Digital Marketing Audit Checklist ? - Evil Twin, Badass Tech & Startup Marketing

Website audit
- First and foremost, make sure that your website conveys the message you want to deliver.
- A website is made up of many different elements, such as a logo, design, functionality, and so on. It is crucial that your website stands out and that everything functions properly.
- Check the loading speed of the website, including images. You can use tools like: GTmetrix or Google PageSpeed insights for that.
- Check if there are Meta tags on your website with Screaming Frog. Meta tags provide information about the webpage in the HTML of the document. This information is called “metadata” and while it is not displayed on the page itself, it can be read by search engines and web crawlers. Search engines such as Google use metadata from meta tags to understand additional information about the webpage. They can use this information for ranking purposes, to display snippets in search results, and sometimes they can ignore meta tags.
- Check if there is a contrast between colors so that your titles and content will be as clear as possible.
- Make sure that there is a sitemap to your website. A sitemap is a visual representation of your website that helps navigate the user. It will direct visitors where you want them to go so they won’t be going around in circles and ultimately leaving your website from frustration. You can use Yoast to build one.
- Website users typically want to know 3 things during their visit to your site: ‘Where am I?’, ‘Where have I been?’ and ‘Where else can I go?’ By clearly displaying these answers within your navigational framework, visitors are more likely to remain on your website longer- increasing the chances of a valuable sales.
- Make sure that there are action buttons on every page of your website. Buttons have become even more important as the number of mobile-friendly websites and apps have grown significantly. With limited space to communicate and entice interest, a clearly-identifiable button is the easiest way to guide a conversation and encourage user action.
- Check if there is a 404 page so that you won’t miss potential traffic.
- Determine all of the top-level traffic patterns in Google Analytics such as: pageviews, visitors, source, devices, countries, and so on, and use Behavior Flow to map typical site journeys.

UX audit
- Checking the website’s accessibility and W3C compliance should be the first quantitative User Experience audit you do. You can use tools like webaccessibility.
- See if any optimization tools, such as Hotjar, Crazy Egg, or Mouseflow, have been installed on the website. You’ll then have access to a wealth of data, including click and scroll heatmaps, which will help you spot potential UX problems.
- Speaking directly to target users and asking them what they think of the website is often helpful for qualitative analysis. Contact some potential clients, or simply reach out to non-customers who fit the target demographic profile. Users should also be shown competing sites and asked to rank which ones they prefer and why.

Branding audit
- A brand audit is a comprehensive examination of a brand’s current market position and efficacy in comparison to its rivals.
- Many of the findings from the overall digital marketing audit will be useful in determining the brand’s performance. Speaking with customers, as mentioned in the previous section, is one of the best ways to do this. Sending polls and surveys to a large number of customers can also be beneficial.
- Tools like Semrush may help:

SEO audit
- First, go over all of the current content on the website. You can use MozBar for that.
- Local Search audit – open Google My Business. GMB is where you can manage things like reviews, contact information, locations, opening hours, photographs, posts, and now direct messaging for local search optimization. For local companies, reviews and star ratings are extremely important. You should keep track of star ratings during your audit.
- On-page SEO audit – check all aspects of a website’s structural SEO, such as word count, sitemap presence, robots.txt, meta description, title tags, heading tags, image alt tags, and Schema.org structured data. Useful free tools you can use: Keyword Density & Consistency Tool, Website Word Count Tool, XML Sitemap Checker, Robots.txt Checker.
- Website load speed – If the page script load time exceeds 10 seconds, you’ll need to list each plugin and their load time breakdowns to figure out who’s to blame. If a plugin is inactive or has little value, it should be removed.
- Broken links – Broken links are despised by Google, and you should despise them as well. This free Broken Link Checker scans pages for broken links and allows you to quickly fix them. List all of the broken links in a spreadsheet so that you can map them to new destinations or delete them entirely.

