◉Visibility in practice

Four areas, and the last one surprises most people:

1. Technical and reachability — does the site load, is it encrypted, does it work on a mobile phone, how fast is it.
2. Findability — titles, descriptions, structure, whether search engines can read the site.
3. Content — is there enough text, are the important details there.
4. Legal and data protection — is there a complete legal notice (Impressum), is there a privacy notice, are third-party servers contacted when the page loads.

Point 4 is the most valuable in practice: missing required details and fonts loaded without asking are the most common reasons for formal legal warnings (Abmahnungen) against small websites — and the operator never notices them by themselves.

From top to bottom — the list is sorted by weight, not by the order in which things occur.

What you should tackle first:

1. Legal matters. Missing legal notice, missing privacy notice, third-party content loaded in. This can cost money.
2. Reachability. The site does not load, the certificate is missing, it is unusable on a mobile phone.
3. Basic findability. No page title, no heading, no text.
4. Fine-tuning. Everything else.

What you should not do: work through everything. Findings with forty points contain thirty that change nothing.

And the most important perspective: a good score is not a goal. A site with 90 points that nobody finds is worse than one with 60 that brings in enquiries.

Those that are visible from outside, and that is a surprising amount:

• Legal notice: present, reachable, with the required details.
• Privacy notice: present and reachable from every page.
• Third-party servers on loading: fonts, maps, videos, tracking tools — anything that passes on the visitor’s IP address without consent.
• Cookie banner: whether one would be needed and whether it is there.
• Encryption.

What the check cannot do: judge whether the content of the legal notice is correct or whether the privacy notice matches what the site does. A person has to read that.

And to put it in perspective: findings are not legal advice. They show where someone should look.

The website check itself costs nothing — it opens the site and reads what is there.

Costs arise for the parts that query external services:

• Research queries, if you want to know where a site ranks on Google.
• Data queries for the search volume of your keywords and for the backlinks from other websites.
• AI evaluations, if you have a summary generated.

What this means in practice: check as often as you like. The basic check is free, and there is no reason to economise on it.

What you should keep an eye on: the queries for which a budget applies. A run across fifty websites with search queries is something different from a single check.

Set a budget before you start larger runs.

The comparison, and that is more valuable than any single check.

What you see the second time:

• What has been fixed and what has not.
• What has been added — an embedded map, a new tool, an expired certificate.
• Whether the rank has changed, if you use search queries.

A sensible rhythm: quarterly for your own site, before every customer conversation for other people’s.

And the case that is particularly common: a site that was clean six months ago now loads third-party content — because someone embedded a video or a map without thinking of the privacy notice.

Just like someone else’s — and with the same detachment.

What you should bear in mind:

• Not just the home page. Also check the most important service page and the contact page.
• With and without www, if both are reachable.
• After every larger rebuild.

And the part the check does not do for you: look for yourself. Open your site in a private window, on a mobile phone, over mobile data. Fill in the contact form. Click a few links.

That finds the mistakes no tool finds: a wrong price, a contact person who is no longer there, a text that is no longer accurate.

As an occasion, not as a sales argument — the difference decides whether it goes down well.

What works:

• Name two or three concrete points, not the whole list. A list of forty complaints comes across as an accusation.
• Start with what can cost money — a missing legal notice, fonts loaded from elsewhere. That is a real problem, not a matter of taste.
• Say what it means, not what it is called. Not “your canonical tag is missing”, but “Google sees your page under two addresses and splits the effect between them”.

What does not work: sending an automatically generated list. That comes across as mechanical and is ignored.

And the attitude that makes the difference: you are pointing out a problem, not blame. Almost nobody built their website themselves.

Yes, and that is often a better route than a conversation about details.

What you should watch out for:

• Cut it down to the essentials. A report with forty points will not be read.
• Put into your own words what the three most important ones mean.
• Say what you offer — and what the recipient can do themselves.

What you should not do: pass on findings about someone else’s website to third parties unasked. The findings themselves are unproblematic — they are based on what is publicly visible — but passing them on to anyone other than the operator is impolite and can be interpreted as damaging their business.

And legally: advertising emails containing unsolicited findings are advertising — with everything that entails.

What a segment looks like. Who links to whom, on the other hand, is in the Backlinks tab.

In concrete terms: it collects the sites of one industry in one area and shows what is usual there. How many have a complete legal notice, how many load third-party content, how many are usable on a mobile phone.

