Author: Franz Malten Buemann

Those new to the field of marketing might not be familiar with the process, but referral marketing is an excellent tactic for growing business. Let’s take a look at what referral marketing is, why it’s effective, and how to get your first referral marketing campaign off the ground.
Congratulations! It’s time to start on the journey towards your first referral marketing campaign. This is an exciting time for any business because growth and development are just around the corner. 
How does referral marketing work?
Referral marketing is an incredibly effective way to bring in new business to your company. It is so effective because, after the initial setup, the vast majority of the marketing efforts are conducted by your own customers and those taking part in the referral program. Participants in a referral program, often called referrers, recommend your business by making referrals in exchange for some sort of incentive.
Most referral programs include incentives to encourage participants to make as many referrals as possible. The most effective style includes a two-sided incentive, where the referrer and the referral each get a reward.
For example, for every person that the referrer signs up, they get a month of free subscription. In turn, when someone signs up through a referral they receive their first month free.
These campaigns work well because everyone involved in the program receives some form of benefit. The active participants receive their rewards, and the company receives new business.
The key to an efficient and effective campaign is in the setup phase. It is not unusual for there to be some high initial costs, which can scare people off, but once it is up and running the majority of programs go on to be excellent revenue-generating options for businesses.
Benefits of Launching a Referral Program
The obvious benefit to launching a referral program is that your business will begin to bring in new customers. That increase in revenue keeps everyone happy, especially those in finance, but there are myriad more benefits beyond straight-up revenue.
Build Brand Awareness
The more people talking about your business, the greater the number of people that are going to become aware of your brand.
The maths adds up. When your business is running a referral marketing program that has many active participants, there are more people engaging in conversations about your business. Meaning, awareness grows.
The great thing about this method of building brand awareness is that it isn’t necessarily a flash in the pan, viral-style system of marketing. The number of people actively spreading brand awareness is ever-growing. In fact, when people become customers through a referral program, they are more likely to participate in the process themselves following their initial sign-up or purchase. They have already seen the benefits first hand.
Lower Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Customer acquisition cost, or CAC, is exactly as it sounds. It’s the price of a new customer. It is the measure of how much it will cost for your business to turn that prospect into a customer. The lower your CAC, the better, as it means that your business is spending less to get the customer through the door.
Referral marketing is, after the initial setup, incredibly low cost in terms of acquisition. Typically you are only missing out on a relatively small amount of revenue — like 1-2 months of a subscription — per referral. When you take into consideration the lifetime value of that customer, the acquisition cost pales into comparison.
Increase your conversion rates
The words that every sales department wants to hear — “there’s been an increase in conversion rates.” Increasing conversion rates means that a higher proportion of your prospects are turning into active customers. The higher the better. 
When customers are referred to your business through their close acquaintances, they are far more likely to become converted customers. This is because some of the trust between the business and the consumer has been inherited from their friend’s previous transaction. Plus, being able to see how the process worked for them goes a long way towards a conversion.
Lower your churn rate
Many SaaS and subscription companies track their churn rate. This metric is based on the number or percentage of users who stop subscribing in any given period. A high churn rate means customers aren’t being retained and could indicate that customers aren’t entirely happy with the service or product that they are receiving. 
When Deloitte conducted a study into the retention rate of customers, they found that customers who subscribe to a business following a referral have a 37% higher retention rate than those who join on their own.
Increase Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
Linked to the previous point, a customer who joins through a referral program often brings with them a higher customer lifetime value. Furthermore, because customers are actively participating in the referral process, they are more likely to repeat purchases themselves. Longer subscriptions or repeat purchases mean that the overall average lifetime value of the customer base increases. 
The lifetime value metric is at its most useful when investigated alongside CAC. The goal for any business should be to have a low CAC with high LTV. When the opposite is true, issues arise.
It makes perfect sense but there are a large number of businesses spending thousands of dollars acquiring customers (through paid advertising methods) who then go on to only subscribe or purchase once. Having a robust and rewarding referral program counters these issues perfectly.
How to Set Up Your First Referral Campaign
The benefits are clear, the metrics are ready to be calculated and measured. It is now time to launch the first referral campaign. But first, there is some setup that needs to be done in order to ensure that the campaign runs smoothly and, importantly, delivers a positive customer experience.
Set Goals
The first step is to set up targets for your campaign. What do you actually want to achieve from the referral marketing campaign? The obvious would be more customers, more sales, more subscriptions. But it is worth looking deeper into what could be achieved and considering the larger goals on a more granular scale. 
You might want to drive more sign-ups within a certain customer segment. You might aim to sell a specific product to those who are referred. There are many different goals that could be set.
The key is to set them from the start, reflect on them and evaluate them as the campaign goes on. There is no harm in adding or editing your goals as you move forward, as long as you don’t move the goalposts so that you can achieve them more easily.
Don’t forget to set measurable data-driven goals so that you can benchmark progress against your goals. Examples include clickthrough rate, conversion rate, participation rates, and more. 
Choose Referral Incentives
This should be approached on two different levels — what rewards you will be offering as an incentive, and who will be receiving them. 
First, the type of reward your business offers will usually be linked to the service or product that you are offering. For example, if you’re selling a subscription-based platform, many referral programs will include free months of subscription or a discount from a monthly subscription. Platforms such as monthly food boxes often go down this route.
There are many other types of rewards that can be offered, but the most common tend to be gift cards (either internally or for external companies), cash, or credits. Lesser used but still effective rewards include upgrades to subscriptions (even if on a temporary basis) and cashback rewards.
Deciding who gets the reward is equally important. There are 3 usual setups — no incentive, one-sided incentive, and two-sided incentive. Referral marketing strategies tend to be more effective depending on the number of rewards and incentives offered.

