Before you start to fix or improve something, you usually have to find out what’s good and what works now. The same goes for your digital marketing strategy , where you must first conduct a full audit before investing in any promotional activity.
Therefore, this article will show you how to correctly carry out a complete digital marketing audit and which situations to pay special attention to.
Why do you need a digital marketing audit?
A digital marketing audit will allow you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your website, find optimization opportunities and increase performance.
Before you start setting up conversational marketing, you should definitely do a digital marketing audit as it will help you with the following:
- Detect critical technical errors that will prevent the chatbot from working correctly in your ecommerce.
- Analyze usability to make sure your site is convenient for users.
- Identify the effectiveness of paid advertising in attracting your target audience.
- Check if your brand strategy matches the actual impressions your users get.
- Evaluate email marketing campaigns at the personalization level.
Let’s take a closer look at what goes into a web audit and what you should pay attention to before implementing conversational marketing tools.
1. SEO as part of a digital marketing audit
As part of a digital marketing audit, SEO metrics should be checked. After an SEO audit, you will discover:
- how your site ranks in search results
- with which queries you rank better
- which pages in the SERP bring you the most organic traffic
- and if your site is ranking for target keywords and matches user intent.
When users land on your website, they pay attention to content and usability, and chatbots play second fiddle in converting them into actual customers. But if there is poor content or critical errors on the website, users will not initiate a conversation with the chatbot and will simply leave.
Therefore, before implementing any conversational marketing tricks, you should thoroughly check the health of your website and track particular SEO metrics to catch problems early. Therefore, we are going to delve a little deeper into what a complete SEO audit consists of.
technical audit
As part of a technical audit, the following issues are checked:
- Crawl errors: bot crashes, server errors, DNS errors, too long URLs that bots can’t read, etc. Run a robust web audit to get a white paper of SEO issues. These SEO tools simulate the behavior of a search engine crawler to detect those errors.
- Indexing issues: improper use of noindex or nofollow tags, presence of crawled but not indexed pages.
- Duplicate pages: Google can perceive pages with the same content as plagiarism and, consequently, you can fall in the SERP. Auditing allows you to detect such duplicates and remove them.
Page redirect errors: Auditing allows you to identify pages with 3xx and 4xx errors and set up proper redirects or remove those pages.
UI/UX audit
A site that is ready to implement conversational marketing tools is a site with an understandable user experience, clear design, and easy user journey. You need to make sure your ecommerce isn’t cluttered with mismatched items. Therefore, before introducing a conversational trading strategy, it is necessary to audit the following parameters:
Mobile Device Compatibility
More than 2.5 billion people use messaging apps on mobile devices and this number is growing, according to Statista . Why not give them the possibility to use a chatbot on your website or open a live chat from mobile too? But first, make sure the mobile version of your website is properly configured.
Use Google’s Mobile Friendly test to determine how well your site is performing against the mobile-first indexing algorithm.
It is also important to check how the website is displayed on devices with different screen sizes and different browsers.
Navigation
While performing the SEO audit, pay attention to the following issues:
- Visual cues and CTAs. They should be easy to understand and visible. Make sure the most important elements of your website are clear and easy to click on.
- Pop-ups and live chat windows. They are very important in terms of personalization and conversational marketing. Determine the relevant pages (contact, about us, solutions/products), where it will be most appropriate and effective to place a chatbot for conversions. A popup will only annoy users and cause some to spam you.
Content audit
Content is an important factor for both users and search engines. Actually, content is king in the realm of digital marketing. The content should “direct” the user to take a specific action and convince the Google bot that your website provides useful and specialized information. As part of the digital marketing audit, you should pay attention to the following elements:
- Content interaction rate. The content should be interesting to readers and aim to increase traffic and time spent on the page. Services like Grammarly will help you check the text for engagement rate.
- Optimization consists. The use of SEO on the page must be competent, the number of keywords used must not be excessive. Otherwise, the search engine may demote the site in the search results. Also, the key phrases used on the page should be relevant to the topic of the page. You can check the keywords used and their density using SE Ranking’s On-Page SEO Checker module.
