So, what is a digital marketing audit? A digital marketing audit is a thorough review of all your online marketing efforts. Conducting an audit allows you to have a better understanding of where you stand, with all the strategies and campaigns you have in place. You need one in order to identify the strengths, weaknesses, challenges, and any missed opportunities of your brand.
However, sometimes companies fail to recognize the vitality of an audit. As a result, they remain unaware of the loopholes existing in their marketing strategy. Not only this, but the absence of a thorough audit leads to several problems for a company trying to make its presence felt through search engine result pages (SERPs).
Amidst tough competition, strategies, and digital marketing techniques, a full-blown digital marketing audit is something you should never ignore. To help you understand it better, here’s OutRank’s guide on digital marketing audits.
How to Audit for Digital Marketing Purposes?
Knowing how to distinguish between different online marketing channels is the first step to knowing how to audit for digital marketing. These channels include search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) on-page optimization, guest post outreach, and many more.
If you are fully aware of the strategies put in place, you’re good to go. But those who are not aware of the strategies being used must try and get the basics out of the way. While it is always best to let professionals conduct digital marketing audits, here’s a few you can conduct on your own.
SEO Audit
SEO audit is one of the crucial factors and aspects of digital marketing. An SEO audit will help you analyze whether your website is search engine friendly or not. Through an internet marketing audit, you will be also able to figure out why your website is losing leads.
To conduct an SEO audit properly, you need to first determine whether your website has been penalized by the SERPs algorithm or not. And for that, looking into your search console from Bing or Google is a great place to start. You can manage the actions, see if there is a warning stating information regarding penalization, and also see other causes of loss in ranking.
In addition to this, you can also see where your company stands with a keyword strategy. You can also compare your website’s ranking using a tool. You can search for all the keywords you use for your website, see where you stand, and place a strategy accordingly. Also, if the tool tells you that your ranking has dropped for certain keywords, you can revisit your strategies and analyze what’s missing.
Rest assured, if you have professionals analyze your website for all the SEO ranking factors, they will be able to recognize missed opportunities and suggest solutions to resolve them.
Content Audit
Once you are through with the SEO audit, you are most likely to come across strategies that you need to incorporate in your content. But first, you will need to check the existing content on your website. Quality content is necessary for any website to rank on the first page of SERPs. Not only should the content be clear and informative, it should be optimized properly.
Essentially, you have to ask yourself questions such as: Is the content causing the bounce rate to increase? If yes, you probably have your answer. Plus, bad content leads readers and visitors to leave your website more often than those with high-quality content. So, make sure that you check the quality of the content immediately.
Once that is done move on to checking the blogs and titles you use to describe your business. See to it that the topics resonate with your business and it adds value to the customers. Not only this but organize your content pages. Design and develop them in a way that it’s easier for a customer to navigate from one page to another. Rest assured, if you pay attention to the pages that are performing well and those too that are dead, you will be able to derive more business through the optimization of dead pages in the most effective way.
Social Media Audit
Review your business’ metrics to assess growth opportunities and how you can improve engagement and social media presence. To begin with, wrangle all the social media profiles. Do not focus only on Facebook or Twitter. The YouTube and Pinterest account that has only two subscribers also need to be audited. Once you have all the platforms lined up in front of you, curate a strategy and decide which ones to focus on.
Once you have that in mind, define specific goals for each platform. Also, audit the consistency of your branding and promotions on all the platforms. Data is key, so do not forget to check social media analytics. It is important you understand which post is performing well and why.
Let Professionals Take Over
Audits can be overwhelming, especially if you do not know much about digital marketing. That is why you need professionals to help you with the process. Auditing is the first-step to creating a marketing strategy. Precisely why you need an industry expert to help you with it.
In other words, if you have a cold, you may be able to diagnose it by learning about its symptoms but you won’t be able to understand its underlying cause and how to treat it effectively unless you are a doctor.
Have more questions about internet marketing audit? Contact one of our experts at OutRank.
