Why Audits are Your Best Friend When it Comes to Digital Marketing
Over time, websites lose their structure, pages are left on Google that perhaps shouldn’t be, huge images are posted all over the place, and mobile UX always seems to suffer. When your website drives new business, it’s vital that a health check is performed - otherwise it can tangle pretty quickly.
This guide will cover all the different types of Digital Marketing Audit and what makes them valuable, so you can make the best decision for you and your business and set the best building blocks for you to push your website faster and further.
The Creative Bloom Full Website Audit
We Bloomers take a ‘no stone left untouched’ approach when it comes to our digital marketing audits. Good Marketing Strategy comes from Good Diagnosis and and insightful diagnosis will show us the challenges and opportunities to forge ahead in our marketing.
We’ll look at everything from measuring your digital footprint, full channlel anlaytics & performance, website technical checks, speed and mobile optimisation, SEO, and User Experience in our comprehensive review.
Why does that matter? It means you can create a clear actionable plan of what to tackle and when, getting you more our of you digital marketing efforts and budgets
You’ll take away a step by step action list of all the areas we’ve flagged that require improvements or immediate attention. We’ll go through it all point by point, no jargon, so that you walk away feeling empowered instead of overwhelmed.
What is the Value in a Content Audit?
The point of a content audit is to work out whether you’re making content that’s actually valuable in terms of SEO.
The content you post to your website shouldn’t just be there to promote your business’ values or show off your success stories; it should also be answering questions that potential customers are asking, helping you reach them at multiple points along their customer journey.
A content audit can show you where you have gaps in your content that could provide you with more traffic and help you reach new audiences - meaning people are more likely to consider your brand and compare you against your competitors, as well as giving you a list of content ideas that you don’t have to come up with yourself, which is a win allround.
Do I Need a Social Media Audit?
Social Media Audits help you understand whether you’re driving traffic from your socials to your website, and whether those leads result in conversions over time.
It also points out where you have gaps in your social content and helps you understand whether your brand values are translating in the way that you’re expecting.
Sometimes the values and content you think are worth promoting on social media aren’t really reaching the audience you’re trying to target once you look at the data; a Social Media Audit can help you identify content that will set you apart from your competitors, and speak to both the audience you have established and new customers that find you online.
Similarly to a Content Audit, a Social Media Audit will often result in a list of content you can create without having to sit and think about it yourself, which gives you more time and energy to make that content as high quality as possible.
What does a Website Audit Include?
A Website Audit covers all the backend bits that we often don’t like to think about, but that are really important for rankings; we’re talking speed, mobile optimisation, links (both internal and external), images, website structure issues and all the rest. Websites can bloat over time, and search engines and users can start having a hard time working out what’s what.
The biggest value in having a Website Audit conducted is that it can be a time consuming process to do yourself, you may not have access to the paid tools required, as well as being quite technical. Keeping an eye on your website health is something that needs doing regularly, so having someone else just tell you what needs fixing makes it a lot easier to handle.
What is an SEO Audit?
SEO Audits are essentially the backbone to an effective search marketing strategy.
An SEO Audit is the best way to measure your organic search rankings, assess the opportunity in your search environment and create a plan on how to improve them.
It will cover the keywords you’re hitting successfully, the keywords you aren’t hitting, and the keywords you didn’t even know about - meaning you can go on to apply those keywords to all the other aspects of your digital marketing. It will assess you against the other ranking factors too to see how you stack up against them, and most importantly against your competition.
A good SEO Audit will sift through all the data you’re collecting to identify any issues affecting your organic search performance, showing where you need to improve your strategy overall - what people search for changes constantly, there is a technical element too and your action plans need to reflect that.
What Do You Do After an Audit?
Well, that part is up to you!
As we said Good Strategy comes from Good Diagnosis, a good audit will show you what’s going on and how to navigate forwards, so the best thing you can do is take the information and recommendations from an audit and put into short term, medium & long term action plans - particularly if there are glaring issues with your website or SEO.
If you’re the type who focuses more on creation than implementation, there are plenty of Digital Marketing agencies who can help you put in place and deliver against those actions plans - these types of agencies are perfect if you don’t want to do the heavy lifting yourself.
Whether you end up making the changes or an agency does, it’s important to keep measuring our performance and check if the changes you’ve implemented are having the results you were expecting - you should never see a decline in rankings after taking action from a Digital Marketing Audit.
And with that, we’ve covered it all!
Dreaming of your own audit after going through it all?