- User intentions. Make sure that the pages meet the specific intentions of the user: informational, navigational, transactional or commercial intentions. It analyzes the queries you use and the LSI words. Intents are important for both SEO and conversational marketing, as they attract targeted visitors who will see exactly what they were looking for on your website. Additionally, keywords selected based on intent can be used in chatbots to anticipate user questions.
Also, the content must fulfill a specific objective; for example, for ecommerce, it is usually to guide the user through the funnel and generate conversions. Therefore, it is important to optimize your content for effective digital marketing. Any funnel consists of three main stages:
- Consciousness (TOFU). You need to provide product information, get users interested, and weed out those who won’t become your long-term customer. User interest can be increased by informative articles and lead magnets: free books, templates, checklists and more.
- Review (MOFU). Here you should focus on the “pains” of the audience. Advanced content works effectively at this stage: videos, podcasts, webinars, etc.
- Decision (BOFU). You must show that your product really has an advantage over the competition. For example, a free presentation or consultation can help with this. You can also make special offers: promotions, discounts, etc.
Backlink audit
In order to rank higher in search results, you must constantly receive backlinks from donor sources; this increases the authority of your website in the eyes of Google. However, the backlinks you get should be reliable and their number should grow over time. After performing a backlink audit (for this you can use the Majestic tool), you will get the following information:
- The trust of the domain and the page. This indicator is calculated using a special formula. If your site’s score is below 50, it may be marked as unreliable. To increase your score, you need to remove backlinks from sites with bad reputations and gradually increase the number of backlinks from more reliable platforms.
- Quality of the linked sites. Pay attention to the trust of your domain: if it is low, it is better to request that the link be removed or rejected.
- The total number of links linking to your domain. It is important that the mass of the link does not decrease or grow too much; this process should be gradual.
- New and lost backlinks. This will allow you to track whether unsolicited toxic backlinks appear, as well as whether the backlinks you agreed to with donor webmasters have disappeared.
- Anchors. The keyword or phrase used with the link must be relevant to the topic of the page it links to.
- The number of “nofollow” links. Links with the “nofollow” tag do not allow robots to index your page. Therefore, it is important to maintain a dofollow/nofollow link ratio of approximately 60/40.
Additionally, it is important to verify the accuracy of internal links on the website. If the pages are linked correctly, it is easier for users to navigate your site, they can easily find the necessary information and make a purchase decision without contacting the support team. If the user is “stuck” in a section and support is not online, a bounce can occur.
2. Brand audit in digital marketing
For digital marketing to be effective, you must ensure that your positioning and promotion are not a waste of time. A brand audit should determine if people trust your brand no matter what. With that, you will find the following information:
- Product positioning. Explore how you differ from other similar products or services and how your audience perceives you.
- Customer focus. Define your target audience, the personality of the client and if this data corresponds to your original digital marketing strategy.
- Consistency across all channels. Make sure that your users get the same information about your brand in all the channels you use to promote yourself and that the information they get through different channels is not conflicting.
- Product value and unique selling proposition (USP). Make sure you are correctly defining and presenting the benefits of your product. Think about what your USP is and if you can describe it in a few words.
- Call to action. Define if the calls to action you use are effective and generate conversions.
If you identify any contradiction in the strategy and promotion of the brand, you must eliminate it immediately; otherwise, conversational marketing will not bring you the necessary results. This approach is simply about closer brand communication with target customers and adds value to the service. Without a strong brand strategy, conversational marketing can lead to losses.
3. PPC Audit
The combination of paid advertising and conversational marketing can be very effective because a chatbot can dispel the doubts of the person who came to your landing page from the advertising and lead them to purchase. If you run paid ads, then it’s worth doing a PPC audit before connecting the chatbot. Here you should pay attention to the following features:
- The target audience. Properly configured advertising allows you to focus your budget exclusively on the right segments of your target audience. Therefore, you get more visitors ready to buy and a higher conversion rate. That’s why targeting settings directly affect the performance of your ad campaign.
