Do you really need a Digital Audit?

Shortest answer: YES!

A digital marketing audit is a process of evaluating, analyzing and ranking your digital channel practices and strategies. It will likely unearth areas of business practices where you can improve on your online presence, from content marketing, SEO, social media marketing to on-site optimization.

Essentially, it’s a way of looking yourself (business) in the mirror and ask the tough questions.

What are the steps involved?

1. Content Marketing evaluation.

There’s a reason why good content is considered a currency. Ensuring that your content note only resonates with your target audience, but also that it scores well and is recognized by the ever-looming Google beast.

2. Social Media performance.

A solid social media strategy will involve an organized and well-timed release of content on specific channels which will target your consumer or market. Do you have specific goals that go beyond having “more traction”? More specifically, has your traffic from social to website positively affected your analytics? Has your brand awareness increased? How many leads have you generated through social channels? Tough questions!

3. SEO scoring.

Whether you’ve been at the SEO game for a while now, or just cracking the code, a sound SEO strategy will yield a big jump in search rankings and climbing the Google ladder, step by step, wrung by wrung. SEO is a long play as Google puts out frequent updates to its search algorithms.

4. Website audit.

If you’re site has been left a long time without a “house cleaning” there will likely be a few bugs that need swatting. As Google is somewhat unforgiving, it is important to stay on top of this to avoid a drop in rankings. Are all the links working? Images loading? Is the metadata up to date and properly reflect the page and content?

Let the numbers guide you

The short story is data generally doesn’t lie. If the analytics are not supporting growth than changes will be required to your digital properties. An audit can be scary at first but is rather painless (and inexpensive) and will provide insight into what is lagging or what needs to be overhauled or improved.

It is safe practice to conduct a digital audit very few months, at the bare minimum annually to avoid too many skeletons in the closet.