What is a digital marketing audit?

A digital marketing audit evaluates the effectiveness of your marketing across all digital channels. It’s a deep dive into both qualitative and quantitative data to measure the performance of various strategies.

This comprehensive audit covers every single part of your online presence: website and SEO (on-page and off-page), social media impact, content marketing, email campaigns, and paid search ads.

It checks how these elements work together to reach your audience, focusing on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like website engagement and search engine rankings. Plus, it benchmarks your activity against industry standards to help keep you competitive.

The outcome?

A detailed digital marketing plan tailored to your budget and goals. It offers a clear roadmap to boost audience engagement, generate more leads, and optimise conversion rates – all aimed at driving growth.

Why audit your digital marketing strategy?

A digital marketing audit is a crucial step for any growing business. It gives you a big-picture view of your brand’s digital footprint and confirms whether its current efforts are hitting your business goals.

With an audit, you’ll gain data-driven insights to boost your marketing strategy. It evaluates your activity, uncovers gaps and highlights opportunities so that you can fine-tune campaigns.

Without it, you’ll miss critical questions that could help refine your strategy and direct smart investments. Even the most creative campaigns can flop – a failure that could go unflagged without an audit.

And for marketers who need to back their budgets, this data is gold. It can reveal weak spots to address urgently and shows where the business is excelling, proving your efforts are making a real impact.

When should you perform a digital marketing audit?

A digital marketing audit should be scheduled ahead of time and ideally performed on a regular basis so that your efforts align with your goals. So, consider performing this audit at the start of each quarter or every new year.

Aside from routine deep dives, it’s time for a digital marketing audit if:

• Your digital marketing efforts aren’t delivering the expected results.
• There’s no cohesive strategy across digital channels.
• You’re failing to keep up with the latest digital marketing trends, particularly in fast-changing areas like social media marketing and SEO.
• You’ve recently updated your digital marketing KPIs or overall business goal posts.
• You aren’t monitoring KPIs like conversion rates and search engine rankings effectively.

Sound familiar?

We’ve got you covered. Let’s take a look at the steps needed to carry out a thorough digital marketing audit.

How to perform a digital marketing audit

A solid digital marketing audit covers both internal and external factors across the online landscape. You’ll need to scrutinise every aspect of your digital marketing efforts, as well as compare this performance to competitors.

Read on to learn exactly how to do this.

Step 1: Examine your competitors

First things first, size up your competition. Perform a SWOT analysis for each competitor to identify their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats within your industry.

Research their strategies and performance metrics wherever possible. Evaluate their website’s user experience and content, emails, social media presence and more to spot areas where you can gain an edge.

Make sure to focus on key metrics like website traffic, search rankings and top-performing pages using resources like the SEMrush Organic Research tool.

Once you’re equipped with these insights, you can shift focus to your own business and see how it measures up.

Step 2: Evaluate your digital presence

Next, take the time to evaluate your own digital footprint.

When you’re working within a business, it can be easy to lose track of how potential customers perceive it from the outside. That’s why stepping back to view your brand’s activity more objectively is important when trying to attract new customers.

Review every element from website design,  SEO and Google My Business to social media accounts and email content (more on this below).

You should also re-examine your target audience’s online habits and their customer journey with your business so that all marketing efforts can meet their needs and goals.

Step 3: Analyse performance metrics

Another key step of any digital marketing audit is assessing performance metrics. This step is all about focusing on how your efforts have fared over time, so examine everything.

Use tools like Google Search Console, SEMrush and Google Analytics to examine data like organic and paid traffic, keyword rankings, click-through rates, open rates and more.

This heuristic analysis will deliver important insights into what’s working, what isn’t, and where to focus your energy.

Step 4: Define your goals

After evaluating your external and internal environments, it’s goal-setting time. Define what you want to achieve with your digital marketing and how you’ll get there.

Set both short-term and long-term goals, using clear, measurable and realistic KPIs to keep you on track.

For instance, strive to grow Instagram followed by 10% in two months, or double organic website traffic in one year.

