If your marketing efforts online feel less than stellar, maybe it’s time to take an honest look at what you can do to shine a light on those cobwebs and dusty surfaces. In other words, give your business a bit of a marketing spring clean.

That’s where a digital marketing audit comes in. If you haven’t come across the term before, we’ll use this post to explain what a digital marketing audit is and why your business might need one.

If your feeling trapped in the disappointment of failed marketing campaigns, read on and see how a digital audit might be just the thing to turn that around. 

What Is a Digital Marketing Audit?

A digital marketing audit is an assessment of your business’s digital marketing efforts. Typically, as this is an audit, it’s carried out by someone external to the organization or marketing team so that they can be as objective as possible.

The idea of a digital marketing audit is to mark your efforts in marketing against a benchmark. This enables you to spot areas where your marketing efforts are working well and areas with gaps. 

Once that audit is done, that information can be used to put together a plan to improve your digital marketing strategy. That’s usually in the form of a digital marketing audit report. 

By running an audit and following through by making the recommended improvements, you are allowing your business to get the best possible returns from every dollar you spend on marketing online. 

What Type of Marketing Does an Audit Cover? 

Digital marketing is a broad term. With the advent of innovative new tools and online platforms, that label is beginning to cover an even wider variety of marketing methods. Here is a quick look at what a typical audit covers:

SEO

An audit of your SEO is often split into two distinct parts: on-page and off-page.

On-page SEO is the technical aspect of your website optimization. This is about how well your website is designed for SEO. That part of the audit will ask questions like: are you optimizing for relevant keywords? 

Some of this audit might be manual, but it is primarily an automated audit using the latest SEO tools.

For example, it might include using a Google tool called PageSpeed Insight. This tool tests whether your site is loading too slowly (a slow-loading site will negatively impact your Google search ranking). 

As the name suggests, off-page SEO is everything that is happening away from your website that positively or negatively impacts your SEO.

For example, this part of the SEO audit will look at the number and quality of backlinks you are getting to your website and whether they are for the right keywords.

Again, there are tools such as SEMRush (and many others) that will do this work automatically. They offer a clear insight into how your website is performing and what you can do with off-page SEO to improve your rankings. 

Content Marketing

Content marketing is closely tied to SEO because good quality website content is one of the best ways to optimize any website. However, auditing a business’s content marketing needs a slightly different approach. 

This part of the audit will look at your website’s overall content, the types of topics, the bounce rate from visitors, the length of content, and the variety in terms of media used (video, audio, infographics, etc.). 

The audit will include a recommendation to improve the content on your website.

That might include specific suggestions for future topics or improving existing blog posts to increase the readability and reduce the bounce rate. 

Social Media

Social media auditing always offers valuable insights for any small business. It’s often the case that most companies will focus on only one or two social media platforms in the early stage of their business growth.

This area of a digital marketing audit will look at how your business is using social media, the size of your followings, and how engaged your followers are.

It will examine the quality of your posts and marketing promotions and look at ways to improve that for future marketing campaigns. 

This audit will also help you identify gaps in your social media marketing. That might be something as simple as growing a presence on one of the newer social media platforms or improving your existing social media conversations.

PPC and SEM

Another aspect of digital marketing is your paid promotions, either through Pay Per Click advertising (for example, Facebook ads) or Search Engine Marketing (for example, paid ads on Google).

Auditing these marketing methods involves looking at the metrics on your ad platforms. It will help you to see what reach your promotion achieved, your cost per click, and most importantly, your return on your ad investment.

By doing this analysis, you can get recommendations on improving these metrics and giving you better outcomes on your next paid promotion.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a central aspect of any digital marketing strategy. But auditing this area is more than simply looking at how many subscribers you have on your email list.

Auditing email marketing means taking a look at how effective your email promotions are. Specific metrics will help you get a picture of how well your approach is working.

Open rates and click-through rates are two of the most critical metrics that any auditor will examine. This will indicate whether your emails have the impact they should have to turn subscribers into buyers.

How to Conduct a Digital Marketing Audit

First, establish what you need from an audit. Is there a particular area of your business that you think you need to focus on or are all your marketing efforts below par? Do you need an audit to give you more guidance on what to do?

Audits are best done by an external party, who can bring their outside experience and knowledge into your business and use this to make the best recommendations.

Upgrade Your Marketing Efforts

A digital marketing audit is all about finding the gaps in your marketing efforts and using that knowledge to transform your online promotional efforts in the future.

A good auditor with the right expertise will help support your marketing strategy and bring it up to a level where you can compete with any rival.

Contact us today, and let’s have a conversation about what your business needs support with and how we might be able to help you.