If there’s one thing that remains constant, it’s that digital marketing is continually evolving. Strategies shift, platforms adapt, and audience expectations rise. To keep your marketing investment working effectively and delivering meaningful returns, you need to stay flexible and adjust your approach with purpose and clarity. Is your brand keeping up? Are you sure?

If you don’t know what you don’t know, it might be time for a digital marketing audit.

A digital marketing audit is a top-to-bottom, comprehensive evaluation of your entire online presence, performance, and digital effectiveness. It shows what’s working, what’s not, and where to improve, providing a digital roadmap.

Your Website

A thorough audit of your website will help identify problems and ways to improve performance. Here are a few of the areas to inspect to help ensure online success:

Technical SEO

Technical SEO can make or break your site’s visibility. Improving Technical SEO makes it easier for search engines to discover, understand, and store your content.

Technical SEO is a critical part of an audit that highlights issues that can affect search performance and user experience. No matter how awesome your content may be, it does no good if it isn’t appearing in search results. Even if your site does appear in search results, users can quickly become frustrated with a slow or poorly designed site. Here are a few of the factors that a website audit will measure:

• Site Speed: A faster site is more appealing to users and search engines. Page experience is one of Google’s primary ranking factors. A faster site = higher search positions. A more responsive website is a form of branding. It says that you care about your customers’ experience and can help boost your credibility. By keeping your visitors engaged, you are more likely to capture leads and convert sales.
• Mobile Friendliness: Most website users are on mobile devices, and that percentage is growing each year. That means your site must be easy to use on all mobile devices. Search engines give higher priority to mobile-friendly sites because they want their searchers to be happy with where they send them. Like site speed, mobile Friendliness is a form of branding. A site that is awkward to use on a user’s smartphone says you are outdated and less reliable.
• Crawlability and Indexing: Search engines will only rank a site if it has been discovered. Their automated crawlers will find, access, and navigate through your website’s content. If they like what they see, they’ll index your site – meaning it’s added to the database of all websites. Site structure is a critical component to ensure crawlability and Indexing. Think of this as the architecture of a well-designed office building. Visitors should find it easy to reach the various floors, navigate the hallways, and find the office they want. A well-designed website structure will organize pages so crawlers can easily locate your content. Internal linking is also crucial for indexing success. All pages should be just a few clicks away from the homepage. An audit will help identify where your important content is located and provide guidance to improve ease of access.

There are many other aspects of technical SEO that an audit will review, such as updated sitemaps, broken links, core web vitals, noindex tags, canonical tags, and other “techie” issues. A bit boring? Sure. Mission critical? Absolutely!

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is the strategy of optimizing your site’s content for users and search engines to drive more organic traffic and meet your website’s business goals.

Keywords and other on-page SEO elements help search engines understand whether a page matches a user’s intent. Here are just a few of the key on-page SEO techniques that an audit will measure – and provide guidelines for improvement:

• Target Keywords: Have you identified the right keywords to ensure search engines find your site? The content on your site must include keywords and phrases that match the search intent of your target audiences. When identifying the right keywords, an audit will consider search volume, keyword difficulty, and their impact on your organic traffic. A successful audit will tell you, “Do more of THIS and less of THAT!” An audit will advise on the optimal locations for those keywords, including headlines, first paragraphs, subheadings, and so on. Search engines will scan these sections to understand the page’s topic. Your visitors will also easily see if your content meets their needs.
• Unique content: once you’ve identified the best keywords, it is important to develop content that not only appeals to your audience and differentiates you from competitors, but is also unique. Duplicate content can result in penalties from Google. While using ChatGPT can be a good way to begin assembling content for a topic, you must go back and rewrite it in your “voice” and ensure that the result is unique and useful. Posting original, valuable content establishes you as a trustworthy authority in your field. Plus, unique and helpful content is more likely to be linked to by other websites, which drives referral traffic – a key contributor to successful search positioning.
• Tags: while this may sound like technical SEO, tags are a critical component of on-page SEO success. These tags include H1 and H2 tags, title tags, Alt text, meta descriptions, canonical tags, and more. An audit will scan your site and provide actionable guidance for improvement.
• Internal linking: This helps users uncover additional content of interest and helps search engines understand your site’s architecture. As mentioned above, all pages should be just a few clicks away from the homepage.
• Visual content: images make your site more engaging and help users better understand who you are and what you offer. When properly optimized, images give search engines valuable information about your page through alt text and descriptive file names. An audit will identify images that are improperly sized, use outdated file types, lack proper tags, and more.

Other on-page SEO factors that an audit can uncover include schema markup, valuable external links, optimized URL naming conventions, opportunities for featured snippets, and more.

Other Website Audit Actions

In addition to the above technical and on-page SEO audit activities, there are other actionable issues that a website audit can uncover:

• Google Analytics audit: a deep dive into your Analytics data can identify a myriad of issues, including poor visitor engagement, unmet conversion goals, insufficient traffic from critical sources, and more.
• Backlink audit: This will assess the quantity and quality of links to and from your website, including the possibility of undesirable toxic backlinks.
• Conversion rate audit: are the visitors taking critical actions on the site, such as downloading a PDF, signing up for a newsletter, or – most importantly – buying.
• Competitor audit: how does your site stack up against your top five competitors? How do their search positions compare to yours for the most valuable keywords? A competitor audit can yield a wealth of actionable insights for your web admin.
• Compliance audit: including privacy policy, cookie policy, terms and conditions, ADA accessibility, language options, and more.

Your Social Media Presence

An audit of your social media footprint will set baselines, develop key performance indicators, help align social media strategies with business goals, and create tools for sales success.

