By Steve Brester, director of information technology, for the Resolutions for Independent Pharmacies blog series

Your web presence is one of the most important ways of raising awareness of your store and what your store has to offer. Do you ever check to see how effective your web presence is? I’m referring to all online channels available for you to communicate with your customers, including your website, social media platforms, blogs, and internet searches. This blog post will give you some ideas of how to audit your web presence.

First, you need to ask yourself the following question: What am I trying to achieve with my web presence? To some the answer might be just having a basic website to show the customers where they are located, their store hours, and the basics about what they sell in your store. To others it’s a method to show weekly specials, online ordering, providing health information, etc.

It’s important to audit your online presence regularly. It could be monthly or quarterly, but do it on a consistent basis. Record your findings of the elements you are measuring after each audit so you can compare previous results.

Start your audit process by checking the most common method used by your customer base: Google searches. First, search for your store name and see what appears.  Are you listed at or near the top of the results? Are all of your locations appearing? People like to see pictures – are images of your store or from your website showing up? Try searching using words that you hope would be strongly associated with your store. For example, if you specialize in vitamins, then search on the following: “where can I buy vitamins in [your town]?” Try using terms or phrases you think your customers or potential customers would search. Does your store appear on the results pages? If not, then work with your web developer to improve the search engine optimization (SEO) on your site.

When you try the Google search using your store name, also look for reviews of your store. Read every one of the reviews and use them – positive and negative – to improve your store. Compare the number of reviews that you see this audit vs the number of reviews from the last one. Are the number reviews increasing? If not, think about what can you do to get more reviews. Ask your customers to go online and write reviews for your store, as these are very important.

Check back for the second part of my post on this topic which will cover tools available and your content and social media strategies, or sign up to receive updates and information in your inbox from HRG.