A digital marketing audit of your site is the best way for you to see where you stand, identify any issues, and highlight areas that need improvement.
A digital marketing audit is not only about highlighting these areas. The purpose of a digital marketing audit should not be limited to highlighting these areas. It should also produce actionable recommendations that can then be used to develop a data-driven strategy across your digital channels. These recommendations should always be linked back to your core business goals and growth targets.
This guide will help you complete a Miami digital marketing audit that is holistic and actionable.
- Tools to Conduct a Digital Marketing Audit
- Technical SEO
- Content
- Off-Page SEO
- PPC
- Tracking and reporting
- A Digital Marketing Audit
1. Tools to Conduct a Digital Marketing Audit
Marketers must do a deep dive into website performance data to gain a solid understanding of how it compares with their KPIs. You can use a variety of free tools to do this efficiently.
- Google Analytics To get key insights into how traffic to your site, how customers interact with your content, and how you measure ROI.
- Google Search Console: To monitor and troubleshoot your website’s organic presence within the Google search results.
- Google Keyword Planner: To conduct keyword research, understand search demand and calculate projections.
- Ahrefs (free trial for 7 days): To understand your website’s visibility and keyword research, competitor analysis, keyword rank tracking, backlink analysis, and keyword research.
- Screaming Frog: To crawl your website and diagnose issues related to technical SEO and content.
2. Technical SEO
You have a better chance of being crawled, indexed, indexed, and ranked higher on a search engine if you improve the technical foundations of the site. Credibility and indexability should be the main focus of any audit of the technical SEO on your website.
Google can be expensive to crawl the internet so it is important to make your site as simple and efficient as possible. This will allow your content to be renewed frequently and enable new content to be discovered quickly.
It is important to control which pages can be indexed on your website. You must ensure that users have access to all pages on your site. However, you should also make sure that search engines don’t confuse you by indexing content that is not of value to them.
There is also the issue of user experience. Google considers factors such as mobile usability and page loading time when ranking websites. You will get higher rankings if you improve the user experience.
Here are some quick technical SEO checks you can do:
- Use the ‘Valid pages’ category in Google Search Console to verify that your sitemap includes all indexable pages.
- Check for pages that fall under the ‘Errors’ or ‘Excluded” categories in Google Search Console.
- Check your site has a robots.txt file (domain.com/robots.txt) and make sure that the file isn’t blocking any pages that it shouldn’t be by reviewing the ‘blocked by robots.txt’ area of Google Search Console.
- Google’s PageSpeed Analysis Tool can help you assess your page speed.
- Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool will help you determine if your website is mobile-friendly.
- Use the Structured data testing tool to check if your site uses structured data.
- You can crawl your website and identify pages that have non-200 status codes such as 404 errors. Also, you can spot issues with your title tags or meta descriptions such as duplicate content.
3. Content
You should look at the performance of your website with a critical eye. Then, use these insights to develop a strategy that will help you in your marketing efforts.
Many metrics can be used to gauge the performance of your content. First, where does your website rank for the focus keywords you are using? Keywords with high search intent, high value, high search volume, or both can be considered focus keywords. Are there pages that are not being indexed because of duplicate or thin content?
Google Analytics can be used to analyze the number of organic sessions on the site, and which pages are driving most of them. Google Search Console also offers click and impression data. This is useful as it allows you to gain insight at the page level, but also for specific search queries. The click-through data can indicate how user-friendly your metadata is.
Third, examine your organic conversions. These conversions are mainly driven by service pages, or is informational content also important? How do your conversion rates differ across different subfolders? While it is important to drive traffic to your website, it is equally important to ensure that this is producing real ROI. This will be discussed in greater detail below under “tracking and reporting”.
Questions to ask about the content on your website:
- What pages rank well and what pages don’t?
- Is it necessary to remove poor-performing content from the site or can it be made to work better?
- What keywords drive the most traffic?
- What percentage of my traffic comes from brand searches?
- What pages attract organic visitors once they visit the site?
- What pages are the most successful in terms of session length and bounce rate?
