If your digital marketing strategy isn’t producing the results you were looking for, it may be time for a digital marketing audit.
Digital marketing, in general, can be quite a tedious process. Keeping up with the ever-changing digital world can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re a small business owner trying to tackle your digital marketing without the help of an expert.
Fortunately, a digital marketing audit is a great first step to understanding exactly where your strategy is falling short.
What Is A Digital Marketing Audit?
To put it simply, a digital marketing audit is an examination of your digital marketing efforts. This establishes a starting point for any new work to be done.
Digital marketing audits will analyze things like your technical SEO, content, and PPC advertising.
Annual audits should be common practice, but if you aren’t getting the desired results from your marketing efforts, it’s time to stop wasting precious time and money.
Types Of Digital Marketing Audits
There is a significant amount of information to audit, regardless of how large or small your website may be. Some of which may present a learning curve for those who don’t have any experience.
Below are some of the digital marketing elements we audit and how we use this information to create an actionable marketing strategy.
Technical SEO Audit
A technical audit ensures your website meets the necessary requirements for crawling and indexing. When a website is easy to crawl and index, it enhances your chances of new content being discovered. Plus, your older content will be recrawled regularly.
Some of the things we look into during a technical digital marketing audit include the following,
- Ensuring your sitemap includes all indexable pages
- Page speed
- Mobile Accessibility
- How your website uses structured data
- Broken links
If Google can’t easily crawl and index your content, your marketing attempts will go completely to waste. You must have a strong foundation to build upon when digital marketing.
On-Page SEO Audit
What Google considers “search engine friendly” is constantly changing. The SEO you would perform for your website a year ago, even six months ago, may not be relevant now.
During the auditing process, page-specific information is analyzed, such as headings, title tags, content, keyword usage, and internal links.
Off-page SEO audits and technical audits are very similar. It’s a deep look into the behind-the-scenes work that goes into creating a high-performing website.
Content Audit
Do you know your ROI from the content you’ve produced? You don’t want to waste your time and money producing content that’s doing nothing to benefit your business.
It’s common to group together content audits and on-page SEO audits. But separating the two is wise if you want to be as thorough as possible during a full digital marketing audit.
During content audits, we look for an author, content type, how you’re distributing the content, word count, and other similar information.
We also examine the kind of content your competitors are producing and whether or not your current content could be useful within other marketing channels. This way, we can create a precise and accurate content strategy.
Social Media Audit
Social platforms present absolutely golden marketing opportunities that don’t have to cost anything to take advantage of. The amount of people using social media continues to grow as the years go by so that more than likely includes a large portion of your target audience.
Our team analyzes what platforms you’re currently using, how your customers engage with posts, and how often. Based on this data, our experts will make informed decisions about which channels you should market on and what kind of posts you should make to obtain the most engagement.
Signs Your Small Business Needs A Digital Marketing Audit
Have you noticed a decrease in your website traffic? Or maybe you’ve remained stagnant and are looking to grow? Even if things aren’t necessarily wrong, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be better.
If you haven’t performed a digital marketing audit recently or ever, it’s definitely that time.
Have you experienced the five telltale signs you need a digital marketing audit?
- You aren’t meeting sales goals
- Your click-through rate is high
- Steady or decreasing website traffic
- Social media followers aren’t engaging with your posts
- Your business has evolved
A digital marketing audit is necessary when you aren’t reaching your goals or your business has evolved and can no longer benefit from your current digital marketing strategy.
Benefits Of A Digital Marketing Audit For Small Businesses
As we discussed above, even if there’s nothing necessarily wrong with your current marketing tactics, that doesn’t mean you won’t benefit from an audit.
An audit will improve the overall efficiency of your site for you and your users. Data doesn’t lie, so you’ll be able to get a crystal clear idea of which direction you want to take.
Help Your Audience Connect With Your Brand
You’re missing out if you aren’t creating relationships with your customers online. A relationship with customers is vital to the success of your business because it keeps them coming back for more.
A digital marketing strategy you develop from an audit’s results can nurture and build consumer relationships. It shows exactly how your target audience responds to your current marketing strategies.
Save Money With A More Accurate Marketing Strategy
If you keep up with the same practices that are hurting or just not really doing anything to benefit your business, it’s a huge waste of time. Or if you aren’t measuring results at all and just blindly marketing, you don’t know when you get to pat yourself on the back or if you’re actually losing money.
With a digital marketing audit, you can make an accurate and precise plan that ensures all your work is profitable and rewarding.
Generate More Quality Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is awesome because it doesn’t cost you anything. A technical SEO audit creates a better user experience by ensuring quick page speed, mobile accessibility, and, most importantly crawlability.
If your content is easy to crawl, it’s easier for Google to show it to users, which means more organic traffic to your site. Plus, increased sales conversions because you’re creating a great user experience.
Creating An Actionable Plan
A digital marketing audit will only work to your advantage if you make an actionable plan with the results. Our experts are Strategic Media Inc. has over 25 years of experience performing digital marketing audits for small businesses all over the Tampa Bay area, so it’s safe to say we understand what works.
Our intention is to get your digital marketing strategy back on track and develop creative solutions to weak areas in your marketing. Call us at 727-531-7622 or contact us online for a digital marketing audit or any questions you may have about how we will perform the audit for your small business.