No Incentive: No incentive offers nobody any reward for offering referrals. Many companies are acting in this way already if they don’t have a referral program in place. If your business is in a position where you are receiving referrals without offering any incentives, then you might question why you should bother with it. But, a better question would be to ask how many more referrals you would be getting if those making referrals were rewarded.

One-sided incentive: The next step is to offer only one person an incentive. This could be the referrer or the referral themselves. An example would be where an existing customer receives a free month of subscription for anyone they refer to the company. This is quite similar to affiliate marketing but with a focus on their own personal network rather than a wide, unknown audience.

Two-sided incentive: Two-sided incentives are the most common form of referral marketing. Everyone gets something out of the process. Uber made use of the two-sided incentive when they launched by offering credit to the referrer, and a free first ride to those being referred. 

Reach Out to Existing Customers
A great way to start your referral program is by reaching out to existing customers. In the initial setup and planning stage, you could ask them what they think would be a good incentive for them, or what they would like to see offered to potential customers. 
Later in the process, you will need to make all of your customers aware that the referral program is open and ready for them to participate in.
You should anticipate that your existing customers and potential participants will need a little encouragement to participate. Crafting the perfect referral email will take planning but it is worth every piece of effort. Done right, you’ll see your referral program get off to a great start.
Choosing Distribution Channels to Promote
Now it’s time to consider the actual logistics of the referral process. How will you get your offer out in front of your customers, and how will they use these items to promote your referral program?
A great place to start is to consider which avenues are working for you at the moment. There’s no point embarking on a social media campaign if you’ve had little luck with it in the past.
The process should be taken into consideration the same way you would with any other marketing campaign. It should be planned, structured, and then actioned. The best method would be to keep things simple. The more steps a participant has to follow the less likely they will be to participate fully.
Automate with Referral Software
The hardest part of the setup process is completed. Now, it’s time to make the referral campaign smooth and easy with automation. Platforms like GrowSurf keep everything simple and managed in one place — allowing you to effectively track your campaigns, make adjustments as necessary, and watch your business grow.
It is also worth noting that integrations with payment gateways like Stripe can make all of the difference. These integrations aren’t always available out of the box but the best referral marketing platforms will have them ready to go for a simple, plug-and-play setup.
Wrap up
As with all things in business, preparation and planning will pay dividends in the end. Once you have prepared to launch your referral program, and the automation is in place, there is little that needs to be actively managed, but myriad benefits to be had.

