For a small business owner, deciding whether to move forward with a digital website audit can be overwhelming.

Spoiler alert: It’s worth it!

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I've answered four questions business owners ask about digital website audits.

What is a digital website audit?

A digital website audit is an analysis of your website and online presence to identify weak areas that we can work on, and things we can keep doing, mainly because you’re doing them right.

A digital website audit helps you understand all of your online initiatives for better search engine optimisation (SEO), so you can plan your online marketing over the next three, six and/or twelve months.

The digital website audit analysis can help to identify underperforming digital assets - pages on your website, sales pages, landing pages, sales funnels, PPC (pay per click) advertising and social media channels. It should also cover some competitive opportunities, and additional ways to reach your customers or audience online.

“A digital website audit is worth it’s weight in SEO gold”

There are many ways your business can benefit from a digital website audit especially when:

• your website traffic is decreasing, or becomes unstable
• you’re looking to optimise bounce rates on a certain web page, but you’re not sure what to look for in the data analytics
• perhaps you’re not achieving sales targets for the month or quarter
• you have a low social following or simply want to increase your following in a new market
• your website is more than 3 years old and is looking outdated; and
• you’re spending more on your paid marketing than receiving sales.

What are the Benefits of a Digital Website Audit?

There are several benefits that a digital website audit - you can accomplish quick wins, that are easy to achieve. Below we've listed ones that are important.

1. Make sure your digital assets are working for you

Many businesses have an established digital presence. Rather than beginning with a comprehensive digital strategy, these companies may have had initiatives at different stages of their business, and often forget to combine goals.

A digital audit gives a strategic analysis of the entire digital footprint of your brand. It gives insights on ways to optimise existing digital assets to drive leads, and identify opportunities to outperform your competition.

This analysis helps guide you to ensure your digital assets - like your website and social media platforms and how they’re performing to drive a maximum return for your business.

2. You stay in front of competitors

A digital website audit helps you track the success of your online marketing efforts. It’s critical to benchmarking your ad spend to stay ahead of the competition.

Fact: The speed at which an eCommerce store loads, can impact whether customers continue to look at your website and buy your products. A website that loads more than 5 seconds can lose one third of potential buying customers, because the site appears too slow.

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Many businesses lose a good portion of their market share to start-ups who have clever digital marketing tactics, that encourage customers to switch over to them. These start-ups understand the importance of spending money in a digital audit and SEO.

A digital audit can help you understand the interactive digital landscape from a fresh perspective. You can make decisions based on the data for a competitive edge.

Read: A great website design that works well on search

3. Save money and align your ad spend

A digital website audit combined with digital marketing effectiveness is the fast track for uncovering ways to save money, because you find what works and where to increase budgets for a better return on investment.

A small change such as the copy on a website might have a dramatic outcome that increases leads during the festive seasons

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A digital website audit keeps your marketing initiatives aligned, and provides your marketing team with the confidence they’re using the most effective marketing strategies. Again, this ensures the greatest return on your investment.

What does a digital website audit analyse?

Listen to Caria on The Power of a Digital Audit

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Again, a digital website audit gives you insights into what is performing, what is lagging, and which is harmful to the business. Sometimes a digital analysis can lead to a reassessment of the overall strategy including updating the website and introducing landing pages.

A digital audit should deliver:

• A technical overview of your website and search performance.
• Web traffic analysis and comparison
• Top link and conversion opportunities
• SEO rankings, strategy and competitive analysis
• Social media analysis and strategy
• Google AdWords and Facebook ad cost predictions, strategies, and opportunities

A digital audit will give you the necessary information to create actionable, effective and logical solutions to enhance your digital and online effectiveness to help drive new leads.

Choosing a digital website audit agency

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Choose business experience, not just “digital” experience

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An agency that offers a digital website audit needs to be able to identify the connection between a digital strategy and your business goals. You should look for:

• Agency with client-side (in-house) experience
• Agency with marketing, or management background; and
• Experience working across a broad scope of clients in a variety of industries

Integrating business metrics and data metrics

A thorough website audit will look at both data metrics and internal business metrics, then lay out a clear path to how those metrics can work together more effectively moving forward. Look at:

• Case studies that describe clear goals and metrics delivered
• Up-front discussions about key performance indicators during meetings.

Always get a quote

A digital website audit can be a single transaction that provides an expert perspective on how well your digital assets are performing. Strategic companies know that a digital website audit is the best return on investment - because sales increase and it provides the opportunity to form a mutually beneficial relationship with a digital strategist or agency that adds value to your online marketing, design and even development resources.

When it comes to designing a high converting website with technical SEO - to get more site traffic, and adding web accessibility so it remains compliant - find an agency that not  has the talent and expertise to help you implement effective digital strategies.

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