Giving the first, best impression to consumers and search engines alike is a must to compete in this ever-changing digital world. John Nosal, the CEO of SEO and owner of NosalCentral LLC, walks Rocks Digital workshop attendees through completing a digital marketing audit – and we have the highlights here for you.
How to Perform a Digital Marketing Audit
What does a digital marketing audit consist of? Let’s examine the components.
- First Impressions
- Analytics
- Grading the Site
- Social Media
- Site Inventory
- On-page SEO
- Blogging
- Search Traffic
You’ve got about 5 seconds to convey what your product or service is, so your site needs to load quickly and you need to say what you do at the top of the site. It really needs to be obvious right away.
- Is the site mobile-friendly? You need to pay attention to how things look on mobile as well. One of the best ways to do this is to use the Inspect feature in your browser to see what it looks like on mobile. (Right-click on the page and then click “Inspect.”)
- Cross-browser checking sites are usually OK, but using the inspect feature is more reliable. Inspect is usually a more accurate view of what it really looks like.
- Pay attention to what’s “above the fold” on your site, and make sure that key information is indeed above the fold. Also, when you look at the site on mobile, look at what is visible first.
Use Helpful SEO Audit Tools
Screaming Frog evaluated the index of a site. It crawls a website’s links, images, CSS, script, and apps to evaluate onsite SEO.
- Find broken links, audit redirects, and discover duplicated content.
- Find any errors on the site, and then you can go in and correct them.
- Pay attention to the names of your images. Use your image alt-text to help your images have SEO value.
- Your site should absolutely have a meta-description, even though it’s not really “search food.”
SEOquake allows you to conduct on-page SEO audits very quickly. You can examine internal and external links and compare domains and URLs in real-time. SEOquake works with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
Website Grader is a free online tool that grades your site against key metrics like performance, mobile readiness, SEO, and security.
Always Protect Your Brand
- Is your branding consistent on your site and social media?
- Are you using the same fonts and colors across platforms?
- Is there a consistent look and feel across sites?
Fix any inconsistencies you find right away. Remember, the first impression can’t be redone.
Google Search Console will reveal a wealth of information on your site. It will give you an idea of what people were searching for when they found you.
Best-Practice Tip: The content on your website is currently 80% of Google’s algorithm, so post content on your website first, and then repurpose it on social media.