Put yourself in the customer and participants’ shoes and ask what they want from a referral program.
Track your metrics to see how the referral campaign is improving your business.
Use automation to make the management of your referral program far easier.

The post Your First Referral Marketing Campaign: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

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A scaling business is bound to have data stored across multiple sources (e.g. databases, files, live data feeds). Even individual teams within a department — such as Content  Marketing, Brand Strategy, and SEO — likely use multiple data sources simultaneously. 
It’s important to ensure you have a way of viewing, visualizing, and analyzing all of that data at once. This gives you a complete picture of the health of everything related to your business, from small projects to team projections to overall business success.

Data ingestion is the process that can efficiently get all of your data in one place. 
Data Ingestion
At a high level, data ingestion prepares your data for analysis. In this blog post, we’ll cover the definition of data ingestion in greater detail, describe its importance, review the data ingestion framework, and highlight a few tools that will make the process simple for your team. Let’s dive in.
What is data ingestion?
Data ingestion prepares your data for analysis. It’s the process of transporting data from a variety of sources into a single location — often to a destination like a database, data processing system, or data warehouse — where it can be stored, accessed, organized, and analyzed.
This process allows businesses to get a holistic view of their data in order to leverage and apply resulting insights and findings in their strategies. 
Why is data ingestion important?
You may be wondering why data ingestion is so important and why your marketing team — and business as a whole — should leverage it. 
As mentioned, data ingestion provides a single view of all of your data. Without the ability to access, review, and analyze all of your data at the same time — versus having to check multiple data sources which visualize your data in different formats — you wouldn’t have a clear or accurate picture of what’s doing well and what needs to be improved upon.
Data ingestion tools exist to make this process even easier by automating the process of integrating all of your data from various sources. This way, anyone on your team can access and share that data in a format and via a tool that are universal among your organization. 
Data Ingestion Framework
The data ingestion framework is how data ingestion happens — it’s how data from multiple sources is actually transported into a single data warehouse/ database/ repository. In other words, a data ingestion framework enables you to integrate, organize, and analyze data from different sources.
Unless you have a professional create your framework for you, you’ll need data ingestion software to make the process happen. Then, the way that the tool ingests your data will be based on factors like your data architectures and models. 
There are two main frameworks for data ingestion: batch data ingestion and streaming data ingestion. 
Before we define batch versus streaming data injection, let’s take a moment to decipher the difference between data ingestion and data integration.
Data Ingestion vs. Data Integration
Data integration takes data ingestion a step further — rather than just stopping after the data is transported to its new location/ repository, data integration also ensures all data, no matter what type it is or which source it came from, is compatible with each other as well as the repository it was transported to. That way, you can easily and accurately analyze it. 
1. Batch Data Ingestion
The batch data ingestion framework works by organizing data and transporting it into the desired location (whether that’s a repository, platform, tool etc.) in groups — or batches — periodically.
This is an effective framework unless you have large quantities of data (or are dealing with big data) — because, in those instances, it’s rather a rather slow process. It takes time to wait for batches of data to be transported and you wouldn’t have real-time access to that data. However, this is known to be a cost-effective option due to the fact it requires few resources.
2. Streaming Data Ingestion
A streaming data ingestion framework transports data continuously and the moment it’s created/ the system identifies it. It’s a helpful framework if you have a lot of data that you need access to in real-time, but it is more expensive due to the capabilities that batch processing doesn’t have.

