Despite spending heavily on digital marketing, sometimes, businesses can’t hit their
objectives within the stipulated time. Blame it on the inconsistencies or weaknesses of their online marketing agency.
Even if your business appears on top of search engine result pages and you get quality leads, you can’t sustain this position for posterity. Any new technology, product, or
service can topple you down the list. A comprehensive audit by an expert online marketing agency will keep you vigilant and improve your sales and conversions.
The primary purpose of a digital marketing audit is to highlight the areas that need
improvement and produce actionable insights that work in your favor. You can opt for a monthly or weekly assessment of your website to detect any weak points and utilize data to rectify them.
If you arent is sure where to start, here is a guide to help.
5 Critical Metrics to Measure in Your Digital Marketing Audit
1. Auditing The Technical SEO
A website is a technical tool that gives you a robust online identity. An equally strong
technical SEO strategy for being found, indexed, and ranked on top is essential in the mix. Hence, don’t neglect the technical SEO audit of your web pages.
Make your website as easy to crawl as you can with optimized pages and content. Also,
maintain control over pages that can be indexed. These should include pages that have
valuable content for users.
Lastly, you need to focus on the user experience (UX) features of your website. Factors like page speed and mobile responsiveness are essential for Google & ranking
algorithms. The points to check for technical SEO audit are:
● The sitemap to identify indexable and non-indexable pages
● The page speed of the site
● Pages with errors or pages excluded from the Google Search Console
● Pages having non-200 status codes
● How does your site use structured data
● Issues, if any, with meta tags, meta descriptions, and title tags
2. Auditing The Off-Page SEO And Link-Building
An expert online marketing agency can help to review the performance of your website
based on its link profile. For this audit, it is crucial to evaluate the backlink profile, so it
votes for the authority of your website in the domain. You have to create a natural and
acceptable backlink profile by participating in several activities.
Since Google has released the algorithm updates to slam manipulative and spammy
link-building strategies, you need a clear overview of your backlinks to avoid any
penalty. Tools like Ahrefs can help in this by providing rich insights into your backlinks,
domain rating, and referring domains.
In case you are getting the highest number of links from irrelevant or spammy websites,
it will reduce your website rating capability. So, your digital marketing partner will look
for suspicious links and submit a disavow file to remove your site from these domains.
3. Auditing The Content Strategy
Since content is the foundation of core functionalities in your website, it has to be flawless, engaging, relevant, and unique. A digital marketing audit focuses on a critical
assessment of content strategy to find any inconsistencies or poor quality factors.
Several metrics are available to gauge the performance of your content strategies.
Firstly, the focus keywords for each page should have a high search volume, user
the intent, and commercial value for each page.
Google Analytics can help audit the organic sessions on your websites to find pages
that attract the maximum number of these sessions. Here, click and impression data
from the search console help gain insights for pages and individual search queries.
Lastly, don’t forget the organic conversions where informative content plays a vital role.
Ask these questions when auditing the content strategy:
● Does the content assist in lead generation and sales? It includes case studies
and white papers.
● Which pages are ranked on the top, and which ones aren’t performing well?
● How much traffic is coming from the focus keywords?
● Which pages are engaging the maximum organic users, and what are their
session duration?
● What is the bounce rate of poor-performing pages?
● Is your content reaching the target audience through paid advertising, organic
search, referrals, and social media?
● What type of content is available on competitor websites?
4. Auditing The PPC Campaigns
The performance of your PPC (pay per click) campaigns can affect the overall site
performance. From assessing the ongoing campaigns to new opportunities, this audit
helps determine the visibility, profitability, and quality scores of your digital ads. Here,
the idea is to identify ad accounts where you are wasting your money and prune these
accounts.
You may be paying a higher cost per click for non-relevant keywords or bidding for
irrelevant search queries. If you can cut back these accounts, it gives a better chance to
spread your budget on high-performance ads.
As a result, you can maximize the returns on your ad spend and overall return on
investments. The online marketing agency conducting this audit will also examine the
quality of your ad campaigns. This will include the overall quality score that affects ad
visibility over time.
Lastly, audit your keywords from the SEO perspective because paid media improves
their visibility for a shorter-term while SEO brings organic results for a longer time.
5. Auditing The Lead Generation And Conversion Rates
For accurate tracking of your digital marketing campaigns, it is critical to understand the
overall lead generation data and conversions. You should have clear-cut conversion
goals and apply them to your Google ad campaigns.
At the same time, the website needs to follow the best practices for lead generation to
make it happen. It involves measuring the number of leads resulting from the campaign
and the conversion rates. Identify the touchpoints that bring maximum conversions
during the buying journey. Also, see:
● If your content converts the leads?
● Do you have a clear value proposition?
● Are there call-to-action buttons above the fold on each page?
● Is your website accessible, clear, and relevant?
A digital marketing audit gives you a clear action plan and a roadmap to improve your
web pages’ performance. It helps every stakeholder to understand marketing priorities.
So, take help from an experienced digital marketing agency to conduct this audit at the
right time.
Author Bio: Emily Stuart is a farmer of words in the field of creativity. She is an experienced independent content writer with a demonstrated history of working in the writing and editing industry. She is a multi-niche content chef who loves cooking new things.
