from a previous workshop.
The prospect knows none of that. He arrives with a question, a need or a partial specification. He opens Google, types a few words matching his problem and looks at the companies that appear. He quickly compares their websites, their photos, their reviews, their projects and their apparent level of professionalism. He can leave a company within thirty seconds without ever telling it why.
So that is the journey to audit. Not "do we like our website?", but "what does a prospect understand about us before he has even spoken to anyone?".
The audit starts with the searches a potential customer would actually make. It is not only about checking whether the company appears under its own name: you have to test the generic searches linked to the products, the applications, the trades and the target areas.
The Google Business Profile is then examined as a genuine commercial shop window: category, address, phone, opening hours, description, photos, products or services shown and how up to date the listing is. Reviews are analysed as much for their content as for their rating. A positive review mentioning responsiveness, build quality or the ability to meet deadlines is a particularly valuable piece of commercial proof. Provided the company knows how to use it elsewhere.
The same work is done on trade directories, marketplaces and sector-specific platforms. Outdated information, a wrong phone number, a different address or a company name presented inconsistently may seem trivial. Yet accumulated across several sources, those inconsistencies give an impression of a company not fully in control.
An industrial website has to be analysed as a sales tool, not as a corporate brochure. The first question is blunt but essential: in five seconds, can you understand what the company does, for whom and with what added value? If the visitor has to read three paragraphs to understand the business, the message is already too weak.
Then come the technical and commercial checks. Does the site load quickly? Is it genuinely usable on mobile? Are the important pages reachable without searching? Are the products presented with enough precision? Do the photos really show the know-how? Do the projects provide proof? Do the certifications, references, industrial capabilities, figures or equipment reinforce credibility?
Every page must also have a job to do. A product page must help the visitor understand and enquire. A project page must reassure. An expertise page must demonstrate competence. A contact page must make it easy to act. So calls to action are checked, as are the forms: are they visible, simple enough, suited to the type of enquiry and genuinely working? A form that works technically but asks for fifteen pieces of information before allowing submission can lose part of the prospects it was meant to convert.
Finally, all contact details are compared: phone, address, e-mail, opening hours, legal notice and the information shown on the various channels. A company displaying three different numbers or two addresses depending on the page creates doubt for no reason.
A company's communication does not stop at its own domain. LinkedIn has to be looked at the way a professional buyer would, trying to understand who is behind the company. Facebook can play a different role, notably in showing company life, projects or local activity. YouTube can become a superb demonstration of industrial know-how: a machine running, a manufacturing process, assembly, testing, a demonstration or user feedback.
PDF catalogues are commercial objects in their own right too. You check the references, the prices where they are shown, the contact details, the dates, the links, the photos and the graphic consistency with the website. An old logo in a PDF downloaded from the site can cancel out part of the work done to modernise the brand.
Even the elements considered secondary are examined: photo quality, documents sent to prospects, how quotations are presented, e-mail signatures, technical documents and the way sales staff present the company. The question is always the same: is the level of confidence created by each point of contact consistent with the company's real level of quality?
There is then one part that cannot seriously be audited from a screen: the commercial experience. So contact is made the way a prospect would. A phone call, a request for information or a request for a quotation depending on the context. You observe how long it takes to answer, how the company introduces itself, its ability to understand the request, the quality of the answer and, above all, how long it takes to come back.
A company can invest several thousand euros in Google Ads, redo its website and produce magnificent catalogues, only to lose the enquiry because nobody calls the prospect back within a reasonable time. Response time is a commercial figure here, not simply a matter of organisation. The more potential suppliers a prospect has, the more speed of handling becomes a competitive advantage.
A campaign that generates enquiries but whose outcome nobody measures is not a sales strategy: it is spending on visibility.
The mystery shopper approach also makes it possible to check what happens after the enquiry: acknowledgement, qualification of the need, follow-up, forwarding to the right person and time to quotation.
The audit becomes really interesting when it is comparative. Direct competitors go through the same tests: Google visibility, business listing, reviews, website, product presentation, proof, social media, downloadable documents, calls to action and ease of contact. You also look at their apparent positioning: are they more premium, more specialised, more technical, more accessible? Does their messaging emphasise price, speed, local manufacture, customisation, industrial capacity or service?
Customer reviews are particularly instructive. They show what the market spontaneously values and, above all, the recurring irritations. If customers consistently talk about responsiveness, advice or meeting deadlines, those subjects become potential communication angles. Conversely, if a promise displayed by the company never appears in customer feedback, you have to ask whether it really is a differentiating advantage.
Finally, the comparison makes it possible to tell a communication problem from a genuine positioning problem. Sometimes the company is better than its competitors but demonstrates it less well. That is an immediate opportunity.
Paid advertising deserves a separate audit, because it can amplify a good mechanism as easily as a bad one. A Google or social campaign has to be linked to a measurable objective: a call, a form, a request for a quotation, a download, an appointment. So you have to check what happens after the click.
Does the advert lead to the right page? Does the page message match the advert? Can the prospect act immediately? Is the conversion properly tracked? Are the enquiries identified in the sales tool? Are campaigns optimised on real conversions or simply on clicks and impressions? A campaign that buys traffic without knowing how many qualified enquiries it produces makes it impossible to calculate a return. And a campaign that generates enquiries with no follow-up system leaves part of its investment on the table.
In almost every serious audit, the same situations come up: commercial content far better than its presentation, excellent customer reviews never used as proof, sections started then abandoned, photos that do not show the company's real level, or communication that is very professional on one channel and much less controlled on another. You also frequently find companies investing in acquisition before securing conversion: they pay to bring prospects to a site that explains the offer poorly, a form that does not work properly, or a sales organisation that answers too late.
The aim, however, is not to draw up a list of criticisms. We start from what the company has built, and every finding becomes an opportunity: proof to use better, a page to convert, information to harmonise, a campaign to measure, a delay to reduce.
To make the audit usable, every action is assessed against three criteria: its potential commercial impact, the effort needed to implement it and its urgency. A wrong phone number on several channels can therefore come before a complete graphic redesign. A product page that already receives traffic can be optimised before creating ten new pages. An advertising campaign that cannot be measured must be fixed before its budget is increased.
The final deliverable is therefore not a report destined for a drawer. It is a costed, prioritised action plan that separates what can wait from what cannot. It says where to invest, in what order and for what expected gain.
A good communication audit does not try to make a company prettier. It tries to make sure that what the prospect discovers finally matches the company's real quality.
That is the approach Atare applies when supporting a company in auditing and improving its sales and communication set-up. Our audit and diagnosis service →
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