Data Ingestion Tools
Data ingestion tools integrate all of your data for you — no matter the source or format — and house it in a single location.
Depending on the software you choose, it may only perform that function, or it may assist with other aspects of the data management process, such as data integration — which entails transforming all data into a single format.  
1. Apache Gobblin

Apache Gobblin is a distributed data integration framework and it’s ideal for businesses working with big data. It streamlines much of the data integration process, including data ingestion, organization, and lifecycle management. Apache Gobblin can manage both batch and streaming data frameworks. 
2. Google Cloud Data Fusion

Google Cloud Data Fusion is a fully managed, cloud data integration service. You can ingest and integrate your data from a number of sources and then transform and blend it with additional data sources. This is possible because the tool comes with many open-source transformations and connectors which work with various data systems and formats. 
3. Equalum

Equalum is a real-time, enterprise-grade data ingestion tool that integrates batch and streaming data. The tool collects, manipulates, transforms, and synchronizes data for you. Equalum’s drag-and-drop UI is simple and doesn’t require code so you can create your data pipelines quickly. 
Start Using Data Ingestion
Data ingestion is a critical aspect of data management — it ensures all of your data is accurate, integrated, and organized so that you can easily analyze it on a large scale and get a holistic view of the health of your business. 

Leads are the lifeblood of any business, and a good lead generation strategy is key to long-term growth. Marketers and agencies focused on ROI are great at crunching the numbers and acquiring new leads.  Unfortunately, quality leads often get lost as the workflow continues on. Interested prospects get left on read, long-term customers fall off…
The post 6 Tips On How To Triple the ROI on Your Lead Generation Efforts appeared first on Benchmark Email.

Hello! I’m looking for some advice. I work in Higher Ed. Our CRM hosts contact information for individuals who relate to the University in multiple ways. Those contacts may include 5-10 valid email address! Multiple campus emails, personal, work, alumni, etc. Our users may have to email to one or the other depending on their need. Students need mail at campus email, alumni relations to a personal, etc. The kicker is that our users may need to use these emails simultaneously. That is because contacts can be in multiple categories at the same time (student and alum for example). We have really struggled to effectively use marketing automation in this environment. We need an enterprise solution to integrate to enterprise Salesforce implementation, but most tools want to leverage a single email address from CRM. We have had limited success with data extensions from Marketing Cloud, but haven’t found that scalable as it limits our use of Journey Builder and other features. Is anyone aware of another enterprise application that might meet that requirement? Marketo? Eloqua?
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We already noted earlier this summer that Apple’s iOS 15 update is just around the corner – likely mid-September. As Apple rolls out new privacy protections for users, email service providers (like Benchmark Email) will have less data on some users. We’re excited to tackle this challenge head-on with the rest of the email marketing…
The post Your iOS 15 To-Do List from Benchmark Email appeared first on Benchmark Email.

When was the last time you gave your website a checkup? If you’ve never before audited your website, it’s been a while since you have, or you’re planning a website redesign in the near future, use this post as your go-to website audit checklist to make sure your website is primed for maximum SEO and conversion results.

Below, let’s learn what a website audit is, why it’s important, and how to use the information to improve your SEO and conversions.

Before we dive into the things you should be keeping an eye out for as you’re auditing your website, let’s review some of the benefits of doing one. Here are some of the top benefits from a marketing perspective:
1. Website Performance Optimization
Website audits usually evaluate a site not only for its content but also for its technical performance.
As a result, an audit will give you a chance to inspect the robustness of your website’s technical framework and infrastructure, assess how friendly your website is to search engines, and determine how easy it is for users to navigate and intuitively find content on your website.
2. Search Engine Optimization
By conducting a website audit, you’ll be able to identify any missed SEO opportunities and remedy any misguided or poorly executed SEO pitfalls (e.g. keyword stuffing, exact match anchor text links, etc.) throughout the content of your website.
It will also allow you to re-focus your SEO efforts on users first and search engines second. This will safeguard you from constantly chasing changes to search ranking algorithms, meaning you won’t be applying misguided practices just to show up at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).
3. Conversion Rate Optimization
Website audits also enable you to re-evaluate the effectiveness of your website in terms of lead generation and conversion. As a result, you’ll be able to spot any previously overlooked opportunities to convert visitors into leads so you can add relevant CTAs, as well as identify deficiencies in your landing pages so you can optimize them to boost conversions.
4. Competitive Analysis
Conducting a website audit will allow you to compare your website to your competitor’s. You can analyze how well you’re ranking against competitors for keywords and determine potential new sources of revenue.
You can use tools, like HubSpot’s website grader, to perform an audit on your competitor’s websites to gather more insights. You can learn how your competitors are attracting visitors and see how they’re garnering conversions.
Ultimately, this will help you brainstorm new tactics and strategies for your site.
5. Identify Issues
When you do a website audit, you’ll be able to find issues that are hurting your SEO and conversions. Perhaps it’s broken links, hidden content, long page load speed times, or more. Identifying these issues will help you repair issues that are diverting traffic.
As you can see, assessing both the content and technical aspects of your website will open up opportunities to drastically improve the traffic and conversions your website generates.
Now that you know what a website audit is and why you should do one, let’s look at how to conduct one.