Regularly review and adjust these goalposts in line with your progress.

Step 5: Prepare an action plan

Your digital marketing audit should deliver actionable insights in a clear plan. Apply its findings to fine-tune your online strategies, targeting channels that need improvement and boosting investment for strong performers.

To do this, devise a timeline and assign tasks to relevant team members. This approach will help to keep your team organised, efficient and working towards the same outcome.

Finally, it can help to group the points of your action plan by difficulty or use a framework like ICE (Impact Confidence Ease) so that you can establish clear priorities.

Channels to analyse in a digital marketing audit

When performing a digital marketing audit, you’ll need to unpack every channel in depth. Importantly, each channel is unique, demanding distinct analyses and tools to uncover insights.

Here are the different facets to focus on:

Website

Your website is the core of your digital marketing strategy. And it’s one of the few online assets you have complete control over. That means you need to ace its design, functionality, user experience, and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

In a nutshell, here’s how to do a website audit:

1. Check the basics: Make sure your site is secure, loads fast, and is error-free. These are non-negotiables for a great user experience.
2. Dive into data: Look at your web analytics – traffic, conversion rates, bounce rates and more. These numbers tell you how well your site is performing.
3. Get technical: Review your site’s code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and check your hosting platform and server settings. Ensure everything is running smoothly under the hood.

The bottom line?

Keep it sharp, keep it simple, and make sure your website is working as hard as you do.

Now, let’s get more specific.

Perfect your website design

Your website’s design makes an instant impression. It can either draw visitors in or push them away.

We’ve put together some website design best practices to audit on your site:

• Prominent Call-to-Actions (CTA): Your CTAs should pop. Make them easy to find with bold buttons and vibrant colours that encourage action. But don’t go overboard – make sure they are short and sweet for maximum clarity.
• Modern visuals: Keep your site looking clean and contemporary with lots of white space, and use images and videos that enhance the user experience. Review visual elements like layout, colour scheme, typography, and overall aesthetic to ensure they’re clear, appealing and in line with your brand.
• Clear Messaging: Can your visitors tell at a glance what they should be doing on a page and what it is you’re offering? Pay attention to your content headings – this might be the only copy that users read on their first visit to your site.
• Simple structure: Use consistent typography and differentiate headings and subheadings with varied text weights, colours, and sizes. This guides users to key information.
• Easy and intuitive navigation: Ensure your site’s header, footer, and links help customers find what they want in three clicks or less.
• Accessibility: Include key accessibility elements like colour contrast, alternative text, visual focus indicators, and accessible labels to help everyone use your site effectively.

Monitor your website speed

Page load times are key to both user experience and Google rankings.

So, during your digital marketing audit, test the loading times of your key pages to ensure they’re up to par.

Assess your top-performing pages and look for ways to trim every millisecond. Consider site-wide optimisations like:

• Cutting unused JavaScript;
• Actioning lazy loading; and
• Compressing file size.

You can identify page speed improvements using tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom and GTMetrix.

Make your site mobile-friendly

Once you’ve sorted your website’s speed, assess the user experience on a mobile device – which is what most consumers use to browse their options online.

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool is a great resource to gauge your site’s performance on mobile devices. Additionally, manually checking key pages on a smartphone will give you a firsthand look at the user experience.

To ensure your site is mobile-friendly, avoid these common mistakes:

• Content that is too wide for the screen
• A viewport that isn’t configured
• Text that is too tiny to be legible
• Clickable elements bunched too close together

Check Core Web Vitals

The Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console leverages real data to evaluate each web page’s performance. Google flags problem areas for you to address to enhance the user experience.

You’ll receive specific instructions on how to resolve these issues. Once you’ve made the necessary changes, you can validate the fixes in Google to clear the error messages and boost your scores.

Learn more about Core Web Vitals.

SEO

The next focus for your digital marketing audit is SEO. Essentially, this step evaluates how search engine-friendly your website is.

In short, SEO boosts your site’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs), driving organic traffic. With so many people using Google every day, this is crucial to your brand’s online presence and performance.

