Summary – As the year progresses towards an end, it’s time to review your digital marketing efforts. Here’re some SEO audit tips.
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Everyone has been through a lot this year. And we must acknowledge the effort of the search marketers. From the shrunken budget of the existing projects to newly developed businesses with limited resources – they have had their share of the challenges. In fact, many have helped businesses to thrive digitally through advanced strategies.
As the year progresses towards an end, it’s time to review the success of your digital marketing efforts. It will help you to take the next step in 2021. Here are a few things to keep an eye on.
- Perform an SEO Audit – A Step-by-Step Guide
- Start with Technical SEO
An audit of the technical aspects of your clients’ websites is the first step to take. Over the years, lots of elements may have been added in the website including landing page, blogs, products, and many more. On the contrary, little may have been removed.
This can make the website bulky and slow it down. It’s a good practice to conduct a year-end review in the Google Analytics account to compare and optimize page loading speed. You may find several issues like large image files that require optimization, content duplication, invalid file references, etc. It’s high time to revise those before starting new projects in the New Year.
Note: It is recommended to use SEO Manager Module for WHMCS to manage your entire website’s content even without using WordPress and automate your business processes.
- Assess the Efficacy of Your Keywords
Search engine optimization is incomplete without keyword research. In order to track the efficacy of the efforts put in delivering digital marketing services, it’s a good idea to pay attention to the keyword volume and searching trends over the time.
Check if the related keyword list for the keywords you target has been increased. This will help you to strategize your content marketing plan in 2021. Also, if you find that some terms you are working on don’t have enough search volume, you can discard them.
Alongside, keep an eye on the cost-per-click and cost-per-conversion rate of the paid keywords. Micro-managing the marketing efforts is really an agile approach adopted by the professionals any reliable Top SEO agency India. If you have not yet started that, we recommend you to start right away.
- Mind the Traffic Volume
Pay attention to a holistic review of the site traffic earned by your search marketing efforts. Did you attain more traffic last year?
While doing the calculation, you must take the pandemic into account. Several business verticals (like travel and tourism) were largely affected by it. It’s okay if you have such a project and it received lesser traffic this year than the previous year.
However, if you are marketing for a pharmacy or a food delivery business and it didn’t receive adequate traffic, you may find out some issues with your marketing measures.
Also, keep an eye on diverse channels to find out a positive and negative transient in engagement and user behaviour with the website. When we say channels, we include a broad spectrum of platforms and not only search results. So, as a search marketer, you need to pay attention to the social media presence of the brand as well. That’s because, in today’s connecting digital realm, users expect a seamless omnichannel experience from a brand. Obtaining a high rank on the search engine and marketing unique campaigns on the social media platforms are not mutually exclusive. You may check out this blog to find out the connection between social media marketing and SEO.
Other than scrutinizing a detailed overview of the entire website, make sure to review each landing page. Do you notice any drastic change in the traffic on the page as compared to the last year? Then you may consider a revision or enhancement for the page.
- Content is the King
For a search marketer, value content bears immense significance. As the year comes to an end, it’s time to minutely inspect which content drove the most user engagement.
Analyze which pieces of content received the most pages per visit as well as session duration on the website. Remember, a value content doesn’t only draw readers to the site but also engages them for a significant amount of time. When you are getting elated at the click-through-rate (CTR), we recommend you to also keep a keen eye on the bounce rate.
It’s quite tricky for a content to drive instant conversion. Consider content marketing as a long-term effort that increases brand awareness, exposure and also earns the traffic’s trust. An informative content will establish brand authority. So when we talk about an effective content, we actually mean a content that enhances user engagement with your brand – even if it doesn’t straightaway lead to a conversion.
Some other touchpoints that we recommend you to keep an eye on include the content that increases blog-subscription, drives PDF download to a newsletter sign-up, and encourages social media sharing. Paying attention to these will help you to understand which type of content is triggering a user action and you can leverage the insight while strategizing your future campaigns. However, we don’t want you to be repetitive and sell the same content time and again. Uniqueness and innovation are the keys to make the most of content marketing.
Before wrapping up this point, we got to tell you one thing. If you could craft an impactful content marketing strategy during the trying times, you can definitely level up your game the next year!
- Assess Your Link Building Efforts
You have put immense effort into link building throughout the year. It’s time to review those. Also, pay attention to the mentions you received from others without a link. You may drop an email requesting them to link the website URL. You can find such mentions with the help of Mention.com.
Wrapping Up
The year has been rough but you have made through it. It’s time to celebrate all the success you have brought to your clients. Conducting a review will be yet another smart move and it will further prepare you for the next year with some awesome insights. So, don’t skip it!
All the best!