1. Run Your Website URL through a Site Audit Tool
Before you get started, you’ll want to find a website auditing tool that can help you analyze how your website is performing. When you use site audit software to run your site through, you can get specific recommendations and test how your page is performing.
2. Find Technical Errors
Once you’ve put your site through an auditing tool, you’ll want to look for technical errors. These could be related to performance, SEO, mobile, security, and more. The technical site structure and setup of your site play a large role in how well your website performs for customers.
3. Identify SEO Problems
Now, you’ll want to look at SEO-related issues so you can improve your ranking on search engines. This might mean looking at meta descriptions, reviewing image alt text, and more.
4. Analyze Design and UX
One of the things I like to look for when conducting a website audit is the user experience. How is this design working for your customers? Some software has heatmaps of what parts of your design draw the most attention and what users are reading. This type of analysis will let you know how the overall design and user experience are impacting your visitors.
5. Assess Website Content
A website audit will help you assess website content including blogs, website pages, etc. You’ll want to know how your current pages are stacking up. Ask yourself, “Is my content ranking well in search engines?” and “Is my on-page SEO and performance aligned with my traffic numbers?”
6. Generate a Checklist of All Site Issues and Recommended Fixes
Lastly, when you’re conducting a website audit, it’s important to have a place where you put a summary of all your findings. List out the site issues and recommended fixes, so that you can send that information to the appropriate teams.
Now let’s dive in even more specifically so you know what to be checking for in this website audit.
Assessments to Make When Auditing Your Website
But first, enter your website into HubSpot’s Website Grader — this will give you a general overview of your website’s strengths so you can gauge your focus on each of the assessments that follow in this article.

How’d you do? Got an idea of which website audit benefits you need the most? Here we go.
1. Website Performance Assessment
In the first part of your website audit, you should be focusing on how users navigate your website — from your homepage to blog posts, to landing pages, and any related content in between.
Make a list of the pages on your website and ask yourself the following questions to evaluate them for optimization opportunities:
Is Your Website Optimized for Maximum Usability?
The more visitors you can attract to your website, the more opportunities you’ll have to generate leads and, ultimately, customers. But only if your website performs well.
As I’m sure you can imagine, just having a website does not guarantee results. As part of determining the overall efficiency of your website, your audit should check to make sure your site is designed with your visitors in mind. The design and overall navigability of your website should correspond with what a person would come to the site to seek out, such as more information on a business-related topic, resources, product/pricing information, testimonials, etc. This will largely depend on your individual business.
The main goal here is to make it easy for people to get the information they’re looking for. As a result, you’ll likely see conversion rates improve on their own.
To audit your website for usability, consider the following:

Are all the main value propositions of our business easily accessible via our main navigations/menu items?
Do we have a simple yet intuitive website design and page layout? Make sure pages aren’t too cluttered; littered with ads, CTAs, or links; or void of internal links altogether.
Are your conversion paths and/or shopping cart or checkout processes intuitive? Are there a ton of distractions along the way that could be creating friction for your site visitors?