Keywords audit
- Make a list of relevant keywords. Then compare this list to the actual keywords for which your website ranks. You may or may not find substantial crossover. To quickly gain insights into both, use this Keyword Tracking Tool. You can track the ranking progress of these keywords once you’ve saved them.
- The keyword audit should show that the website ranks well for the target keywords and that there is a lot of traffic for those keywords. Looking at competitor site keyword rankings with high search volume can also help you generate a list of potential keyword options.
- Google’s Keyword Planner, which is built into Google Ads, is another helpful keyword tool for auditing and identifying relevant keywords:

SEM & paid media audit
- Determine your target keywords – Any paid search campaign must begin with this step. All target keywords, impressions, clicks, and conversions should be included in the SEM audit. Don’t forget to include any negative keywords in your list.
- Ad copy: Make sure there are enough ad variations with active language and a variety of features. Ads that are purpose-driven vs. ads that are benefit-driven.
- Bid & cost: Check bids per keyword and any ad schedule settings (ie day-parting), bid adjustments on device and locations, and analyze the bid strategy if manual bidding is allowed.
- Search terms: Make a list of recent user searches and see how many of them are applicable.
- Audiences: see if RLSAs (remarketing lists for search ads) are being used in campaigns.

Social media audit
- Organic and paid social audit: Use a social media analytics tool, like Sproutsocial, to evaluate the organic and paid performance of the content on major social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. It’s helpful to track the Organic Reach Rate (ORR) over time for organic content, which shows how many people see content organically vs. the number of fans or followers. ORR is a cross-channel metric that allows you to compare content performance across different channels.
- Check organic social metrics such as Impressions, Engagement Rate, Total Interactions, Monthly Growth Rate, Clicks, and Conversions.
- Competitor analysis: Make sure you compare the client to all relevant competitors to see what the current “average” performance is.
- Ensure that the Facebook Pixel, Facebook Open Graph Tags, and Twitter Cards are all in place on the client’s website before moving on to paid social.
- When it comes to paid social metrics, it’s easy to get lost in the numbers. You should first look at the “Cost Per” metrics and how they’ve changed over time. This will give you a good idea of how efficient your social ad spending is. You can compare metrics such as Cost Per Thousand and Cost Per Click to paid search and other paid media metrics as well: CPM, CPV, CPE, CPC, CPA.
- Earned social audit: Use a social media listening tool like Hootsuite to discover conversations and mentions by keyword for earned performance (public mentions on social media from word of mouth). You should answer these three key questions when performing social listening: Where are the conversations taking place? What are the topics of discussion? Who are the people who are driving the discussion?

Email marketing audit
- Email campaign performance – For each email, the following key metrics should be examined: Bounce rate, Open rate, Click through rate, Unsubscribe rate.
- Email content audit- Looking into individual emails or email templates will help you form some working hypotheses about what constitutes a “successful” email and, conversely, what adversely affects performance. The following are some of the most common areas to look into: do the email templates work well on all devices and in all emails? Are they adaptable in terms of layout and media? Is third-party data used or capable of being used in existing email campaigns? Do earlier campaigns’ subject lines follow industry best practices? Does the content of previous campaign emails provide value to recipients? Have you used Google’s Campaign URL Builder to properly tag all links from previous campaigns?
- Contact list quality: You may discover during your audit that previous email campaigns were of high quality but had low open and click rates. It’s possible that this is due to poor email contact quality. It’s worth asking the client how the email contacts were obtained if you don’t know the history.
Presenting the audit to your management
- You’ll have a lot of slides and a lot of data at the end of your audit. To avoid overwhelming your management, list the key findings on one executive summary slide per channel. This part of the audit is crucial, and hinges on your ability to interpret data and draw insightful conclusions for each channel.
- Insert a new slide after the executive summary slides that covers suggestions for each channel. This slide should list the actions that should be taken in response to each of the key findings. Consider a variety of recommendations, including those that are fast and easy to implement in the short term and those that are more mid to long term. This will aid prioritization and make tasks seem more manageable.
- It’s preferable to structure the slide deck so that it only includes the most important findings and recommendations – no more than 20 total slides. Then, in an Appendix section or a separate slide deck, place all of your data and discovery slides.
Putting recommendations and amendments into action
- The next step in creating a Digital Marketing Strategy based on the results and insights from the digital audit, is to map out and implement the recommendations. It should be divided into phases and modularized so that work can be moved forward or backward as required.
- Each task on the roadmap must result in a recommendation based on a key insight from the audit. This method ensures that each piece of work is supported and rationalized through a business case.
If you have any other questions don’t hesitate to contact us.

For more checklists, you can visit our resources page.

Digital Marketing Audit Checklist

Website audit

UX audit

Branding audit

SEO audit

Keywords audit

SEM & paid media audit

Social media audit

Email marketing audit

Presenting the audit to your management

Putting recommendations and amendments into action

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