Web Presence Audit

Web Presence Audit

The public surface is where the product meets people who do not yet trust it. Every gap here costs traffic, conversion or credibility — and unlike most engineering debt, the cost is continuous and silent.

This skill covers four layers. Run them in order; each depends on the one above.

1. CRAWLABLE   Can a machine find, fetch and index this at all?
2. LEGIBLE     Does each page declare what it is, uniquely and correctly?
3. STRUCTURED  Can a machine understand the entities and answer questions with it?
4. TRUSTED     Would a stranger believe this is a real business and act?

Verify against the live rendered page, not the source. Server-side headers, proxies, CDNs and client-side rendering all change what a crawler actually sees. Run scripts/web-check.sh <url> for the automated first pass.

Layer 1 — Crawlable

The two failures that silently destroy traffic:

A soft 404 — a missing page returning 200 with "not found" text. Crawlers index it, and every mistyped URL becomes a thin duplicate page. Test with curl -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}' https://site.com/nonexistent-xyz.

A blocking robots.txt shipped from staging. Disallow: / deployed to production removes the site from search entirely, and nobody notices for weeks. Check it on every deploy.

# robots.txt — a sane default
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /*?sort=
Disallow: /search

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing. To keep a page out of the index, use <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> — and do not also block it in robots.txt, or the crawler cannot see the noindex.

Layer 2 — Legible

Every page needs its own:

<title>Ergonomic Standing Desks for Home Offices | Devleck</title>
<meta name="description" content="Height-adjustable desks built for small
      spaces, shipped in 3 days with a 10-year frame warranty. Compare six
      models and find yours.">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/desks/standing">

<!-- Social share — the difference between a link that gets clicked and one
     that looks broken -->
<meta property="og:type" content="website">
<meta property="og:title" content="Ergonomic Standing Desks for Home Offices">
<meta property="og:description" content="...">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/og/desks.png">
<meta property="og:image:width" content="1200">
<meta property="og:image:height" content="630">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/desks/standing">
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Devleck">
<meta property="og:locale" content="en_US">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta name="twitter:image:alt" content="A white standing desk in a small home office">

Titles

• Unique on every page. Duplicated titles are the most common on-page defect and they make your pages compete with each other. A site-wide title set in the layout is a P2 finding on every page it touches.
• Roughly 50–60 characters before truncation. The distinctive words go first — a title that begins with the brand wastes the position that matters.
• Describe the page, do not stuff keywords.

Meta descriptions

• Unique per page, roughly 140–160 characters.
• They are not a ranking factor; they are ad copy for the search result. Write them to earn the click: state the value and include an implicit call to action.
• Missing means the engine writes one for you, usually badly.

Social share image (og:image)

• 1200×630, under ~1MB, an absolute URL (relative URLs silently fail).
• Legible at thumbnail size — large type, high contrast, no fine detail.
• Page-specific where it matters. One generic logo across a whole site is a missed opportunity on every share.
• Test with the platforms' own debuggers; each caches aggressively, so a fix is not visible until you force a re-scrape.

Alt text

• Every meaningful image gets alt text describing its function in context, not its appearance. A product photo's alt is the product; a chart's alt is the finding it shows.
• Decorative images get alt="" — empty, not missing. Missing alt makes a screen reader announce the filename.
• Never begin with "image of" or "photo of".
• Text inside an image must be repeated in the alt, or the information is lost to search engines and screen readers alike.

Heading structure

• Exactly one <h1> per page, matching the page's subject.
• Ordered without skipping levels. Headings are structure, not styling — a <h4> chosen because it looks right is a defect.

Language and locale

• <html lang="en"> set correctly.
• hreflang for multi-language sites, reciprocal and self-referencing.

Layer 3 — Structured

Structured data (JSON-LD) is how a machine understands entities rather than strings. It drives rich results, knowledge panels, and increasingly what AI assistants can cite about you.

The baseline set for any business site:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@graph": [
    {
      "@type": "Organization",
      "@id": "https://example.com/#org",
      "name": "Devleck",
      "url": "https://example.com",
      "logo": "https://example.com/logo.png",
      "sameAs": [
        "https://www.linkedin.com/company/devleck",
        "https://github.com/Kin9Zeus"
      ],
      "contactPoint": {
        "@type": "ContactPoint",
        "contactType": "customer support",
        "email": "support@example.com",
        "availableLanguage": ["English", "Spanish"]
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "WebSite",
      "@id": "https://example.com/#website",
      "url": "https://example.com",
      "name": "Devleck",
      "publisher": { "@id": "https://example.com/#org" }
    }
  ]
}
</script>

LocalBusiness — for any business with a physical location or a service area. This is what drives map results and the local pack; without it a local business is largely invisible in the search that matters most to it.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
  "@id": "https://example.com/#localbusiness",
  "name": "Devleck",
  "image": "https://example.com/storefront.jpg",
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "telephone": "+1-555-0100",
  "priceRange": "$$",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "123 Main Street",
    "addressLocality": "Austin",
    "addressRegion": "TX",
    "postalCode": "78701",
    "addressCountry": "US"
  },
  "geo": { "@type": "GeoCoordinates", "latitude": 30.2672, "longitude": -97.7431 },
  "openingHoursSpecification": [{
    "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
    "dayOfWeek": ["Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday","Friday"],
    "opens": "09:00", "closes": "18:00"
  }],
  "areaServed": { "@type": "City", "name": "Austin" }
}
</script>

NAP consistency — Name, Address, Phone must be byte-identical across the site, the schema, the business listing and every directory. Inconsistency splits the entity and suppresses local ranking.

