In the world of modern marketing, organic search is crucial. It’s where you compete against your rivals and where your devoted following finds you. It’s also how new customers find you. The way you design, arrange, add content, and manage your website will determine how successful your eCommerce venture is. In general, SEO is among the most crucial strategies for exposing your brand to the public.
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In order to help with that, we’ve put together this comprehensive guide to an eCommerce SEO audit, which we hope will answer all of your questions and serve as a springboard for your own. We’ll also include some of our best checklists and toolkits in this guide, along with case studies that illustrate the outcomes an SEO audit can provide for your business.
Advantages of Conducting an eCommerce SEO Audit
Ecommerce SEO audits offer a multitude of advantages to businesses hoping to improve their search engine rankings and increase the number of visitors to their website who become paying customers. The following results are indicative of an extensive audit of an e-commerce website:
Enhanced search engine rankings
Checking for and fixing SEO problems on a website audit can teach businesses how to raise their search engine results. Employing these changes will help business owners make their product pages more visible and attract more natural traffic.
It will do better if you fix easy SEO problems like slow loading times and make sure the site works well on phones. Also, make sure that search engines can read it.
Enhanced marketing initiatives
You can also make sure that your digital marketing fits in with your website’s SEO plan by getting an SEO audit. Other digital marketing efforts can be successful by making sure the technical base is strong, the content is better, and the keywords are useful. Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are one example. You might need to know what people are looking for if you want your ads to show up on the term SERPs you want.
More informational content
Informative content can drive a lot of traffic to your website. This is due to the fact that search algorithms favor websites with excellent content. During an SEO audit, you’ll find out which informative content pieces are currently performing well and where you need to make improvements. Finding these gaps can help your customers have a more positive user experience.
A client-focused website
A thorough SEO audit provides a wonderful opportunity for e-commerce websites to focus their content on the customer. Imagine yourself in the user’s position. Make sure they have all the facts they need before they do business with you.
When Should Your eCommerce Website Perform an SEO Audit?
Even though it can take some time, you should at least plan for an SEO audit on a regular basis as part of your annual marketing strategy. The demands of audiences and algorithms are ever-evolving. Regularly making minor adjustments will keep your website optimized for changing circumstances.
Most brands also frequently produce new content, such as blog posts, product pages, FAQs, and the like, which can have both positive and negative effects on your site’s overall authority and SEO.
An annual review of your whole website can help reduce redundancy and bloat. We recommend that brands conduct audits, in addition to yearly reviews, whenever any of the following qualifying events occur:
- During a site migration procedure,
- When new marketers or SEOs join the team,
- During rebranding initiatives or strategy modifications
There are a lot of things that affect how often your eCommerce site should be audited. There is no exact formula, but we can give you a rough idea.
Minimum
- Complete audit: Once a year or more. We check everything here, including conversion rates and technical SEO.
- SEO: Weekly or monthly for industries that are competitive or dynamic; quarterly for the majority of sites.
- Content: For crucial pages—especially those that encourage conversions—at least once every three to six months.
Suggested
- You might want to do eCommerce checks once a week or once a month. Things run smoothly in sales and management when problems are found early and fixed quickly.
- Keep an eye on your key performance indicators (KPIs) every day. Things like how well the product works, where the traffic is coming from, the number of sales, and more are all part of it. Monitoring that is proactive lets improvements and changes happen more quickly.
It definitely depends on things like how complicated and big the website is, how competitive the industry is, how often material is updated, how often large-scale changes are made to the website, and big search engine updates that affect search engine rankings.
To keep the website healthy, you must routinely monitor its performance, even if you are unable to perform a comprehensive eCommerce SEO site audit on a regular basis.
A Comprehensive eCommerce SEO Audit Checklist
It’s likely that the majority of store owners use an e-commerce content management system. Content management systems effectively optimize your SEO automatically. However, you, as the site owner, may not desire such optimization. In this situation, an audit is helpful.
An SEO audit for e-commerce could include important elements such as:
Keyword assessment
The foundation of any e-commerce SEO campaign is a solid keyword strategy. Check the website’s product pages, category pages, and other pages to see how well and how important the goal keywords are used.
