Digital marketing is at a crossroads. The exponential rise of AI has publishers worried not only about automated content creation, but also about the potential for search traffic to their sites to decrease due to the powerful nature of AI-driven search. While these concerns are valid, the open web still has plenty of room for successful websites and effective digital marketing.
Unpredictable circumstances mean now is the perfect time to make your marketing efforts as sharp as possible. A digital marketing audit can help you better evaluate your current strategy and identify the strengths and weaknesses of your current business model. Whether you're a small business, a big brand, an agency, or anything in between, conducting a digital marketing audit is essential to maximizing your ROI.
Here we will walk you through the steps to perform a comprehensive digital marketing audit.
Step 1: Define your goal
Before you embark on an audit, it's important to define what you want to achieve once the audit is complete. For example, are you aiming to improve brand awareness, increase conversion rates, increase lead generation, improve customer engagement? You might have all of these goals or more. Once you have clearly defined your goals, make sure you're addressing them at each step of the audit process.
Step 2: Assess your current digital presence
Next, you should take an inventory of your digital assets that may need updating. This includes:
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Website: Evaluate your website's design, user experience, mobile friendliness, and page performance.
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Social media: Check out your social page activity, including engagement rates and follower growth across platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
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Email Marketing: See your newsletter readership, average open rates, click-through rates, and engagement metrics.
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content: Examine the quality, relevance, and performance of your blog posts, videos, and other content you publish.
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SEO: Check your website’s search engine rankings, keyword profile, and organic search volume.
Google Search Console helps you evaluate your search performance.
Step 3: Analyze your website's performance
Your website is usually the first point of contact with a new customer. Tools like Google Analytics can help you analyze:
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Traffic Sources: Be sure to understand where your traffic comes from. This includes organic, direct, referral and paid traffic.
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User Action: Understand user engagement by looking at metrics like bounce rate, average session duration, and pages per session.
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conversion: Track conversion rates, goal completion rates, and e-commerce metrics (if applicable) to see how successful your website content is.
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Technical issues: Identify and fix technical issues that cause user experience errors and broken links.
Use Google Analytics to view reports on your website's key performance metrics. Screenshot from Google.
Step 4: Evaluate your SEO strategy
Traffic from search is essential to drive organic traffic. You can conduct a thorough SEO audit by analyzing the following points:
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Keyword Analysis: Identify high performing keywords for your content, as well as potential new keywords. Make sure your related content is optimized for those keywords.
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On-page SEO: Make sure your title tags, meta descriptions, headlines, and images are optimized according to Google's best practices.
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Off-page SEO: Review your backlink profile to identify quality backlinks and new opportunities for gaining more backlinks.
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Content Audit: Review your existing content for relevance, quality, and overall performance. Identify content gaps and identify new content opportunities to attract new visitors.
RebelMouse offers comprehensive SEO audits, click here to learn more.
Step 5: Check your social media presence
If properly optimized, social media can be a powerful tool for building brand awareness and increasing engagement. You can audit your current social media strategy by looking at the following points:
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Platform Performance: Review all the social media platforms you use and identify how they are performing in terms of reach, engagement and performance.
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Content Strategy: Evaluate the type of content you share and its effectiveness. Make sure your posts align with your brand's tone and overall goals.
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Audience Analysis: Be sure to understand your audience demographics, including their preferences and behaviors on each social platform.
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Engagement Rate: Evaluate likes, comments, shares, and overall engagement rates for each platform. Identify your best-performing posts and make a plan to create similar content.
Step 6: Analyze your email marketing campaigns
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach your target audience directly. You can audit your newsletter campaigns by evaluating the following aspects:
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Listing quality: Review your subscribers and look for inactive emails and new segmentation opportunities.
✅ Campaign performance: Analyze open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and all engagement metrics from previous campaigns.
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Content and design: Look at your email as a new reader and evaluate its content, design, and CTA.
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automation: Evaluate your email automation workflows to see if you're missing out on any personalization opportunities.
Step 7: Take a closer look at your paid advertising efforts
When investing in paid advertising, it's important to make sure you're getting the best possible return on your investment. To audit your campaigns, look at the following:
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Campaign performance: Get a holistic view of performance across your search ads, social media ads, and other running paid campaigns. Understand metrics like CTR, CPC, conversion rate, and more.
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Targeting and segmentation: Review your targeting parameters to ensure you're reaching the right audience – you may need to narrow your target audience for a wider impact.
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Ad creative: Evaluate the quality of the ad's design and copy. Ask yourself: is the message clear and compelling?
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Budget Allocation: View budgets across campaigns and platforms and optimize spend based on performance.
Step 8: Synthesize your findings and create an action plan
Once you have collected all the necessary data, compile your findings into a report that is easy for you and your team to understand. You can do this by highlighting key insights, areas for improvement, and action items that need to be taken immediately. Develop and prioritize tasks that need to be addressed and capitalize on newly identified opportunities as soon as possible.
Step 9: Monitor and adjust
A digital marketing audit isn't a one-and-done task. It's important to regularly monitor your performance metrics and understand how you need to adjust your strategy. In today's publishing industry, big viral hits are less important. Instead, it's about ongoing, sustainable growth through continuous improvement.
Dominate your KPIs with RebelMouse
Systematically assessing your digital presence is a daunting task, but it's a valuable one that can help you consistently achieve your business goals.
One thing that helps in the audit process is the support of the right technology and expertise. RebelMouse is an AI-enabled platform that makes it easy for sites in our network to achieve great results across all platforms: on-site, social, search, and more. We have both the built-in integrations to set your content up for success, and the team you need to make sure your digital checklist is always well-maintained and improved.
If you're looking to reevaluate your current digital presence and ensure your content is optimized from start to finish,
Request a demo Let's talk today about how we can work together.