Per page type: Article / BlogPosting (with author, datePublished, dateModified), Product + Offer, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, SoftwareApplication, Event, Recipe, JobPosting.

Rules that keep it working:

• Mark up only what is visible on the page. Schema describing content a user cannot see is a policy violation and gets rich results revoked.
• Never fabricate reviews or ratings. Invented AggregateRating is fraud, and it is detectable.
• Validate with the Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator after every template change. Silent breakage is the norm.

references/structured-data.md has the full templates.

Layer 4 — Trusted

This is the layer engineers skip and businesses lose money to. A technically perfect site that reads as anonymous does not convert.

Internal linking

• Every important page reachable within three clicks of the homepage. An orphan page is one nobody — human or crawler — will find.
• Descriptive anchor text. "Read our pricing" beats "click here" for accessibility, for search, and for the reader scanning the page.
• Contextual links inside body content, not only in the navigation. Contextual links carry topical meaning that a nav link does not.
• Breadcrumbs on any site deeper than two levels, with BreadcrumbList schema.
• A related-content block on articles and products.
• Fix broken internal links. They waste crawl budget and read as neglect.
• An HTML sitemap page for large sites.

The pages a credible business has

The response-time commitment

State it explicitly, wherever a visitor is deciding whether to make contact — the contact page, the form, the thank-you page and the footer:

We reply to every enquiry within one business day. Support: within 4 business hours, Monday–Friday, 09:00–18:00 CET.

Two reasons this matters more than it looks. It removes the "will anyone even answer?" hesitation at the exact moment of decision. And it is a promise, so it must be true and monitored — an unmet stated commitment does more damage than no commitment at all.

Sticky mobile CTA

More than half of traffic is mobile, and mobile users scroll far and rarely scroll back. A persistent bottom bar keeps the action always one tap away.

<div class="cta-bar" role="region" aria-label="Primary action">
  <a href="/get-started" class="cta-bar__button">Get a free quote</a>
</div>

.cta-bar {
  position: fixed; inset-inline: 0; bottom: 0; z-index: 40;
  padding: .75rem 1rem calc(.75rem + env(safe-area-inset-bottom));
  background: var(--surface); border-top: 1px solid var(--border);
}
@media (min-width: 768px) { .cta-bar { display: none; } }   /* mobile only */

Do it correctly, or it costs more than it gains:

• Add matching padding-bottom to the page so it never covers content — especially the last form field or the footer links.
• One action only. Two competing buttons in a 60px bar is a decision, not a CTA.
• Minimum 44×44px touch target; respect env(safe-area-inset-bottom) on notched devices.
• Keyboard reachable, and not a focus trap.
• Do not stack it with a cookie banner and a chat widget — three fixed elements is 40% of a phone screen and reads as hostile.

Trust signals throughout

Real customer logos (with permission), specific testimonials with a name, role and company, third-party review scores, certifications and compliance badges, a physical address, years in business, and any guarantee you actually offer.

Specific beats superlative. "Reduced their onboarding from 6 weeks to 4 days" is persuasive; "world-class solutions" is noise.

Reporting

Report per page, not per site — "meta descriptions are missing" is not actionable; a table of which pages, with the suggested text, is.

| Page | Title | Description | Canonical | OG image | H1 | Alt gaps | Schema |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| / | ✓ | ✗ missing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | 0/12 | Organization, WebSite |
| /pricing | ⚠ duplicate of / | ✗ missing | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | 2/5 | none |
| /blog/x | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ points to / | ✓ | ⚠ two h1 | 4/9 | Article |

Then the prioritised findings, with the exact replacement text where you can supply it. A finding that says "write a meta description" is half a finding; one that includes the description is a completed task.

References, templates and scripts

• references/technical-seo.md — crawling, indexing, canonicals, redirects, migrations
• references/onpage-and-content.md — titles, descriptions, headings, images, internal linking
• references/structured-data.md — JSON-LD templates for every common page type
• references/trust-and-conversion.md — the trust surface, case studies, FAQ, CTA, forms
• templates/robots.txt · templates/404-page.md · templates/faq-page.md · templates/case-study.md · templates/thank-you-page.md
• scripts/web-check.sh / scripts/web-check.ps1 — live surface check for any URL