What is a marketing audit? We can define it as a periodic, systematic, and comprehensive review of a company’s marketing. The purpose of the inspection is to evaluate the organization’s marketing activities and assets and use the results to drive their decision-making when it’s time to make new plans. In other words, a company can’t create a marketing strategy without having performed a marketing audit.
Besides being necessary for the formulation of a marketing strategy, a marketing audit has other benefits. It pinpoints the marketing practices and efforts that work and don’t work, provides an in-depth look at your regular methods, and enables you to detect and correct issues before they grow into serious problems. Take a look at the components of a well-conducted marketing audit.
SEO Audit
Search engine rankings have two essential components – search engine algorithm updates and SEO efforts. Due to frequent changes, SEO audit needs to be conducted as frequently as possible, because SEO acts like a moving target. Observe the rankings of a particular keyword and algorithm updates at least once a day. Every SEO audit has two parts – Off-Site and On-Site audit.
Off-Site Audit
- Follow all Google algorithm updates.
- Check to see if the third-party link building (guest blogging) is bringing results or not.
- Check if you are Google Penguin compliant.
- Analyze to find out whether all linkbacks are of good quality and are significant. Bring down all insignificant links.
On-Site Audit
- Use Google Keyword Planner to identify new keywords and optimize ranking for your website pages.
- Use marketing audit tools, like Link Sleuth or SEO Spider, to check for crawl blunders on your website.
- Check if 301 and 404 redirects are filling-in properly, fix broken links, and try to accelerate page load times.
- Check if all the pictures contain appropriate alt tags.
- Your URL structure should be helping your SEO. Check to see if that’s the case (if not, change your permalink structure accordingly).
Content Marketing Audit
At the core of all web-based marketing efforts lies content marketing. It’s among the most beneficial digital marketing campaigns, and many marketers are chasing the so-called “evergreen content.” However, it’s important to revisit and audit your content marketing procedure and content created to ensure they’re still relevant as they were when built.
- Check the content published over different channels convey similar style and tone.
- A content audit is a chance to refresh and update your content. Identify and add new keywords. Link articles to other essential pages or articles on your website. Also, adjust the content to new algorithm updates.
- Content marketing audit allows you to target new audiences that you haven’t targeted so far.
Social Media Marketing Audit
Social media is a dynamic environment, which requires you to audit your social media marketing strategies. To do your social media marketing audit properly, you should:
- Create profiles at the most significant social channels for your brand. Update your profile descriptions and check if links to your pages are correct.
- Update your banners, background pictures, and profile pictures to keep things fresh. Re-evaluate your hashtag strategy – recognize new hashtags and create newly branded hashtags for better online presence and visibility.
- Add more visuals to your posts, because they significantly improve engagement and conversions.
- Automate content curation, measure social traffic, and discover new relevant content to share.
- Stay on top of social media trends.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and Paid Advertising Audit
Paid advertising helps you generate more leads at a faster rate. However, it does consume your budget, and if you don’t audit these processes, you may be giving more than you receive. The aim is to minimize your spending and avoid excessive bidding.
- Analyze and update the keywords you use in your PPC campaigns.
- Improve your click-through rate by tweaking your ad copy.
- Update your banner design by following some generally accepted design rules.
- Ensure that your ads are ready for multiple screens. Create mobile and tablet compatible ads.
- Monitor how your competitors execute their PPC campaigns to see what works for them and try to implement similar processes.
- Register your PPC ROI to see if it justifies your ad spend.
- Pay attention to negative keywords.
- Improve your CTA buttons on landing pages. Redesign them if necessary, to improve your CTR.
- The purpose of a marketing audit is to help create a positive brand image and drive more targeted traffic to your website. You can do it by ensuring that your campaigns stay contemporary, relevant and that they keep converting.
To conduct a complete marketing audit, you need to know how to execute all the processes. If you’re not that tech-savvy and don’t have an in-house marketing department to help you out, you can always reach out to Exceedion. Our experienced team of marketing experts can conduct a marketing audit for you, present you with the results, and help you adjust your current marketing strategies to maximize your effort and financial returns.