Digital auditing involves assessing your website’s performance in several categories on different devices. The aim is to discover areas that need improvement, strategies that need updating, problems that need addressing, and high-performing areas that need replicating.
It’s important to assess all online brand-related performances, including your mobile apps, from custom application development services providers.
The scope of digital audits differs from business to business because each business has unique priorities and objectives to assess. For instance, some business owners are perfectly happy with their paid advertising (PPC) and social media marketing, but they’re worried about their website’s user experience. That would put a design assessment at the top of their list.
On the other hand, some businesses aren’t fazed by their online presence either way. In this instance, a digital audit is just a massive waste of time and resources.
Make Digital Assessments Count Across Website And Mobile Custom Applications
Before you start the audit process, list areas that could benefit from analysis. Begin with the most important and work your way down. Start with the highest priority because a comprehensive audit covers a lot of ground and is time-consuming. It’s easy to adopt a ‘good enough’ attitude and stop the audit process after only two or three audit findings.
It’s recommended to know what a digital audit entails is recommended so you can properly prioritize your list. The following assessments are listed in no particular order.
1) Social Media Assessment
A social media analysis looks at your social media strategy to see how well it’s performing and measures its performance against your competitors. It includes how the content you posted is perceived by users.
For example, how many likes, how many shares, and how many comments. Performance is measured on desktop and mobile apps to ensure you capture the mobile experience.
2) SEO Assessment
A search engine optimization (SEO) assessment looks at how your site is optimized to earn a (high) search engine ranking on browsers, particularly Google. This includes keyword optimization and site crawlability to achieve your strategic goals. You need to determine the ease with which search engines can find your website and crawl (analyze) the content so they will add it to their index, which is their database of websites.
The assessment uncovers things like broken internal and external links and anything else related to the structural integrity of all the pages on your website.
3) Brand Assessment
A brand assessment looks at the brand’s online presence; for example, its consistency across all online avenues, including social media platforms and apps. Consistency comprises visual branding (the logo is up to date and the same everywhere) and tone of voice (you’re not overly formal in some places, slapstick in others, and dryly sarcastic elsewhere).
It also includes the consistency of your brand’s message or story online. (This is similar to a storytelling audit, which, due to its similarity, is not covered here.)
4) Customer Experience Assessment
A customer experience assessment looks at the ease with which customers navigate your site. That is, can they quickly and easily achieve their goals? It reveals potential obstacles; for example, social media share buttons are too difficult to find. It also highlights potential areas of frustration; for example, conversion pages need to be more deeply on the site. This means customers have to click through too many pages to reach their goal of booking a consultation.
5) SEM Assessment
A search engine marketing (SEM) assessment looks at the performance of your overarching online marketing strategy. It includes the relative success of the keywords you’ve targeted in both organic and paid search results, especially compared to your competitors. This is very important because paying for keywords that don’t deliver is a waste of money.
A comprehensive assessment will not only show you how to adapt your forward-looking strategy, but it will also show you how to use the results of the competitor analysis to overtake them on the search engine rankings.
6) Technical Assessment
A technical assessment looks at the integrity of your site’s architecture. In addition to assessing your site’s architecture, a technical assessment looks at the architecture of your competitors’ sites. You can do this using online tools, such as a proprietary tool called Builtwith.
This simple analysis is particularly valuable if your site was built by a website design and development agency because you can come to grips with the tools used. This allows you to decide if you want to take over site maintenance or assume the bigger responsibility of addressing any technical problems.
7) Paid Advertising Assessment
We’ve touched on paid advertising as part of an SEM assessment, but it pays to conduct a separate PPC (pay-per-click) assessment to measure the effectiveness of your paid advertising strategy. This includes click-through rate, lead generation, conversion rate (online and offline sales), reach/awareness, apps, and mobile growth.
You want to determine the actual cost per click or conversion against your expectations, so you can adapt your paid advertising campaigns accordingly.
Can You Assess Your Custom Application Development Services Provider?
If you’ve paid a company to create high-quality custom applications for desktop and mobile devices, you want them to stand up to scrutiny. You can audit their service and assess the efficacy of the product. As an industry leader, Laminar Consulting delivers top-notch application development services.You can benefit from our expertise today! All you have to do is call (888) 531-9995 to book an appointment or get an online quote.
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