Specific and descriptive keywords are typically the best for e-commerce. If you sell products, make sure you use descriptive language when describing your collection. If you sell red t-shirts, naming your collection “red” won’t help you rank higher in search results. In search results, you should refer to it as “Red T-shirts.”
Technical SEO audit
Check your website for any technical issues that could make it harder for search engines to crawl and index, like issues with the URL layout, how fast it loads, or whether it works well on mobile devices. Taking care of these parts is called “off-page SEO.” Though a technical SEO audit might not add more content to your site, it can help it move up in the search engine results page (SERP).
Quality of content
The content strategy is an important component of SEO. Examine the blog entries, product descriptions, and other content on the website for originality and quality. In general, the most important thing is to figure out what queries a customer has regarding a product and the details they require. Make sure it appears on the page.
Avoid having duplicate content on several pages, as this can confuse search engines and reduce your website’s visibility. Although the content on different pages may be similar, they shouldn’t use exactly the same language.
You can also use a canonical tag to help search engines understand related content. Even if a page has similar content in different versions, canonical tags indicate to search engines which version is the authoritative or primary version.
Structured data and site Architecture
Read over the parts on internal linking and XML sitemap to make your website more search engine friendly. Shopify is a content management system that you might want to use Yoast SEO or another SEO tool to add areas that help group data.
Provide details about the name, estimated shipping time, price (including currency), and return policy of each product. When attempting to present users with relevant pages, search engine bots gather this data and take it into account. Google is increasingly displaying this structured data in your search results. Given that this is what a customer is searching for, when its search engine crawlers discover that content, they immediately display it on the SERP.
Mobile friendliness
Every year, e-commerce transactions on mobile devices increase, with sales predicted to reach $710.4 billion by 2025. Your best chance of taking home this ever-increasing e-commerce pie is with a mobile-friendly website.
Make sure that your store is mobile-friendly, and that the pages load quickly and correctly. Check out Google’s mobile-friendly test to see how mobile-friendly your site is and find ways to make it better.
Internal and external links
Links are crucial for increasing organic traffic because Google and other search engines incorporate both internal and external links into their search algorithms. Examine the backlinks pointing to your website to identify areas where you can create relevant, high-quality links.
Although internal linking is also beneficial, external sites linking to your web pages are the ideal scenario. This is also the time to identify broken links that point to non-existent pages and remove them or redirect them to live ones.
UX (user experience)
Analyze the overall user experience (UX), paying attention to features like mobile responsiveness, page speed, ease of navigation, and site search. Eliminate any barriers that may exist between the first landing page and the final stage of an online checkout.
CRO (conversion rate optimization)
Consider how well you’ve set up your website to convert visitors into buyers, paying close attention to elements like product pages, checkout procedures, and calls to action.
Conversion rate optimization involves keyword targeting. The mere fact that keywords are associated with a high search volume does not mean that a page should be overflowing with them. Stay with extremely relevant keywords that target people who would genuinely be interested in purchasing from you.
Competitor assessment
When performing SEO audits, examine the websites of brands that are competitors to yours. Determine the tactics they are using, and choose the ones that will benefit you. Additionally, you might spot holes in the competitive scene that you can exploit to bolster your niche.
Comparative analysis involves checking your rivals’ sites for speed, searchability, and overall user experience. It also involves researching terms to see which specific keywords have been sending people to their sites. You can use all of these metrics to help you set and achieve goals.
Local SEO (if relevant)
If your company has physical locations, examine local SEO elements, such as your Google Business Profile and local citations—online references mentioning your location, phone number, etc. Give your real locations permission to show up on mapping applications such as Apple Maps and Google Maps.
Category pages
Sort the different products you sell into distinct category pages. This is a quick and simple method to improve search visibility for your online store by adding content. According to Kyle, some online retailers do not have category pages, “but they leave a lot of opportunity on the table.”
“Let’s say you sell spices,” he says in an illustration. You could probably arrange those spices in twenty or thirty different ways. For instance, you could create separate pages dedicated to Italian and Indian spices, among others, or spices for curries, barbeques, and so on. That’s advantageous because it shows strong buyer intent.