- Keywords and phrases. When choosing keywords for your PPC campaign, you should consider search volume, match type, and negative keywords to be more targeted and therefore effective.
- Landing pages. Here you need to make sure that the ad is relevant to the topic and fully corresponds to the offer on the landing page.
There are five main metrics you can use to analyze the effectiveness of your advertising campaign:
- Quality level. It is a measure of the relevance of your keywords based on the following factors:
- CTR shows whether your keywords and ads are relevant to people searching for something using the corresponding search query;
- The relevance of the keyword and the ad to the search query;
- The relevance of the keyword to the ad group;
- The quality of the page to which the ad leads.
- Conversion rate. Shows the number of users who, after clicking your ad, took a specific action. The value of this metric is the same as the CTR since you, as an advertiser, are not interested in paying for ads without getting results. Each click is your expenses and the profit you get comes only from specific actions.
- Cost per Conversion. This metric shows how well your ad is performing. In other words, estimate how much a potential customer costs you. If you have to pay more for advertising than you earn from the advertising campaign, you have not achieved a positive ROI.
- Wasted spending. This metric is for money that has been spent without getting results. In this way, you will discover how much you spend on clicks that do not convert. If the wasted spend rate is high, you should filter the traffic. For example, use negative keywords; In this way, you can reduce the number of keywords that do not convert and that do not correspond to the theme of the advertising campaign.
4. Email marketing audit
Once, email marketing was one of the most effective types of online promotion. Today, however, Campaign Monitor reports that the click-through rate for emails is about 2.60%, an average number in digital marketing.
One of the biggest problems with email marketing is that marketers are taking customers through many sub-funnels.
Open the email, click the button, go to the landing page, fill out the form, wait for confirmation, and finally, don’t forget about the webinar in a week.
This is far from what would be called effective communication with a client. In fact, not everyone reaches the first stage, only one in five customers opens the emails you send..
The solution is personalization , which enables better customer engagement. However, before you implement conversational marketing, you need to make sure that your email marketing campaigns are set up correctly:
Segmentation . If users get more personalized emails tied to their current needs, they will be much more engaged and convert better. Set up your targeting correctly based on user interests, recent purchases, funnel stage, geographic location, and other metrics.
Content . Make sure your emails are easy to read and consistent. All clickable elements, links and buttons should work. Write the text of your emails based on the target audience it is intended for.
The most personalized emails created with the BLUF concept in mind (bottom line first) invite users to chat rather than simply click on advertising calls-to-action. Do not deviate from the highlights of your emails, offer some important offers to consider your service or product and buy it right now. And always end your emails with an offer to continue the conversation.
It is also important to monitor the effectiveness of the email marketing campaign. You can track them in any email marketing service you use. The main SEO metrics are the following:
- Open Rate . If users aren’t opening your emails, the issue may be with the subject line or the first line of the email. Make it more personal and attractive.
- Bounce . The average rate is 10%. If it is higher, your content does not meet the expectations of the target audience or there are design problems.
- CTR . The average CTR for email marketing is 8%, which means that only 8% of all your subscribers enter the sales funnel from the email marketing campaign.
- Conversion . In 2020, the average conversion rate was 15%. You need to work on emails to ensure that as many users as possible take the desired action.
- Unsubscribe . The optimal indicator is 0.01% -0.02%. If it is older, you have serious problems with the mailing list.
Conclusion
Conversational marketing is a more modern approach to digital marketing. Each client has their own specific needs, and if you manage to deal with their “pains”, the chances of success increase.
However, before you implement chatbots, live chat, or any other conversational marketing tools on your website, you need to thoroughly audit your website.
It’s important to make sure that your promotion strategy works, that the site ranks well, and that your offers and advertising are targeted to a specific audience and meet their requirements.
Well-conducted audits provide critical information about technical and other errors that need to be fixed so you can move on to conversational marketing and get better results.