- What content do your competitors produce? And what are the opportunities for you to create new content yourself?
- Is it possible to use any content from your site as an asset for other marketing channels? As part of an email campaign, or promoted via social networks?
4. Off-Page SEO
Your online success depends on your backlink profile, which is the list of links that point to your site from other sites.
Brands need to engage in activities that foster a positive, natural backlink profile in a world where every link counts as an authority vote. However, not all votes are the same. This is especially evident since Google’s Penguin algorithm update, which aims to curb spammy and manipulative links building techniques.
Ahrefs can be a powerful tool to understand your backlink profile. It provides a clear overview of your backlinks and the referring domains. The domain rating is a third-party metric that measures the strength of a website’s backlink profile. It can range from 0 to 100.
Google may view your website as less quality if you attract a lot of links from spammy, low-quality, or irrelevant websites.
It may be worthwhile to submit a disavowed form to disassociate the site from low-quality domains if you notice that your site has many suspicious or poor links. You should be cautious. It is not a good idea to delete large portions of your backlink profile as this could damage the site’s overall value.
An audit of your backlink profile is a great way to find broken backlinks pointing toward 404 pages. These should be redirected in a way that maximizes the value of your site’s links.
5. PPC
There are several important aspects to remember when auditing your PPC performance or assessing the potential to launch new campaigns.
- Visibility (impressions and impression share, top page IS, absolute top page IS)
- Profitability (CPCs and CPAs, ROAS, ROI, CPA)
- Quality scores (clicks and CTRs)
It is better to find areas where you are spending too much and then reduce your spending. You could waste money by paying higher CPCs for keywords than you need, bidding on non-relevant search terms, or missing opportunities to tighten your targeting settings.
After identifying and cutting back the wasteful spending, you can redistribute this budget to areas that have higher performance. This will allow you to focus your campaign’s efforts on the areas that are driving leads and revenue. It will also maximize your return on advertising spend (ROAS), and your overall return on investment.
Don’t forget about the quality of your ads when assessing your wasted spending. Your maximum bid and your ads’ quality score are combined to determine your overall ad rank. Efforts to improve your ad quality may help reduce CPC while maintaining or improving your visibility.
You should consider keywords that are not easily reachable from an SEO perspective when you audit your PPC opportunities. Paid media can be a cost-effective way to achieve visibility for these keywords short-term, while SEO work is done in the long term to improve organic rankings.
6. Tracking and reporting
Accurate tracking is essential to be able to understand your marketing activity across all disciplines. It can also provide valuable insights into areas that have had high success rates and areas where there has been budget waste. It is vital to set up conversion goals correctly. You should apply them to your Google Ads campaigns to make it easier to optimize your campaign.
It is also important to understand how digital marketing in Las Vegas campaigns across different channels impact each other.
Although it might seem like your PPC campaigns are driving revenue, a closer look at your Google Analytics-assisted conversion data (Conversions >Multi-Channel Funnels Assisted Conversions), can reveal a completely different story. To unlock the potential of each channel and create holistic digital marketing in Phoenix strategy, it is important to understand your customers’ conversion paths.
You can play with different attribution models in Google Analytics (Conversions > Multichannel Funnels > Model Comparator Tool).
Attribution models are a set of rules that determine how credit for conversions will be assigned to different touchpoints during the buying process. Simple attribution models such as the last click give undue weight to certain channels. Understanding the role of your marketing campaigns in driving conversions is much easier with data-driven or position-based attribution.
7. A Digital Marketing Audit
An action plan is as important as a Los Angeles digital marketing agency audit. A roadmap that outlines the planned tasks and details about the potential impact, as well as the resources required, can be useful. This document can be used to give a high-level overview of the upcoming priorities in digital marketing to key stakeholders.
It may be beneficial to include additional information in the roadmap, such as assigned responsibilities or a timeline. Before making this judgment, you should be aware of your authority as well as the roles of other stakeholders.
Once you have created a strategic roadmap, backed by performance data, and set goals, you can start making positive changes that will improve your digital presence and increase your bottom line.
