Why you need to conduct a regular digital marketing audit

Ensuring your website is functioning properly is crucial and is an ongoing process. It must be reviewed, monitored and constantly optimised. Similarly, assessing the status of your marketing activity and its success is just as important, ensuring you achieve the best results possible for your business.

We recommend reviewing the health of your website on a monthly basis, to ensure there are not any red flags which need to be addressed. To Google, any significant issues with your website can hinder visibility online.

All sites should be audited regularly, at least once a year, to identify any weaknesses and where improvements can be made (as Google often changes and introduces new parameters by which a site’s success is measured). When looking to work with new clients, this is usually where we start – reviewing analytics and any technical issues which could contribute to search rankings, site usability and conversion on the website.

Website crawl

It is important to take a technical approach when reviewing your digital presence. It allows us to determine any major on-site issues, which may be holding you back in terms of the organic performance of your website. We use a range of specialist software and analysis tools to identify any errors on your website and ensure you are following best practices for SEO.

We review the following:

  • SEO (search engine optimisation) issues – is the site tagged correctly?
  • From on-page tags to imagery?
  • Duplicate content issues
  • Technical issues, such as site speed, broken links/pages, broken images, orphaned pages, internal linking/redirects.
  • Site structure – is the sitemap set up?
  • Is the robots.txt setup?

Analytics

Accessing your site analytics is crucial for us, in order to understand how your website is currently performing. Initially, we review site visits, acquisition channels, most popular pages, dwell time, mobile behaviour vs. desktop, bounce rates and conversion rates. With these top-level insights, it allows us to understand on-site user behaviour and identify key opportunities to make improvements on your site, with the aim to increase traffic and conversions. Critically, it also raises any significant issues which may need to be addressed, as all of these elements have an impact on search engine standings.

A key part of our analytics audit is reviewing your acquisition channels. Not only to understand which channels are driving the best quality traffic but also to help improve search visibility. Search engines expect to see what is known as a ‘natural linking profile’ and as part of this we expect to see traffic coming from a range of channels, including: organic, PPC, display and remarketing, social media and email marketing. These channels form the foundations of your outbound marketing activity and must be carefully reviewed – we will put key recommendations in place to build your strategy around this.

Review Customer Journey and Conversions

It is important that a user experience/journey review is conducted to assess how users are interacting with your website, based on data. Our UX specialists will analyse the behaviour flow to identify how people are using your site and where they are dropping off. Aside from the product or service offering, the journey to conversion can greatly impact the results. We will consider: are there too many ‘clicks’ or pages to view prior to conversion? Are the ‘Calls to Action’ clear and easy to follow? Does the site perform as well on mobile as it does on desktop? It is crucial these opportunities are identified before putting a solution in place – this can inform any site redesign and development work.

As part of this UX review, it is also important that you have a clear idea of what you want your website to achieve; what do you consider as a conversion? Our team can help with setting ‘goals’ and ‘events’, as well as making CRO (conversion rate) recommendations, aligning to the wider UX review. Ultimately we are aiming to achieve results – this means generating a positive ROI. For the best opportunity to achieve this, your website must deliver positive user experience and strong conversion rates.

Backlink Review

The links pointing to a website can either have an extremely positive impact on your search visibility or seriously hinder the performance of a website. This all depends on their quality. ‘spam’ or ‘toxic’ links can lead to penalties within search engines or even exclusion. It is crucial that all links pointed to the site are reviewed and quality is inspected. With the software available to us, as part of your digital marketing audit, we will review all links pointing to your website and look to affect positive change here, identifying any links which can be cleaned up.

Onsite Content

You may have heard the phrase ‘content is king’ – it’s a bit of a buzz-phrase and has been ever since Bill Gates coined the term back in the ’90s. But, in the online world, it is true. As part of our audit, we will review your website and check for up-to-date, relevant content. Usually, having a blog or news area is a great way to keep your website fresh and host a wealth of on-brand articles. This is important to encourage search engines to return and crawl the site, increasing your visibility on search engines such as Google. All content must also be written specifically for search, in order to generate visits and assist in rankings, this usually starts by identifying specific keywords and building well written engaging content around this subject matter. Content really is key for a website to perform well.

Mobile Review

Finally, reviewing your mobile presence is crucial.  As you probably know, mobile traffic is on the up due to the rise in popularity of smartphones, it’s not just a trend. Translating a basic website onto a mobile device doesn’t quite cut it anymore – your website must be designed specifically for mobile experiences too.

Not to mention, mobile-first indexing has been rolled out by Google, which means that instead of crawling your desktop site for indexing and ranking, they will primarily assess how your site operates on mobile. We will review if the site translates well on a mobile device, if it is responsive and if the content is served in a mobile-friendly way, as well as checking the mobile site speed. In 2019 if a site is not set up to perform excellently on a mobile, it is not set up for success!

Want to see your business take off online? We can help.

Arrange a .conversation today to discuss our digital marketing audit. Our digital marketing team are on hand to run a comprehensive audit of your website and its digital capacities, providing you with intelligent insights and actions to improve your visibility online. Give us a call us on 01603 252555 or fill in a contact form here to find out more.