How to Conduct an SEO Audit of Your eCommerce Store
A survey from Databox reveals that nearly 40% of eCommerce stores consider search engine optimization (SEO) as the best investment in terms of results.
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To perform these optimizations, eCommerce businesses need to perform SEO audits. An SEO audit is a health checkup for your eCommerce store that reveals issues, misconfigurations, and areas of improvement that are affecting organic visibility.
eCommerce teams can quickly spot technical problems, unoptimized pages, and missing data with SEO audits. This helps streamline the site maintenance process as webmasters won’t have to scratch their heads by much to discover opportunities for site enhancements.
There are many moving parts in an eCommerce SEO audit that can make it complicated to manage, particularly for small online stores or teams with limited resources.
In this article, let’s look at everything you need to know to get started with conducting in-depth SEO audits for your eCommerce platform.
1. Prepare for the eCommerce SEO Audit
Start by listing SEO-specific goals that will improve the experience of your visitors. It is possible that these objectives will start out as performance targets such as increasing site traffic and dwell time. After identifying them, you can translate them into SEO goals.
For instance, site traffic can increase if you improve the search rankings. One way to improve search rankings is to remove the dead pages and make the pages lighter by compressing images or implementing lazy loading.
Moreover, those two things will also enhance the visitor experience on your platform which can boost the overall dwell time as well.
When the list of goals is complete (it is a good rule of thumb to keep it short, particularly for small teams), it’s time to start looking for relevant tools. Solutions like Google Analytics and Google Search Console are a must as they are completely free and provide insights into your site performance at a glance.
On top of that, you need an SEO crawler, keyword research software, backlink tool, and organizational tools to manage the auditing process. The first step after gathering these tools is to benchmark your site performance to measure progress later on.
Keep in mind that eCommerce sites usually have a larger number of heavy pages and complicated architecture. It can be advantageous to go for specialized high-performance tools for reliable results and cost-efficiency, particularly in the long run.
eCommerce SEO Audit preparation checklist:
- List specific SEO goals (e.g., increase site traffic, enhance dwell time)
- Translate performance targets into actionable SEO objectives (e.g., improve search rankings, remove dead pages)
- Gather Essential Tools (consider high-performance, specialized software)
- Free Tools: Google Analytics, Google Search Console
- Additional Tools: SEO Crawlers, Keyword Research Software, Backlink Analyzers, Organizational Tools (e.g., project management software)
- Use tools to gather baseline data on current site performance
- Document key metrics for future comparison
2. Technical SEO Audit
A technical SEO audit for eCommerce websites shows how visible and navigable the platform is for search engines and users. It involves using a crawler to parse through all the pages and find technical issues and misconfigurations that affect its performance.
Crawlers can reveal issues like broken links, improper redirect, missing metatags, server failures, page speed, orphan pages, etc. This is essential for eCommerce SEO teams as it makes the subsequent maintenance efforts structured and efficient.
You should also use tools like PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console to discover additional areas of improvement such as JavaScript errors and mobile performance issues.
Each of the issues needs to be addressed in its own way. For instance, broken links need to be either removed or redirected. Larger images need to be compressed. Meta Tags should be added or updated throughout.
While tackling each of the above technical issues, continually check your progress by monitoring site performance metrics such as page speed and responsiveness across devices.
Moreover, you may manually need to push crawl requests to Google for important pages after optimization to ensure the search engines serve them to your potential buyers immediately. If you have too many technical issues, it is crucial to prioritize.
Aim for low-hanging fruits first and then continually move toward more nuanced issues. A good rule of thumb is to start by addressing 404 and 5xx errors and compressing images.
eCommerce technical SEO audit checklist:
- Crawl the website to identify all the technical issues (e.g., broken links, improper redirects, missing metatags, server failures, page speed, orphan pages)
- Prioritize pages based on their importance and start resolving issues in them
- Target critical issues first (e.g. 404 errors and 5xx server errors)
- Go for the low hanging fruits before moving to complex tasks
- Push important pages manually to Google for immediate crawling after optimization
- Continually monitor performance metrics as you make these changes
- Test your eCommerce site performance on different devices
3. On-Page SEO Audit
On-page audits bring issues like inadequate or incorrect keyword usage, missing alt texts for images, thin or duplicate content, and unoptimized titles and descriptions into the light. Fixing them is crucial for delivering a great experience to your visitors and improving indexability.
When the pages are ranked properly on the search engine for the relevant keywords and they provide the right information to your visitors, you can expect higher traffic, increased dwell time, and more conversions.
Here, you will need tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush to conduct in-depth keyword research and find competitors for those search terms. This will make it easier to optimize product and category pages accordingly.
As you can imagine, fixing these issues, particularly when they are prevalent can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. It can be advantageous to leverage automation and AI tools to speed up the process.
For instance, you can use large language models (LLMs) to write product descriptions based on the manufacturer’s details while incorporating keywords. Similarly, you can use specialized plugins to add AI-generated alt text to images on your eCommerce platform.
