Analyze web presence
Use a Middesk website order to receive a detailed analysis of a business’s web presence and evaluate a business’s web presence quality.
How to order web analysis
- Ensure that you can authenticate against the Middesk API and create businesses
- Review the Middesk Postman collection for request examples
Create a business and order Web Analysis
Web Analysis is a subproduct of the Website order. To create a business with a website order, submit a Create Business request:
Middesk determines which subproducts to order based on what’s included in your API request.
The name and address are required for web analysis. website_url is optional.
If you don’t submit website_url, Middesk discovers the business’s website to perform further analysis.
Review the analysis results
Once your order completes, see the results in the GET /business payload or the business.updated webhook, depending on your integration.
For a high-level summary of the outcome, review these review tasks:
| Summary | Key |
|---|---|
| Is the website purchased but has no content? | website_parked |
| Is the website online? | website_status |
| Is the website URL submitted or discovered? | website_url_discovered |
| Was there a match identified to the submitted office address? | web_address_verification |
| Was there a match identified to the submitted business name? | web_business_name_verification |
| Was there a match identified to the submitted person? | web_person_verification |
| Was there a match identified to the submitted phone number? | web_phone_number_verification |
| Was there a match identified to the submitted email address? | web_email_address_verification |
| What is the web presence quality rating? | web_presence_quality |
| Does the submitted website URL belong to the business? | website_url_domain_ownership |
| Does the web presence include any risky keyword hits? | risky_keywords |
To see the results in more detail, look at the Website object in the payload as well as the specific Web Analysis review tasks.
Additionally, any third-party profiles associated with the business are returned here as Profile objects under the top level profiles key.
This includes platforms such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.
Check the business’s review tasks by requesting the full business payload using the GET /businesses endpoint.
For example, use the Website Status review task to evaluate whether website is online.
Inspect individual quality indicators
Use web_presence_quality to determine an overall quality rating of High, Moderate, Low, or Not Available of the business’s web presence.
Going one step further, inspect each quality indicator used to determine the overall quality rating and optionally, derive an outcome based on your own defined heuristics.
One example of a potential use case for directly inspecting the indicators is in the case of evaluating new businesses. Naturally a newly formed business may have a recently registered domain and possibly is perfectly okay for the site to not display a high amount of content diversity, given its recent inception. If that is the case, you may wish to explicitly ignore those ratings to determine your desired outcome.
Here’s a look at the current quality indicators and their respective keys within the website object.
Each indicator includes a rating field of its own, yielding a positive, neutral, or negative rating for each category type.
If the indicator cannot be accurately determined for any reason, the indicator is absent from the payload.
| Quality Indicator | Description | Key |
|---|---|---|
| Broken links | An evaluation of links found on the website leading to errors or nonexistent pages | broken_links |
| Compliance info | An evaluation of compliance-related information, such as terms of service and privacy policy, that can be found on the business’s website | compliance_info |
| Contact info | An evaluation of contact information found within the content. You can leverage the other review tasks associated with the Website order to determine matches with submitted contact information. | contact_info |
| Content diversity | An evaluation of the variation and type of information the website presents | content_diversity |
| Domain age | An evaluation of how long the domain has been registered | domain_age |
| Domain consistency | An evaluation of whether the domain matches the business name and branding | domain_consistency |
| Domain ownership | An evaluation of how likely it is the domain belongs to the business | domain_ownership |
| Filler text | An evaluation of content for any placeholder or filler text, like Lorem Ipsum | filler_text |
| Https | An evaluation of HTTPS/TLS support | https |
| Image quality | An evaluation of images to identify blurry or stock images | image_quality |
| Last updated | An evaluation of how long ago was the website last modified | last_updated |
| Page count | An evaluation of the total number of internal pages found on the website | page_count |
| Spelling and grammar | An evaluation of spelling and grammatical mistakes and inconsistencies | spelling_and_grammar |
| Testimonials | An evaluation of customer testimonials or reviews found on the website | testimonials |
| Third party profile links | An evaluation of links to third-party profiles (social media, review sites, and so on) found on the website | third_party_profile_links |
| Top Level Domain | An evaluation of the TLD with respect to the website’s quality | top_level_domain |
| Update frequency | An evaluation of how often the website’s content is updated | update_frequency |
| US Business Presence | An evaluation of website signals that suggest the business operates within the United States | us_business_presence |
You can retrieve these additional website details via the GET /businesses/{id}/website endpoint.
Here’s an example iterating and printing out the sample business’s website’s quality indicator ratings:
Access more details
The API also exposes a source object for each indicator to illustrate how the indicator quality rating was derived.
This includes a human-readable explanation and, when relevant, examples from the retrieved dataset respective to the indicator returned.
For example, the image_quality indicator returns a list of source URLs for any stock images detected, the spelling_and_grammar indicator lists citations for any found mistakes or inconsistencies, and the broken_links indicator returns a list of URLs found on the website that do not resolve.
To access this expanded view, add the query parameter include with the value indicator_details to the aforementioned business website endpoint.
For example: https://api.middesk.com/businesses/{id}/website?include=indicator_details
Here is an example of the expanded quality rating indicator with new source key: