31 March 2014
Positioning a brand online is an exercise that takes months, if not years to come to fruition. It’s a mammoth undertaking that leverages a multitude of organic and inorganic digital marketing channels in a harmonious synergy.
Once you are successful in getting a pole position online, it doesn’t mean you’re done. An equal amount of hard work is required to retain that leadership position. You’ll have to adapt to new trends and make course corrections in line with your competitor’s strategy at a breakneck pace.
Auditing the digital marketing strategy in its entirety at regular intervals is one assured way of staying ahead of the curve. So, what metrics should a digital marketing audit take into account?
Reach - Track and benchmark your numbers - website traffic, SERP rankings, ad impressions, social follower count and the like. Did you reach the goals that you set when you kickstarted the campaign? Irrespective of whether you answer in the affirmative or not, the bar has to be raised higher.
Strategy - Are your online marketing strategies still relevant? Digital marketing is a fluid concept and new, lucrative channels pop up every now and then. The strategy that worked like gangbusters last quarter might not guarantee results today.
Conversion - So, you are ranking high in search engine results. There are hundreds of followers across all social media accounts and there are thousands of people visiting your websites everyday. But, these successes become irrelevant if there is hardly any conversion. Not getting enough trial accounts or form submissions? Then, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
Search engine rankings are the most notorious of all the digital marketing rankings. Happy to see all your 30 keywords rank high? Well, you’ll have to hustle twice as hard to keep those rankings intact.
Search engine rankings have a crazy half life due to two important factors - search engine algorithm updates and the SEO efforts of your competition. It’s a two front war with a bunch of moving targets.
It might be alright for an audit of social strategy once a month and content marketing strategy once every couple of months, SEO audits should happen as frequently as possible.
Even if you are not crossing off everything in the SEO checklist every single time, constant monitoring for algorithm updates and monitoring the rankings of individual keywords on a daily basis is highly recommended.
On Page SEO Audit
Run a crawler and check for website crawl errors. Tools like SEO Spider and Link Sleuth make this an easy task.
Identify new keywords using Google Keyword Planner and other third party tools and optimize the pages.
Check if the existing URL structure is helping your SEO strategy and try changing the permalink structure if the results aren’t satisfactory.
Find newly added pages or content and look for ways to deep link existing pages.
Check out if proper alt tags accompany all images and if video SEO has been done for videos if any.
Fix broken links and check if 301, 404 redirects are working as they should.
Optimize the code and try to speed up page load times.
Off Page SEO Audit
Analyze if all the linkbacks are relevant and are of high quality.
Contact webmasters to take down or remove links from websites that aren’t relevant to your business. Basically, check if you are Google Penguin compliant.
Figure out if the link building strategy by way of guest blogging is working.
Stay on top of all Google Algorithm updates. Subscribe to email alerts and RSS feeds of top tier blogs to stay current.
Advertisements help businesses to acquire customers inorganically at a faster rate. While that’s true, it’s easy to burn money even faster if there isn’t a proper paid advertising audit in effect.
When it comes to online advertising, a major chunk of every company’s advertising budget goes into Google AdWords. New and creative ideas are required to keep costs low and to stay away from costly bidding wars with competitors.
Here are some ways to make sure you get the most out of your advertising spend:
Constantly check if the keywords used in the PPC campaign compliment the organic SEO efforts.
Tweak the copy to attain better click through rates (CTR). If there isn’t any significant improvement, rewrite them from scratch.
Update banner ad designs and copy. Follow and adopt widely accepted design guidelines.
Use tools like SEMRush to monitor the performance of PPC campaigns of the competition.
Following the above mentioned steps and tweaking them constantly will result in a better quality score. If it doesn’t, then try getting some expert advice if you are doing it on your own.
See how well the ads published via search partners perform. Compute the RoI and consider if the numbers justify the spend.
Ensure that your campaigns are ready for multiple screens. Mobile and tablet optimized ads are a must.
Track if geo targeting works for your brand. Explore new geographies to target.
Keep an eye on negative keywords and add or remove more of them based on PPC analytics.
Experiment with the placement of ads and see if the CTR rates improve.
Rewrite and redesign landing pages with better copy and CTA.
Implement a remarketing strategy if you haven’t already.
Content generation is one task that overlaps across all marketing strategies. Content marketing is now at the heart of all online marketing efforts and it appears that people can’t have enough of it.
The concept of “evergreen content” sounds good on paper. However, in reality it’s better to revisit both the content generated and the content marketing strategy to ensure that they are still relevant.
For instance, if your landing page emphasizes on a business process that helps businesses streamline their sales pipeline management, you’ll have to subject the content to a scrutiny after a few months. This way, you will get to polish the content, update it with relevant keywords and ensure that the suggestions put forth aren’t outdated.
And, in the case of blog posts, content audit will give you a chance to perform a keyword refresh and link to other relevant articles or pages in your website. Search engines love to crawl and index up to date content, so convert content audit into an opportunity to update the content and bring search engine spiders to your pages more often.
Content audits aren’t just about SEO alone. From time to time, it’s better to check if your messaging is uniform across the board. Content generated across all channels should be consistent and should carry the same tone and style.
Besides keeping the content from getting stale, content audits are a way to utilize new search engine algorithm updates to your benefit. Let us take Google’s Hummingbird update for instance. Search results are now optimized for human speech. Meaning, Google is capable of delivering precise results for keywords that are in a conversational style.
These keywords tend to be lengthier than the conventional keywords that are usually three or four words long. Thanks to a timely content audit, you can stay ahead of the competition well ahead of time. While at it, evaluate and revamp the email marketing strategy as well.
Any lapse in content mix is also quickly spotted during content audits. Instead of producing pages after pages of written content, content types that attract more eyeballs - images, video etc. - that have been short of supply so far can be created and distributed for better engagement.
Another important benefit of content marketing audit is to better address new customer personas. It becomes easier to create articles, ebooks, infographics, landing pages etc. around profitable customer profiles that haven’t been targeted so far.
Closely on the heels of SEO is social media marketing. Let’s forget about new trends that emerge out of the blue for a second. When it comes to social, new networks are launched at a feverish rate. That in itself warrants a close watch of your social marketing strategy.
Even if new social networks aren’t as big as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, every new app or platform has a social layer to it and you can’t miss out on the new opportunities. So, it’s important that you are aware of new channels where you can engage in conversations and content marketing. Here’s how:
Create social network profiles at all newly launched networks. Maintain a spreadsheet to keep track of multiple accounts.
Update the descriptions in profile pages and check if links to relevant pages are all there and aren’t broken.
Change the profile pics, banners and background images often to keep things fresh.
Benchmark and re evaluate the hashtag strategy. Identify new hashtags and use them for better visibility.
Revisit your content mix and posting frequency. Focus your efforts to weave more visuals in your posts.
Evaluate if you are successfully engaging influencers and your audience. Make a new list of topics and people to target.
Measure the traffic that social networks bring to your website. If people aren’t clicking on the links as much as you would like, try using power words in the posts and tag them with industry standard keywords.
Make it a point to automate almost all your social media efforts except when it comes to engaging in conversations with real people.
Dedicate more time to find new and interesting content to share. Try automating content curation using third party tools.
At the end of the day, the goal is to drive targeted traffic to the website and to build a positive chatter around your brand. Though there is no right time to do digital marketing audit, it’s always good to do it as frequently as your marketing calendar allows. What say you?
