Ecommerce SEO Audit: Essential Guide for Online Stores
4.50/5When it comes to ecommerce marketing, there are many different ways to promote your website and products. From targeted social media ads to referral programs. But there’s one channel you can’t forget: high search engine rankings. It’s the one that provides the best ROI and allows you to attract organic traffic that is highly interested in the products you sell. But where do you start this optimization process? An ecommerce SEO audit will help you understand where to focus.
In this article, we will explain how to perform it and the checklist that will help you succeed in this process.
What is Ecommerce SEO?
When we talk about ecommerce SEO, we are referring to the process of optimizing your website to make it:
- Crawlable
- Indexable,
- Rankable by search engines.
This way, your potential buyers can quickly find you or the products they want on Google or any other search engine.
While in theory this process seems very similar to any other SEO, it’s imperative that you understand that in practice it is much more complex. This is because your website is made up of many different pages and content that is constantly being updated.
What Is an Ecommerce SEO Audit?
With this in mind, an ecommerce SEO audit is the process of taking a snapshot of your site. Analyzing it’s organic visibility and the performance of various factors including:
- Page load speed
- Navigation
- Mobile friendliness
- Content quality
- Security
- And more.
Understanding how well, or not, each of these metrics is performing will help you prioritize actions to improve your users’ experience and your search engine rankings.
Reasons to Audit Your Ecommerce SEO 2024
An ecommerce SEO audit requires resources, tools, and time. But it’s well worth it, as it will provide you with a report that clearly states what areas (on-page, off-page, technical, and if applicable, local SEO) your site has for improvement and how to fix them. Once you start implementing these recommendations, you will see your search engine rankings improve and the benefits that come with it: increased organic search volume, conversions, and sales.
At the same time, the audit’s recommendations will lay the groundwork for you to transform your website into one that’s focused on your target buyer’s needs, pain points, and interests. This allows you to differentiate yourself from the competition and provide a better user experience. The latter is highly valued in today’s world. Users are tired of being bombarded with sales messages everywhere they look.
Checklist SEO Audit – How To Do an Ecommerce SEO Audit?
While most ecommerce sites rely on Shopify to optimize for SEO, you will need to submit your online store for an SEO audit at least once or twice a year. This process can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, depending on the complexity of your site. And will provide you with a list of recommendations so you can improve the user experience and search engine rankings.
A complete ecommerce SEO audit should review on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO, and local SEOif applicable. Let’s take a closer look at the checklist that will help you understand what this means.
Ecommerce SEO Audit: On-Page SEO Elements
Your ecommerce SEO audit should start with an analysis of your on-page SEO efforts. They are a key part of your success in both search engine rankings and converting visitors into customers.
Evaluate Keyword Usage
Keyword analysis determines whether the search terms used on your product pages, category pages, and the rest of your site’s content are the right ones. Remember, they must match your buyer’s search intent in order for you to rank in the search engines. Also, they should be descriptive and specific.
If you are doing the audit yourself, you will want to use Google Search Console to identify which pages of your ecommerce are not ranking well in search engine results pages. This could be due to poor keyword selection or poor optimization.
- If you have integrated your keyword enough and your page is not ranking, then you will want to consider changing it and reoptimizing your site. Google Search Console will provide you with information on which terms are driving the most traffic to your online store.
- If your keyword is the right one, but it’s not integrated enough, then you need to spend time carefully adding it. Make sure it is in a natural and strategic and to places like your meta title, meta description, product description, etc.
Analyze Title Tags And Meta Descriptions
Your audit should then focus on the title tags and meta descriptions of the various pages that make up your site. These are the first two things a person sees when they find your site in Google. They need to be perfect, which means
- They should be unique for each page.
- They must entice the searcher to click and visit your e-commerce.
- The meta title should be 50-60 characters long.
- Meta description should be 160 characters.
The audit should reflect which pages are missing one or both elements, which ones should be optimized.
Optimize Category Pages
Category pages are a great asset to your ecommerce site. They help customers find similar products, and they help search engines understand your site’s hierarchy. With this in mind, your SEO audit should include a review of your category page structure.
This will help you:
- Find outdated category pages.
- Discover new opportunities for new category pages.
- Unify the URL structure for your category pages.
- Identify category pages that need to be optimized with on-page SEO best practices.