A thorough SEO audit helps you identify weaknesses and make improvements to climb the rankings.

Since search algorithms are always evolving, it’s important to run an SEO audit regularly (and by that, we mean at least twice a year). SEO isn’t a set-and-forget strategy if you want to stay ahead of the competition.

Here are some key elements to check in any SEO audit:

Technical SEO

Technical SEO focuses on optimising your website for search engine bots to find, crawl and index content easily.

This is what to check in your technical SEO audit:

• Robot.txt file: Make sure you’re not blocking important content from getting crawled and blocking content that you don’t want to be indexed.
• URL structure: Keep it simple and logical.
• Breadcrumbs: Add them for better navigation.
• Structured data: Use it to enhance Google’s understanding of your content and increase eligibility for rich results.
• XML sitemap: Ensure all your pages are included and submitted to Google Search Console.
• SSL Certificate: Secure your site with SSL and check it routes to HTTPS.
• Site speed: Like we said before, test for quick loading times, which is a major ranking factor.
• Mobile-friendliness: As discussed above, make sure your site is mobile-friendly.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is all about optimising your website’s content and UX to boost its page rankings on SERPs.

All kinds of on-page SEO factors send signals to search engines, helping them understand your content and determine the keywords it should show up for.

Here’s what to focus on during your website audit:

• Title tags and meta descriptions: Ensure each page has unique, engaging title tags and meta descriptions that inform users about the topic and include target keywords.
• Headings and text formatting: Use hierarchical headings to break up content into sections (H1 for the page title, H2 for main headings, H3 for subheadings). Moreover, opt for bullet points and bold text to make certain sections clearer or more prominent for skim readers.
• Originality and freshness: Run your through a plagiarism checker to confirm it’s unique, assess the length and when it was last updated, and use tools like Yoast SEO to see how well your it has been optimised for target keywords.
• Internal linking: Include 2-10 internal links per page, varying the anchor text within the content of your pages. Link to important pages from your homepage.
• Images: Make sure image file names are descriptive and include SEO-optimised alt text.
• Broken links: Use tools like Google Search Console to identify broken links. Then fix, delete or replace them accordingly.

By focusing on these on-page SEO elements, you can improve your website’s search engine ranking and user experience.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO looks at strategies beyond your website to boost its rankings.

Here’s an easy way to remember: On-site SEO is fully in your control because it’s all about your own website. Off-site SEO depends on other websites, making it trickier to manage.

A key off-page SEO tactic is to gain backlinks from authoritative websites. Backlinks have been a major ranking factor since the dawn of search engines. That’s because when other sites link to yours, it signals trust and value in your content.

• Incoming Links: Evaluate all links to your site using tools like SEMRush or Google Search Console. Check each linking domain’s quantity, quality, and key pages. Using this information, you can identify sites that are likely to link to you and shortlist similar sites for outreach!
• Domain authority: Measure and boost your domain’s trustworthiness and strength by acquiring high-quality backlinks with a link-building campaign.
• Link profile: Compare your backlink profile with competitors using tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush to identify high-quality link sources and potential link-building opportunities.

Learn more about our comprehensive SEO audit services here.

Content

Check the relevance, quality, and consistency of your brand’s content across every channel – from organic social posts and blog articles to product descriptions and paid search ads.

The aim is to feature engaging and informative content tailored to your target audience’s needs.

Pinpoint your top-performing content

Content marketing is all about creating valuable content that attracts, engages, and retains customers, ultimately building brand loyalty.

Start by reviewing your existing content to spot the top performers.

Check which pages get the most views, engagement, and conversions by looking at metrics like page views, click-through rates, session durations, and conversion rates.

You can either list all your pages in a spreadsheet and review them manually or use tools like SEMRush or Screaming Frog to streamline the process.

While doing this, keep track of common traits among high-performing pages to know what to focus on next.

The goal? Find out what works and what needs improvement. Spot trends in your strongest content to sharpen your strategy.