This is also a great opportunity to add relevant internal links. Embedding internal links well makes it easier for search bots to map your website and index it appropriately.
eCommerce on-page SEO audit checklist:
- Use crawlers and specialized tools to discover on-page issues (e.g. underused keywords, outdated content, etc.)
- Conduct keyword research and competitor analysis with software like Ahrefs
- Leverage AI-powered tools to create the first drafts of content
- Track on-page SEO metrics (keyword rankings, traffic, and retention) before and after optimization
- Ensure the pages provide useful information in a friendly UI
4. Off-Page SEO Audit
Off-page SEO audits reveal external factors that might be impacting your eCommerce store’s search visibility. This includes backlinks, social signals, and overall online reputation. Optimizing them helps make your site appear credible, trustworthy, and authoritative to search bots and users.
eCommerce SEO teams should start by auditing the backlink profile with the help of tools like Moz Link Explorer and Majestic. You can also look at the backlink profiles of your competitors to quickly recognize enhancement opportunities.
The basic rule here is: that organic mentions in respectable sites are beneficial while referrals from sketchy domains do more harm than good.
Coming to social signals and online reputation, keep a close eye on relevant terms and trends on various platforms and publications. Promptly address the grievances of disappointed customers to offer a rightful resolution and regularly publish public relations articles.
Tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social can be great for tracking buyer sentiment across platforms. Similarly, you can set Google Alerts specific to your brand and industry to stay on top of other mentions across the web.
eCommerce off-page SEO audit checklist:
- Analyze the backlink profile of your website with tools like Moz and Semrush
- Do the same for your competitors
- Try to get backlinks from the sites they are mentioned in as well
- Aim to build high-quality, organic backlinks from reputable sites
- Recognize and disavow backlinks from sketchy or harmful domains
- Monitor social mentions and discussions on publications (Google Trends can help)
- Use tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social to track buyer sentiment
- Promptly respond to and resolve customer complaints
- Offer solutions to maintain a positive online reputation
- Share content that establishes your brand as credible and authoritative
- Collaborate with industry leaders and influencers
5. Local SEO Audit
Local SEO audits are essential for eCommerce stores that operate in a specific geographical region or serve customers residing in a particular area. This is also crucial for online shops that have brick-and-mortar stores.
Ensure you have pages dedicated to the relevant locations. These pages should resonate culturally and demographically with the audience. Use all the relevant words, phrases, and lingo to hit the mark with your messaging.
If you have a physical store, get listed in Google My Business and add useful content to your profile such as catalog and pictures.
Another important thing while promoting a local business is managing reviews. Keep a close eye on different listings and forums to remain on top of potential issues. This keeps the eCommerce teams agile and proactive in maintaining a good local reputation.
eCommerce local SEO audit checklist:
- Ensure each relevant location has its own dedicated page
- Use culturally and demographically appropriate language and lingo
- Include relevant keywords specific to the location
- Get your physical store listed on Google My Business
- Add comprehensive information including address, phone number, etc.
- Upload high-quality images and a product catalog
- Promptly respond to reviews on different listings, positive and negative
Best practices while auditing eCommerce sites for SEO
The five steps outlined above can be tedious, particularly for budding eCommerce stores with limited hands on the deck. While talking about those steps, we briefly mentioned a few tips that are collated below:
- Audit the eCommerce platform at regular intervals for different issues. This is crucial for consistent monitoring of the relevant performance metrics and measuring growth over time. Additionally, it can be beneficial to summarize the insights after each audit.
- Use a comprehensive toolkit. It can be irritating to discover in the middle of the eCommerce site auditing process that software in your tech stack is lacking a feature you need. Test the tools thoroughly before adopting them.
- Prioritize issues and collaborate with the team for faster resolution. Assign SEO team members tasks based on the importance of the affected pages. While doing so, share a checklist where all the necessary fixes are mentioned.
- Automate wherever possible with action-based triggers and specialized AI tools. This is helpful in fixing issues faster, reducing the possibility of manual errors, and decreasing the administrative burden of the eCommerce SEO team.
- Stay updated about SEO trends and technologies. Search engines constantly evolve their criteria for ranking websites and the tools always grow in features and functionalities.
Final Thoughts
SEO audits are vital for eCommerce businesses aiming to boost visibility, traffic, and sales. A thorough audit identifies technical, on-page, off-page, and local SEO issues that could hinder performance.
To run an SEO audit for your ecommerce site, start by preparing with clear goals and the right tools.
Conduct technical audits to address site speed, architecture, and mobile usability. Perform on-page audits to optimize content, meta details, and keyword usage. Assess off-page factors like backlinks and social signals.
Lastly, focus on local SEO to ensure consistent listings and a strong local presence.
Remember, SEO is a continuous process. Regular audits help maintain and improve your site’s performance. Ecommerce teams should establish a routine for SEO activities, ensuring they stay ahead in the competitive online market.
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