Look for any category pages that are out of date, or that you could add to the mix while conducting your audit.
Website security (HTTPS)
Make sure your website is using HTTPS to safeguard the user’s browser from the server. Having a secure website is essential for gaining visitors’ trust, and Google takes HTTPS into account when ranking sites. Furthermore, e-commerce websites handling sensitive customer data during transactions should prioritize having a secure connection.
Social media integration
See how well your online store connects to social networks. Some people may see your product pages more if you add social sharing buttons to them. These buttons can also have a secondary effect on your SEO. That way, your buyers will have an easy time. Make sure that your website and social media pages all have the same branding.
Product image optimization
Ensure that you compress images for faster loading times, give them descriptive file names, and include relevant alt text. In addition to helping with SEO, image optimization improves the user experience in general.
Additionally, it assists you in adhering to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), a collection of standards and guidelines created by the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) to improve the accessibility of websites for people with disabilities.
Using SEO Tools to Conduct an eCommerce SEO Audit
Audits rely heavily on tools that analyze performance, retail SEO practices, and potential areas for improvement.
We can make use of a few of these well-known eCommerce SEO tools throughout the audit process:
SEMrush
One of the most popular tools for performing SEO audits is SEMrush. You can access a plethora of features with both the premium and free versions of the software, including the ability to track eCommerce SEO keywords, competition specifications, tags, duplicate content, links, and backlinks, among other things. Nevertheless, it’s ideal for quick website audits because the free edition has a lot of limitations.
Ahrefs
Another well-liked SEO tool that assists with website auditing is Ahrefs. It enables you to audit the organic performance, identify keyword gaps and opportunities, ascertain which content pieces perform well, and make decisions based on that data.
SE Ranking
Companies and individuals can use SE Ranking, a full-featured SEO (search engine optimization) platform, to boost their website’s exposure and search engine ranking. The platform includes numerous features, such as backlink checking, competitor analysis, rank tracking, keyword research, and on-page SEO checks.
Screaming Frog
With the help of the Screaming Frog’s features, we can map a website’s web structure, evaluate its URL quality, internal and external linkages, and thoroughly inspect websites—whether they belong to us, our clients, or our rivals. Considering all of this, the primary advantage lies in its ability to replicate the crawling process exactly as web crawlers do. This is incredibly helpful, as it will provide a comprehensive analysis of the situation as perceived by Google.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics offers more data about your website, including visitation totals, reach%, conversion rate, and audience demographics. You can also use it to plan future events that will aid in optimizing your website and executing any digital campaigns you desire.
Google PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is a free tool from Google that evaluates a page’s overall performance on desktop and mobile devices, in addition to how well it performs on those devices. The tool also includes suggestions for enhancing the page’s performance.
These improvements have the potential to both decrease bounce rates and shorten page load times, two critical factors in your site’s natural linking structure.
Google Search Console
All SEO experts can use the Google Search Console to track and improve their websites, including e-commerce ones. It provides in-depth analysis on a variety of Google search-related topics, including sitemap submissions, performance, indexing, mobile usability, linking, and URL inspection.
Wrapping Up
Our eCommerce SEO procedure will assist you in comprehending the goal of optimization for your online store, along with the practical checklist. Examined from every angle, your website reveals a plethora of prospects for expansion and income. It is your responsibility to see the possibilities and make the necessary adjustments to improve your current situation.
Let’s now review the material mentioned above. An in-depth SEO audit for eCommerce includes the following:
- Mapping and analyzing the pertinent keywords for your company
- Resolving on-page issues to provide users with a seamless experience
- Enhancing and refocusing the current content to deliver greater value
- Resolving frequent technical SEO problems to guarantee a direct route to the top 10 rankings
- The best off-page strategies that won’t damage your brand or business
You now have the ideal eCommerce website that benefits search engines as well as customers.
Supriti is a seasoned Content Writer at SwiftPropel, boasting over 8 years of experience in SEO content writing. Her expertise lies in crafting compelling, search-engine-optimized content that not only engages readers but also ranks highly in search results. At SwiftPropel, Supriti combines her passion for storytelling with a deep understanding of SEO strategies to deliver content that drives traffic and converts leads.