Here are a few ways a social media audit can help meet business goals:

Baseline Audit: Where are you right now with your social media strategy? An audit will help provide a roadmap for future success.

• Current, inactive, or never-used platforms
• Definition of goals (increase brand awareness, generate leads/sales, etc.)
• Current count of followers
• Historical averages for follower growth and engagement

Positioning vs. Competitors: How does your social media presence compare to competitors? Are they winning the race for your customers’ top-of-mind awareness? Some of the measurable stats an audit would uncover include:

• Quality and type of content (text, image, video, etc.)
• Reach and frequency of posts (number of posts per week, volume of interactions)
• Engagement with audiences (likes, comments, shares)
• Quantity and quality of page followers

Branding Audit: This will help ensure consistency of your brand across all platforms. The audit will make recommendations on a variety of branding items, such as:

• Adherence to brand guidelines
• “Voice” or “persona” of the post content matches that of all other marketing channels, including your website, collateral materials, news releases, and so on.
• Ensuring all your employees follow branding guidelines (such as linking to the proper company page).

Audience Audit: An audit of your key audiences will help ensure your social media activities will be seen and resonate with them.

• Which platforms do your audiences use most frequently (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.)?
• Where do they “hang out” (LinkedIn Groups, Facebook Groups, etc.)?
• How many individuals in your target audiences are active on social media, and on which platforms?
• What are the demographics of your target audiences, and what content generates engagement and interaction?

Content Audit: social media platforms are no good without content! An audit will help identify the who, what, when, where, why, and how of your content.

• Who owns the social media posting process?
• What content is most effective – text, video, images, charts, etc.?
• When should posts appear, including the number of posts per week, best time of day, best day of the week, etc.?
• Where are posts most likely to be seen by target audiences, as determined by the above audience audit?
• Why are you posting? To drive sales, brand awareness, website visits, etc.?
• How will you manage the content, including developing a social media “library” and storing images and videos in the cloud? Do you need to acquire a social media management platform such as Hootsuite, or is it more effective to outsource to a professional?

Email Marketing Audit

Email marketing continues to deliver some of the highest ROI numbers across all industries. An audit will help identify ways make the most of this important strategy.

Depending on your industry and business goals, maximizing your use of email is critical for success. Here are just a few items that an email marketing audit can uncover:

List Audit: This will help understand the current health of your email lists.

• Location: where are the lists residing – online, in an Excel document, in the desk drawers of the sales team?
• Quality: How old are the lists? Are you emailing someone who is no longer with your customer’s company?
• Segmentation: Can you segment the list to ensure relevance to the recipient? Are they an end-user, influencer, or decision-maker? Can you segment by industry vertical or geography?

Technical audit: Awesome emails will do no good if they don’t get into the inbox! An email marketing audit will guide the technical parameters needed for success, including:

• DMARC Audit: DMARC is key to improving deliverability! It gives you complete control of email delivery for your company’s domain and is now a requirement from major email providers.
• DKIM Audit: This is important for email security and deliverability because it helps verify that an email is authentic and untampered with.
• SPF Audit: SPF helps protect your brand from spoofing, improves email deliverability, and allows you to control which servers can send emails on your behalf.
• List Hygiene: How are you handling unsubscribes, and are you compliant with CAN-SPAM, GDPR, state-specific laws, CASL, and other applicable laws?

Campaign Audit: How do your KPIs look for your current email marketing efforts? An audit will establish baseline numbers for your campaigns and guide to improve results. The measurables include:

• List growth
• Open rates
• Read rates
• Click rates
• Click-to-open rates
• Unsubscribe rates
• Abuse complaint rates

Content Audit: An email marketing audit will determine how your current template designs and content align with your company’s branding guidelines, industry best practices, competitors’ efforts, and more. The audit will address a variety of topics, including:

• Template design: Colors, fonts, images, headers, footers, etc.
• Personalization: Opportunities to add salutations with first names, reference recent purchases, etc.
• Subject lines: Recommendations on length and style of subject lines and preheader text.
• Image vs. text: Is the message too heavy on images that may not load for everyone in their inbox or preview screen?

A/B Split Tests: An audit can make recommendations on testing variables in your email marketing efforts, including:

• Subject lines
• Time of day
• Day of week
• Buttons and calls-to-action
• Text volume vs. image volume
• Frequency of messaging

Pay-Per-Click Audit

A pay-per-click audit is a deep dive into your online paid advertising strategy, and will help improve performance and save money.

A poorly designed and managed pay-per-click campaign can burn through money at a surprising rate! An audit of your digital advertising efforts can help prevent overspending and increase your conversion rates.

• Data Gathering: an audit will pull together all KPIs from existing campaigns and identify the keywords and phrases that should be present in all assets.
• Ad Content: Do the content and calls-to-action align with current business goals? What does the data say about what works and what doesn’t?
• Competitive Research: An audit can help uncover which keywords your competitors are using, their estimated ad traffic, and their monthly ad spend. How do you compare
• Ad Assets: What extensions should you be using based on your goals?
• PPC Platforms: Based on your industry and target audiences, you might find that you should focus on one ad platform or spread your efforts across several. These platforms include Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, TikTok Ads, and others.

Digital marketings audits should be conducted regularly, regardless of a business’s size. Larger companies should conduct audits more frequently, every 6 to 9 months, due to rapidly changing algorithms and competitive landscapes.

Interested in a digital marketing audit for your business? Contact the team of professionals at Scheffey Marketing & Communications. Contact us at 717.569.8274 or email info@scheffey.com.