Optimize Product Pages
Your audit should then review your product pages to determine which ones have lost or gained traffic. This way, you can spend time improving the ones that are not performing as expected so that you can rank higher, attract more organic traffic, and sell more of that specific product.
To improve the performance of your product pages, you need to
- Include the product name, price and currency, detailed product description, shipping time, and customer reviews.
- Add a FAQ section.
- Include a related products section.
- Optimize them for specific and detailed keywords.
- Optimize your images by adding alt text.
- Add structured data tags.
- Create and implement a pricing strategy to attract more potential buyers.
Check Alt Texts
Most websites make the same mistake: ignoring image alt texts. While it may seem small, it has a huge impact on your site’s performance. Your SEO audit should be able to help you understand which images are missing it so you can quickly fix this and add a good description that includes your product keyword.
Evaluate Content Strategy
The final step of the on-page SEO audit focuses on analyzing the content of your website. Make sure it includes both your site and your main competitors. You want to understand what content gaps you have and what others are doing so you can replicate it and adapt it to your site.
- If you find content gaps, it’s imperative that you spend enough time to fill those areas with relevant, value-oriented, and insightful information. Remember, you must first determine the keywords you want to tag.
- If your content is performing well, you want to continue to create new pieces and keep your site updated and filled with valuable content for your users.
This analysis should also help you understand which pieces:
- Have outdated information.
- Don’t add value.
- Have poor readability.
- Have misspelled content.
- Don’t provide a consistent brand experience.
Ecommerce Website Audit: Off-Page SEO Elements
Once you have completed the first part of the audit, you will want to move on to the next step: off-page SEO. This refers to the various actions taken outside of your website to drive more organic traffic to it.
Check Backlinks
In this section you will want to spend time analyzing and understanding the backlinks your site is getting. What sites are they coming from? What’s their domain authority? What backlinks are your competitors getting? From whom? What sites are mentioning your brand or products and not adding a link? Are there any broken or expired links?
The more information you get, the easier it will be to understand which sites you can contact and ask for a backlink. Also, you want to focus on adding internal links to the pages that are getting the most backlinks so that you can keep visitors engaged and surfing to other pages on your site.
This audit will also give you information about untrustworthy or harmful sites that may be linking to your site. If this is the case, you may want to take action and let Google know that you don’t want to be associated with them.
Analyze your Social Media
Social proof is something that Google values highly when it comes to ranking your content. It’s a key indicator that your users find your content and website valuable.
Make sure your audit checks what users are saying about your brand and if your online store and social networks are fully integrated. You want to give visitors the ability to share your product pages with someone with just one click.
Ecommerce Technical SEO Audit
The third step in this process may be the longest and most difficult. It revolves around the technical aspect of your ecommerce site to ensure it offers the best user experience and can clearly communicate with search engines.
Check Crawlability
Making your site crawlable is the key to search engine rankings. Think of it as making your site accessible to Google so it can read it, understand it, and then rank it.
If you want to perform this check yourself, you can check the crawlability report provided by Google Search Console. It’s important to focus on understanding spikes and drops in crawl requests, as these are indicators of major technical issues that could be affecting your performance.
To make your site crawlable, you need to check your robots.txt file and add internal links from relevant pages to other relevant pages (home, category pages, product pages, etc.).
Check Core Web Vitals
Google uses three performance metrics (Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)) to measure the user experience and speed of every site they rank. It’s imperative that you include these in your audit.
You can analyze your site’s core web vitality using PageSpeed Insights, a free tool that only requires you to enter your ecommerce URL. In a matter of seconds, you will receive the results of the assessment and tips for improvement.
Most of the improvement ideas revolve around hosting, caching and image optimization.
Run an Indexation Analysis
If search engines don’t index your website pages, you have no chance of having your e-commerce appear in search results. With Google Search Console, you can quickly understand which pages are indexed and which are not.
For those that are not indexed, you will want to check the robots.txt file and add internal links to it. In this way, you are starting to send signals to Google that this page is relevant and should appear in search results.
Check Your XML Sitemap
Part of your ecommerce SEO audit should be dedicated to verifying that Google has a valid XML Sitemap. This is a document that indicates which subdirectories and pages of your site Google should crawl, index, and rank.