You might also consider doing some user testing with members of your target audience to ensure you’re effectively surfacing the content they’re looking for, and that they find it easy to navigate to the parts of your website they’re interested in.
How Is Your Website’s Overall Speed?
Are there excessive page sizes and/or long page load and server response times? Does your site go down frequently? Site speed can be impacted when image files are too large or HTML and CSS needs to be cleaned up, all of which can drastically improve your site speed.
Ultimately, fast-loading and optimized pages will lead to higher visitor engagement, retention, and conversions. To quickly check a web page’s load time, download MozBar, a toolbar by Moz that you can attach to your browser for simple page analysis every time you visit a website.
2. SEO Assessment
Optimizing the performance of your website is crucial to holding onto visitors, but the above question isn’t the only one you should be asking. You should also audit the content you’re publishing to ensure it’s actually solving your visitors’ problems.
Is Your Website Content High Quality?
As you evaluate your content for quality, think about it from your target audience’s perspective. Did this information leave me satisfied? Did it answer all of my questions? Does it give me all the resources relevant to this topic? Do I know what to do next?
Keep in mind quality content should appeal to the interests, needs, and problems of your buyer personas; be interesting and well-written, provide valuable, thorough, and detailed information about a particular topic; and leave the reader with next steps (such as calls-to-action, links to resources, etc.).
If you’re still not sure if your content is high quality, evaluate it with this checklist:” How to Tell if Your Marketing Content Is Actually Valuable.”
Is Your Website Search Engine Optimized?
Make sure all your web pages are following on-page SEO best practices. To audit your content for on-page SEO, conduct a keyword analysis in which you do the following:

Consult your analytics to review keyword performance. Which keywords are giving you the biggest gains in traffic and leads?
Assess how well you’re factoring keyword performance into your content strategy. How much relevant content are you adding to your website to target those keywords?
Review basic on-page SEO elements like URLs, page titles, meta description, and copy. Make sure keywords are included where relevant.

To help you conduct an on-page SEO audit of your content, read the “Step-by-Step Guide to Flawless On-Page SEO,” which also includes a free downloadable on-page SEO template to keep you on track.
3. Conversion Rate Assessment
While high-quality, search engine optimized content is a great way to boost your traffic numbers, it’s what happens once those visitors are on your website that really counts. Unless of course, you don’t care about conversions (ha!).
Is Your Website Optimized for Lead Generation and Conversions?
This is where optimized calls-to-action (CTAs), marketing offers, and landing pages play a major role in the performance of your website. Not only do they offer you opportunities to capture visitors’ information so you can follow up with leads, but they also keep your visitors engaged with your content and your brand.
To audit your website for maximum conversion potential, ask yourself the following questions:

How many marketing offers do I have in my content arsenal to gate behind landing pages?
Do I have a variety of marketing offers that appeal to all my different buyer personas?
Do I have any landing pages/conversion forms on my website to begin with?

How optimized are those landing pages?
Do I have conversion opportunities for visitors in varying stages of the funnel?
Am I using calls-to-action effectively? Am I missing opportunities to include calls to action on various pages of my website?