Remove, update and merge pages

After reviewing your pages, it’s time to tidy up your site. Remove outdated or low-value pages, and merge repetitive or duplicate content.

Combining similar pages can help boost your SEO. That’s because users and search engines prefer one comprehensive page over multiple thin ones.

When consolidating pages, don’t forget to set up 301 redirects for the deleted ones. Focus on your top performers, and get rid of the weaker version.

Develop a content marketing plan

Craft a content marketing calendar for the foreseeable future. Leverage the insights from assessing your top-performing pages, as well as your competitors’ content strengths and weaknesses. The latter will help to reveal gaps in your strategy and opportunities to stand out.

You can also draw on the findings from your SEO audit to identify gaps in your keyword strategy and find new content topics. Identify keyword gaps and develop content based on the success of your top-performing pages.

Social media

A solid social media strategy sets clear goals for where your brand wants to be in a few months. To keep your strategy sharp over time, conduct a social media audit every quarter or year.

This involves analysing your social media campaigns and profiles, assessing the quality of your content and engagement, and evaluating your follower count and engagement metrics.

Key figures to track include:

• Traffic: Are your social media pages driving users to your website?
• Visitor type: Are you attracting more repeat visitors or new visitors to your social media profile and website?
• Engagement: Are users interacting with your social media activity and converting on your website?
• Brand awareness: Is your social media activity boosting your brand’s presence?
• Leads: How many leads are being generated via your social media channels?

Read on to learn more about each key step at this stage of your digital marketing audit.

Check that all details are accurate

First, review each of your social media pages to ensure all information is correct and consistent.

Key areas to check include:

• Profile and cover photos: Ensure they align with your brand’s image.
• Profile bio: Make it complete and up to date, succinctly highlighting your brand’s core offerings and competitive advantage.
• Links: Verify that all links back to your website are working properly.

Confirm follower count

Next, check the follower count for each of your social media pages. This metric helps you gauge engagement and growth.

If one channel is growing faster, consider focusing more effort there.

Reply to comments

Engage with your audience by responding to comments on your posts. Regularly monitoring and replying to comments will help you understand your audience better.

If comments are scarce, your content might not be resonating or you may need more followers.

Review your social media handles

Ensure consistency across all social media handles. Ideally, use the same handle on every platform.

During your digital marketing audit, update any handles that differ from the rest.

Create a social media content plan

Plan future content for your social media profiles to maintain consistent engagement with your audience. It should include regular updates to your bio and other account info to keep your pages fresh and engaging.

Paid advertising

Now you’re ready to dive into your paid advertising campaigns.

That means assessing your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, like Google Ads and Meta Ads (Facebook and Instagram).

The goal?

To confirm you’re using the right platforms for your target audience and leveraging each one effectively.

Check your campaigns

Next, evaluate your entire approach to planning and implementing paid ads, including campaign creatives, types, targeting, and spending.

To check ad performance, take a look at these key metrics:

• Impressions: How many users saw your ads?
• Cost: How much did your campaigns cost?
• Clicks: How many clicks did your ads get?
• Cost per Click (CPC): What did you pay for each click?
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): What percentage of viewers clicked on your ads?
• Conversions: How many people completed the desired action?
• Cost per Action (CPA): What did you spend for each conversion?
• Conversion Rate (%): What percentage of interactions led to the desired action?

You should also review your ad budget at least quarterly to ensure it’s spent efficiently. Identify high-spend campaigns with low conversions and vice versa. Then focus your budget on the most effective campaigns.

Audit your ads

Time to give your ads a thorough check to spot any areas for improvement. Here’s what to focus on:

• Messaging: Make sure your ad copy is relevant to your target audience and sounds like it’s coming from your brand. Double-check for any typos.
• Display URL: Optimise your display URLs for your target keywords to help boost click-through rates.
• Ad variety: Aim for 3 to 5 different ads in each ad group to keep things fresh, precise and engaging.
• Landing URLs: Check that your landing page URLs are correct and match the campaign’s objectives.

