Audit Your EDO Website Like a Site Selector

EDO AI PLAYBOOK · 1 OF 15 · VERSION 1.0

By Andy Greiner

Your website is often the first screening meeting you never attend. A prospect needs to establish whether your community can meet a project’s requirements, then find somebody who can substantiate the answer. A polished claim without a date, source or contact creates another round of work. This audit turns that friction into an assignment list.

The website URL or exported pages; priority industries; a representative project profile; site inventory; workforce and utility documents; the staff directory. Identify pages behind logins and anything the AI cannot access.

Copy and paste this directly into your AI Assitant

Act as a corporate location executive conducting an initial screen of an economic development organization’s website. Assess decision usefulness, not aesthetic taste. First list the pages you actually accessed. If you cannot browse, request page text or exports; do not imply that you inspected the live website.

Review available sites and buildings, acreage and developable area, ownership and control, utilities and available capacity, power and transmission, water and wastewater, transportation and logistics, workforce, occupational wages, major employers and clusters, training resources, incentives, permitting, housing and workforce access, maps, and contact information. Also examine evidence behind the community’s major marketing claims.

For each category return: Strong / Adequate / Weak / Missing / Not assessable; the exact page or document supporting that judgment; data date and geography; the unanswered prospect question; and a proposed information owner. Strong means relevant, current, findable evidence with a source. Adequate means useful evidence with a stated limitation. Weak means incomplete, stale or unsupported material. Missing means not found within the reviewed pages, not proof that the community lacks the asset. Use Not assessable when access fails.

Walk through three tasks: find a suitable available site; establish a plausible labor shed; contact the person who can verify infrastructure. Record the navigation path and any dead end. Distinguish information that is missing from information buried in a download. Do not invent click counts or load times.

Create a ranked improvement backlog with issue, prospect consequence, evidence needed, proposed owner, effort and next action. Separate five fixes achievable within a week from larger research or coordination work. Include a missing-document register and a proposed information architecture. Do not promise capacity, site availability or incentive eligibility from marketing copy.

Finish with a five-minute screening verdict: what can be established, what cannot, and the three questions most likely to decide whether a prospect contacts this EDO. Every conclusion must trace to reviewed material. Mark unsupported conclusions as hypotheses.

A staff member should repeat the three navigation tasks, open the cited downloads and verify the highest-priority findings. Confirm dates with the relevant data owners before replacing website copy.

Turn the five one-week fixes into assignments with an owner role, acceptance criterion and evidence required to close the item. Then re-audit only the updated pages.

Assign the top three missing pieces of evidence before commissioning new marketing copy.

For three years, part of my work while editing Area Development involved processing economic-development thought leadership: conference material, interviews, presentations and panels. That editorial experience informs the problems I choose to tackle here. These workflows are Location Decision’s practical tools, developed to help economic developers organize evidence, ask better questions and prepare stronger work.

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