To learn more about CTA selection, check out our post, ” How to Select the Right CTA for Every Page on Your Website.”
4. Technical Assessment
Once you’ve addressed the three primary goals of a website audit, it’s time to loop in a developer or someone from your IT department for a technical evaluation. You could also hire an outside agency — just be sure to do your homework first.
Keep in mind that there may be some carry-over from the three assessments above — website performance, SEO, and conversion rate. The technical evaluation, however, addresses all three to maximize the user experience (UX).
Here’s what you should be looking for in the technical assessment stage of your website audit …
Is Your Website Design Responsive?
Does your website have a responsive design? Meaning, is it a mobile-friendly website? The usage of smartphones to access the internet is only growing. As of 2017, mobile devices account for half of all web page views worldwide. As a result, websites must be compatible with that growing demand.
For more on mobile compatibility, check out our “Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Mastering Mobile Marketing.”
Is Your Website Error Message Free?
Are response code errors popping up all over your website where there shouldn’t be any? Calling out 302-, 404-, and 500-level response codes can be useful to tell users that something’s wrong.
However, having this happen is also an indication that someone isn’t cleaning up broken links and, as a result, leading users to dead ends. Find those error messages and clean up your broken links. Tools like Google’s Webmaster Tools or Xenu’s Link Sleuth can be very helpful for this.
Are Your Website URLs Optimized?
Does your site have URLs of excessive length due to keyword stuffing? Do they contain session IDs and/or include tons of dynamic parameters? In some cases, these URLs are difficult for search engines to index and result in lower clickthrough rates from search results.
Does Your Website Have Too Much Flash or JavaScript?
Identify areas of your navigation that are entirely Flash or JavaScript. Search engines have challenges reading and accessing these, which could prevent your site from getting indexed.
Furthermore, these elements present problems from a usability perspective. Visitors are often looking for a very specific piece of information when visiting your site; if they have to sit through a 10-second visual introduction before they can find your hours of operation, you’re going to have a pretty frustrated visitor on your hands.
Is Your Site Structure Optimized for Search Engines?
We already talked about site structure as it relates to accessing content and usability for users, but it’s also important to make sure your site structure is optimal for search engines. If pages on your site are not internally linked to other pages on your site, those pages are less likely to be indexed.
Are You Defining How Your Web Pages Are Crawled and Indexed by Search Engines?
This can be done through various methods that include everything from robots files and tags to sitemaps. These measures are a way for you to guide search engines toward your website’s most useful content.
Robots Files or Tags
The robots meta tag lets you utilize a granular, page-specific approach to controlling how an individual page should be indexed and served to users in search results. These tags should sit in the <head> section of a given page.
The robots.txt file, on the other hand, is a text file that allows you to specify how you would like your site to be crawled. Before crawling a website, search engine crawlers will generally request the robots.txt file from a server. Within the robots.txt file, you can include sections for specific (or all) crawlers with instructions (“directives”) that let them know which parts should or should not be crawled.
Public and XML Sitemaps
Your website should also have public and XML Sitemap files. The public sitemap is one that users can access to review the pages of your site, like the index of a book.
The XML Sitemap is for search engines to review pages that get added to your site, all in one place. The usual location of a sitemap.xml file is www.domainname.com/sitemap.xml. The XML Sitemap is something every website should have; it offers an opportunity to tell Google and the other search engines what pages on your site you want to be crawled and indexed.
While search engines don’t guarantee they will abide by your sitemap, anecdotal evidence has proven time and time again that XML Sitemaps help provide insurance that your pages are found, and found faster — especially if your sitemap(s) dynamically update your new web pages.
Are You Defining Canonicalization of Content?
The canonicalization of your website content is the final major technical consideration to make. To gain more control over how your URLs appear in search results, and to minimize issues related to duplicate content, it’s recommended that you pick a canonical (preferred) URL as the preferred version of the page.
You can indicate your preference to Google in a number of ways. One such way is to set the Canonical Tag (rel=”canonical”) in an HTTP header of a page. Be sure to have someone check that the Canonical Tag is properly implemented across the site by making sure it points to the correct page, and that every page doesn’t point to the homepage.
Website Auditing Checklist
Now, before you get started, you might consider using this basic website auditing checklist to ensure you review all the necessary elements of your site’s performance, SEO, mobile, and security issues.

Website Audit Example
To pull all this together, I decided to run a website audit on one of my favorite bloggers, Christina Galbato.
This website is performing well. SEO and Mobile are scoring very highly. The main areas for improvement for this site would be performance and security.

You might be asking yourself, “What does that mean?” Well, let’s dive in a little deeper.
In each section, the website grader will let you know what you’re doing well and what you could improve on. See the SEO section below.

Then, the grader gives overall recommendations to improve your site overall. As you can see in the example, you’ll see a table to compare your current site to the recommendations.

Conducting a Website Audit
It’s important to establish an audit framework early on. Ask yourself questions ideally centered around gauging “How am I doing?” These questions may also include things like, “How does this compare to others, especially my competitors?”
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in April 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.