Email

Email marketing is a must for modern digital strategies, thanks to its versatility and strong ROI (return on investment) when done right.

An email marketing audit involves analysing all email campaigns, including their design, creative content and metrics.

Keep reading to learn exactly what to look for.

Tally up your subscribers

To start, review how many email subscribers you’re gaining each day. Even the best campaigns won’t succeed if they’re only seen by a few people, so ensure your lead generation efforts are bringing in enough subscribers.

If you have a low subscription rate, it might indicate issues in other areas of your digital marketing, including:

• Traffic: Your SEO and paid ads might not be driving enough traffic.
• Content: Your content might not be engaging enough to prompt sign-ups.
• Incentives: What are you using to incentivise signups? Try enticing leads with some free content like a guide or resource relevant to your audience.

Use your analytics platform to identify where visitors are dropping off.

Look at email deliverability rates

From there, make sure your emails are actually arriving in your subscribers’ inboxes.

A low deliverability rate might mean your emails are being blocked by ISPs or landing in spam folders.

To improve deliverability, you can:

• Ensure proper IP allocation
• Authenticate your email domain
• Stay away from spammy subject lines
• Use a dedicated subdomain for emails
• Implement warm-up and sunset automations
• Regularly clean your email list

Optimise open and click rates

After confirming your emails are reaching subscribers, assess your open and click rates to gauge engagement.

• Open rate: Review and refresh your subject lines. Also, consider adjusting the timing of your emails.
• Click rate: If the open rate is solid but clicks to your website are low, examine the design and content of your emails for sections to improve.

Refine email designs

On that note, your email design should be visually appealing and packed with valuable content. Moreover, make sure your emails are responsive as lots of people will open them on their phones.

Avoid these common design pitfalls:

• Missing an unsubscribe button
• Excessive use of images containing text content
• Oversized text
• Rendering issues
• Inconsistent branding
• Lack of alt text for images

When reviewing your email designs, ask yourself:

• Do they work on mobile?
• Is the formatting clean and easy to read?
• Is it readable if images are disabled or blocked?
• Is the offering’s value obvious?
• Is there a strong CTA?
• Are the subject lines attention-grabbing?
• Are the designs consistent with your brand?

Review email automation campaigns

Unpack how your email automation campaigns are performing.

Many email marketing tools offer detailed stats to assess your campaign’s overall success, showing you total revenue and identifying which customers are most engaged and making purchases.

Use these insights to refine your audience targeting, concentrating on the subscribers who are most likely to convert. More on this below.

Tidy up your email list

Your subscriber list is the backbone of your email marketing. During your digital marketing audit, make sure to clean your list, keeping only high-quality subscribers.

Remove inactive individuals to avoid wasting time on uninterested recipients.

You can also configure sunset automations to re-engage users who have been inactive for some time with attractive offers, and then passively unsubscribe them if they still aren’t biting.

This will boost your email deliverability and improve your open rates. Plus, it can reduce costs, as most email marketing platforms charge per number of subscribers.

Brand reputation

Recent research suggests that 79% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. So, nailing your brand’s online reputation is crucial.

A brand reputation audit means digging up all online mentions of your business to see what customers are saying about you.

Equipped with a solid brand reputation audit, you’ll be able to:

• Get the scoop on customer relationships
• Spot issues in your business
• See how you stack up against the competition

Here’s how to do a brand reputation audit.

Begin by Googling your brand to see what pops up first. Any recent press about your company or team is likely to be at the top.

We also recommended setting up Google Alerts to get real-time notifications whenever someone mentions your brand. This saves you from having to constantly rifle through search results.

As well as Google, check out these platforms for reviews:

• Customer reviews: Trustpilot, Yelp and Amazon (if relevant)
• Employee feedback: LinkedIn, Glassdoor and Indeed
• Social media mentions: X, Facebook, Reddit, TikTok and Instagram

Next, flag any bad reviews.

Replying with a genuine message to negative feedback and trying to fix issues shows both consumers and search algorithms that you care about your customers.