The sound of the word “audit” might automatically make you think of the IRS looking into your finances. While perhaps a trigger word, an audit isn’t always worth worrying about. When you do a digital marketing audit, you’re looking deeper into what your company does internally to uncover challenges or opportunities to improve your processes.
Without knowing how well you’re executing your digital marketing campaign, you may never know exactly how to improve it.
If you’re going through your first digital marketing audit, it’s time to learn about the process and know why it should become an ongoing process.
What Exactly is a Digital Marketing Audit?
This type of audit looks at what you’re doing in creating an effective online presence. It’s going to involve looking at key marketing areas you’ve focused on recently and how effective those marketing categories are in the online world.
Keep in mind it’s going to take a little time to conduct these audits because of the multiple categories involved. In digital marketing, you have numerous elements to scope out and possibly tweak.
These categories usually start with content and wind up with auditing your most important marketing creation: Your website.
Auditing Your Marketing Content
The first category to audit is the content marketing you’ve created and what it’s truly doing to bring in more visitors to your site. Are you using the right keywords and other SEO tactics?
Using metrics helps considerably in measuring who’s reading your content and how people respond to it. Looking at what you’ve already created and what’s gaining the most response often helps you pin down what works and what doesn’t.
Other times, it may take a more granular audit to see what you’re doing with content.
One sure thing to do is rid yourself of old content you know won’t interest anyone. Rather than completely trash these pieces, you could repurpose them into a different type of media (like blogs to videos) with updated information.
How Well Your Marketing Performs on Social Media
There isn’t any more important place to pay attention to than social media where you post digital marketing content. It’s not all about content, though. Sometimes digital marketing means direct interactions with leads.
Auditing what you’re doing on social media (no matter how many channels you use) is important to keep track of everything.
Sometimes placing marketing efforts on too many social channels can end up backfiring. Which of your social channels get the most rise in people consuming your content? Those showing stagnant growth should likely be dropped.
Your audit needs to measure how many website visits you receive from social media and how much engagement you’re generating.
Digging Deeper Into SEO Use
A marketing content audit can find areas of SEO where you’re maybe lacking. However, doing a separate audit focused strictly on SEO is going to find even more revelations.
With frequent updates to Google’s search algorithm, you’ll want to keep up on how your SEO is performing. Otherwise, you may not know for months what your rankings are on Google due to SEO mistakes.
Details like how well you’re working with local SEO, and the way you incorporate long-tail keywords are just two areas making a big difference in people finding you.
Auditing Your Website
You have a lot to check for on your website, so don’t overlook doing an audit there. Many audit apps exist to make this process a little easier. Woorank and Screaming Frog are a few tools that can help you automate your auditing process- just remember, nothing beats a human audit so don’t rely entirely on automation.
Your audit is going to check for bad links on your site, your metadata, and whether all your content is up to date.
Be sure to keep doing these audits at least once a year so you catch further mistakes, especially if making any changes during this time.
Contact our team if you have more questions about getting ready for your digital marketing audit.