To check if it’s submitted, simply go to Google Search Console and click Sitemap. You’ll see if it was submitted, when it was submitted, and its status. If the sitemap is not found or has errors, you will want to submit a new and updated one.
Make sure you:
- Includes only the most important canonical versions of your URLs.
- Lists only URLs that you actually want indexed.
- Is set to update automatically as pages are added or removed from your site.
Verify your HTTPS
Ecommerce sites handle sensitive information such as credit card details, addresses, and contact information. It’s imperative that you verify that your SSL certificate is valid and installed on your server.
If you don’t have one, you can quickly get one from a certificate authority such as GoDaddy, SSLs.com, Namecheap, and others.
Make Your Site Mobile Friendly
As more and more people are browsing the web from mobile devices, Google has begun to prioritize the mobile version of ecommerce sites in its search results. In other words, your audit must include an analysis of your mobile version to ensure that it works perfectly.
With Google PageSpeed Insights, you can quickly understand if it’s slow, unoptimized, and unresponsive. If the test alerts you to any of these situations, then you want to fix it:
- Create and implement responsive design.
- Reduce image sizes.
- Change fonts and text sizes so they are easy to read on different screen sizes.
- Disable JavaScript where possible.
- Test your ecommerce site on different screens.
Check Schema Markup
Then you want to verify that structured data has been implemented on your site, specifically in your ecommerce product pages. This code provides additional information for search engines to understand the context of your page. By adding it to product pages, you make it easier for them to find the product name, pricing, reviews, and more.
Fix Broken Links
Your technical audit should check for broken links or pages that lead your people to a dead end where they can’t access any information.
Tools like Ahrefs can quickly help you find these broken links so you can fix them or redirect them to an existing page.
Verify the Canonicals
Most ecommerce sites have the same product live at different URLs and that is OK. However, to prevent you from sending duplicate content to Google and hurting your rankings, you need to make sure you’re working with canonical tags.
You can use tools like ScreamingFrog to find duplicate content. For those you want to keep, you can add the canonical tags. There are many different ways to do this, but here’s a video that gives you a step-by-step explanation.
Reduce Load Time of Your Site
Site speed is a key element that can prevent your site from achieving top search engine rankings. That’s why you need to focus on understanding how long it takes to load and what’s preventing it from loading faster. This way you can optimize your ecommerce site.
We highly recommend that you perform a speed test:
- Home page
- Category pages
- Product pages
- Any others you think are relevant.
If your load time is over 3 seconds, then you need to do this:
- Cache your images,
- Compress large files.
- Reduce the number of redirects.
Ecommerce SEO Audit: Local SEO Elements
If your ecommerce site is intended to serve a specific geographic location – or several different locations – then you need to continue the audit and verify that you are doing enough to attract potential buyers from that area.
Check “hreflang” Tag
Ecommerce sites that operate in multiple locations need to ensure that their users are seeing the correct version of their site. The one that speaks the same language, has pricing information in their currency, and provides information specific to the user’s location.
Your audit needs to help you understand:
- If the hreflang tags are taking people to correct URLs.
- If each page has hreflang tags pointing to all existing local versions of the page.
- If every URL referenced by hreflang is indexable.
- If the hreflang tags use the right language and region codes
If none of this works, you need to check the implementation of the hreflang tags and fix any problems.
Ecommerce SEO Audit Pricing
On average, you can expect to pay an SEO agency anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000 for an ecommerce SEO audit. There are two main factors that determine this:
- The size and complexity of your site: As you can imagine, larger and more complex sites require a greater investment of time and resources to complete a full snapshot and analysis.
- Who performs the audit: While you can perform the audit yourself using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, we highly recommend that you hire an SEO agency. They are trained and equipped to provide you with better recommendations and an implementation plan based on the results of the audit.
In the end, what really matters in this whole process is being able to prioritize SEO tasks and successfully implement them on your website.
Conclusion
Performing an ecommerce SEO audit, while long and time consuming, is a necessary process that must be done at least once or twice a year. It’s not just about grabbing random data points, each item on this checklist has been handpicked and analyzed considering the impact it has on your site’s performance and ranking in search engines.
You can make this process easier by hiring an SEO audit agency. They have the experience, know-how, tools, and team to perform it and provide you with a report full of insights, an actionable list, and an implementation process. That way, you can focus on what you really know how to do and let others improve your ecommerce SEO and website health and performance.
