If your website or blog has been up and running for some time, then you probably have tons of content and plenty of marketing tactics at work. Between aesthetic elements that seek to captivate users, paid advertising on select search engines and proper SEO tactics, there are a lot of marketing elements at work that help drive traffic to your website and convert that into substance. Unfortunately, an established website may neglect some of the needed updates to a marketing strategy due to past successes and an expected continuation of that trend. This is not a smart approach and should be avoided through the use of occasional audits that measure your marketing effectiveness. Below, we will outline how you can conduct an effective audit of your website and ensure maximum potential is being derived from it.

Social Action

Social media has become one of the most popular ways in which websites can be pinging links to thousands of users in an instant. The virility that sites such as Facebook offers can be paramount in boosting your exposure and ensuring that traffic is being driven to your website. When conducting an audit, you will want to verify elements such as post reach, number of subscribed users, followers and likes, as well as the effectiveness of any paid advertising campaigns currently deployed through social media. These elements will help you determine whether you need to invest more energy into harnessing the power of social media, or whether your current efforts will suffice.

Blogs and Content

The most important element of every site is content, so it only makes sense that an audit will cover your content. If you operate a blog, then you need only worry about your posts. If you operate a website that also hosts a blog, however, then you will want to verify each page’s performance. How can you do this? Hopefully, you already have a metric system installed to monitor traffic, conversions, bounce rate and more. Some of the more abstract concepts that you will want to audit will pertain to posts and pages’ relevance to the broader theme of your site, posting frequency and various writers’ reach with audiences (if there are multiple writers).

Targeting

If you have not targeted or do not know your audience, then you have been doing everything wrong up until this point. Who exactly is your audience? What are their likes and dislikes? How often do they visit your site on average and how many are revenue-generating users? When you have the answers to these questions, you can then ensure that your website is optimized to run as effectively as possible in areas such as conversions, calls to action and viral outreach. If you are just pinging links to search engines in the hopes that your desired audience will magically find them (without knowing who that audience is), then your site is most definitely not living up to its full potential.

Conclusion

Any serious website audit will look at social media metrics, the quality and types of content being distributed and the audiences that are being targeted. Without full understanding of these basic variables, your website will be doomed to the bins of mediocrity. Most website audits can be conducted in just a couple of hours, so be sure to devote enough time to assess your website’s marketing effectiveness.