What this is useful for:

• Perspective. Is your site better or worse than what your customers otherwise see?
• Acquisition. Where are there businesses whose site obviously needs catching up?
• Understanding the market. What is usual in your industry?

What it is not: a directory of all backlinks between websites. It only reads the sites it finds in the result lists for your keywords, and notes which directories keep turning up there. A complete backlink profile of a website, including a comparison with competitors, is provided by the Backlinks tab.

And bear in mind: what you find with it are business contacts — the usual rules apply to approaching them.

The content-related ones, and that is the larger part:

Can be done yourself:

• Writing page titles and descriptions.
• Adding alt texts to images.
• Putting headings in order.
• Filling pages that are too thin with content.
• Completing the legal notice and privacy notice.
• Making images smaller.

Cannot be done yourself (for a website you do not manage yourself):

• Certificate, redirects, server settings.
• Removing embedded third-party content if it is in the source code.

For a site from Aurora Hive Sites, almost everything falls into the first group — there, titles, alt texts and legal texts are settings.

And start with the legal matters. The rest can wait.

The most important thing — namely whether the site fulfils its purpose.

What no tool can judge:

• Whether the text is convincing.
• Whether the right target group comes.
• Whether the images work.
• Whether anyone calls.

A site can be technically flawless and still bring in no enquiries. And one with mediocre scores can do well because it says exactly what customers want to know.

That is why every check needs a second step: look for yourself, through the eyes of a stranger. Can you find out in thirty seconds what the business does, for whom, and how to reach it?

If not, no findings will help.

Varying amounts — and the differences are large.

Almost always worth it:

• The entry in the major map service. For locally active businesses, often more important than their own website.
• Guild, chamber, association. Free, credible, and the backlinks count.
• Two or three relevant specialist directories.

Rarely worth it:

• Paid entries in directories nobody uses. The calls selling them are persistent and the benefit is small.

What to watch out for: the details must be the same everywhere — name, address, phone number, opening hours. Discrepancies do more harm than an additional entry does good.

And keep a list of everywhere you are listed. When your address changes, it is worth its weight in gold.

No. A high search volume says that many people are searching, but not that these people want to hire you.

For a local business, a good selection usually looks like this:

• One or two broad keywords with noticeable volume, such as the service together with the name of the town. They show whether you are in the running at all.
• Several narrow keywords with small volume or “no value”. Someone searching for “repair gutter” plus their own district is rare, but almost always a job.
• No keyword for a service you do not offer, however tempting the figure.

When reading the figures, it helps to look at the intent: anyone typing “emergency service” wants to call now. Anyone typing “costs” is still comparing.

And in a conversation with a customer: the search volume is Google’s estimate, rounded. Call it that, and nobody will later have to defend a figure that was never meant to be exact.

You check whether you belong there, and list yourself if so. Most gaps for local businesses are not newspaper articles but quite ordinary places:

• Business and local directories, often free and done in a few minutes.
• Guild, chamber, association, where you are a member anyway but the entry is missing.
• Suppliers and manufacturers that list specialist businesses.
• Clubs and local events that name their supporters.

Work through the list from top to bottom and use the same spelling of name, address and phone number everywhere.

What you leave out: sites that offer links for money, and directories you have never heard of and nobody else uses. Backlinks like that tend to do harm.

In a customer conversation, a gap is a good occasion because it is concrete. The statement that seven competitors are listed there and the business is not needs no explanation.

Read it as an indication of a gap, not as a mark.

Three cases, three conclusions:

• You are named. Good — and check whether the details are correct. Answer engines occasionally reproduce outdated opening hours, old addresses or the wrong range of services. Whatever is wrong there is usually also wrong somewhere on the web.
• Competitors are named, you are not. Look at why: these providers as a rule have pages that answer the question asked word for word, and they are mentioned by third parties — in directories, in specialist articles, in press articles. Both can be caught up on.
• Nobody is named. Then the question is too general. Phrase it more narrowly, with a place or an occasion.

The work you can derive from this is almost always the same: answer your customers’ questions on your own website, in full sentences. A page that answers a question word for word is readily taken up by answer engines and search engines alike.

And keep expectations in check: this is a matter of months, not weeks. So compare runs a month apart, not two runs on the same day — the same question can be answered differently twice without anything having changed.