For E-Commerce, SEO is an essential factor. An Ecommerce SEO audit can be conducted in various ways and structures to improve your website’s performance, generate more leads, and increase sales and revenue. This guide will help you navigate the SEO audit process and make your SEO life more manageable. A new decade is ahead of us, so it’s the perfect time to reevaluate your website SEO strategy or audit your e-commerce website.

What is an Ecommerce SEO Audit?

An e-commerce audit is a process that evaluates the current health and performance of your e-commerce store. At the end of the audit, you’ll have a clear idea of where your stores stand in the market and get an action plan to improve them for better results.

An e-commerce SEO audit involves the current web page’s performance analysis and the health of your whole website, and it lets you:

1. Identify SEO problems that affect your website’s performance.
2. Offer optimization solutions for better performance.
3. Increase the site’s performance and visibility, as well as organic traffic.

How is an e-commerce SEO audit different from other SEO audits? 

The processes of SEO audits are largely the same. The difference is the performance focus. Like in other business site audits, in e-commerce SEO, you still have to check your ranking with a keyword rank checker, determine the web pages that convert the best and worst, establish performance benchmarks, and so on. But the difference is that you’re doing it for product landing pages and shop category pages instead of blog posts. Also, you have to focus more on technical SEO, the load speed of pages, canonicalization, user experience, mobile friendliness, domain security, and the number of indexed pages. All these elements are vital for e-commerce sites.

Why is it important for e-commerce sites to be audited regularly? 

Ecommerce websites tend to evolve over time or regularly. New product pages are added, and old or out-of-stock product pages are removed regularly. Some other frequently changing elements include your product category setup, navigational elements, separate Recommended Product Pages, and some of the other e-commerce store widgets. In short, as a whole, there are many moving parts to it.

Moreover, e-commerce websites have a complex architecture that mostly relies on URL parameters to manage how specific products are displayed differently. Moreover, if the company operates in multiple branches or markets, its e-commerce site must be carefully configured to serve and distinguish between local and global content properly.

That’s why a regular SEO audit helps you keep on track, stay updated about changes, and spot issues before they impact your organic traffic and profitability. 

Ecommerce SEO Audit Checklist:

Technical SEO Checklist:

Technical SEO is the main underlying factor of any successful SEO strategy. Following are the steps of technical SEO you should follow in an e-commerce SEO audit:

1. Ensure that a website can be crawled and indexed: 

It’s a rule of thumb that if a search engine cannot crawl your website, it can’t rank your content. Specifically, on an e-commerce site, it can’t rank your products in search results. The site’s indexability, crawlability, schema markup, and user-friendliness are all essential components of technical SEO. If these elements are correctly settled in their places, the rest of the e-commerce strategy will fall into place automatically.

2. Resolve 4XX code pages: 

Once you’ve verified that your website is indexed on Google and can be crawled by the Google bots, your first step is to find the broken or 4XX Code pages. Pages with 4XX code or broken pages are unable to crawl. Broken pages often occur due to the out-of-date sitemap, out-of-stock products, or sometimes a temporary server error.

3. Double-check the excluded pages:

Excluded pages are those for which you disallow them manually so that Google cannot index them. While auditing an e-commerce site, you also have to check the excluded pages, as Google cannot index them due to the code in the robot.txt file.

Though this list is based on some pages for which you don’t want a search engine to crawl them, such as the cart page or a customer profile page, You exclude these types of pages for better optimization, so you should double-check them to ensure that no essential or important pages are blocked from crawlers.

4. Page loading speed:

Usually, slow-loading pages eventually suffer the organic ranking penalty. But in the case of e-commerce sites, they are conversion killers. Therefore, reducing the page loading time speed of your pages should be on your high priorities list. Check the speed with which your pages load regularly as part of your e-commerce audit. For this process, you can test URLs for each of the templates the site uses, i.e., the home page, product pages, and category pages, to verify whether they are of average or good speed according to the user experience or not. Because e-commerce sites usually have multiple product images, optimizing these images will usually be a key element in improving page loading speed.

Ecommerce Content Auditing:

Once you’ve taken care of technical SEO, it’s time to take a deep look at the actual content of your e-commerce site.

5. Meta-Titles and Meta-Description:

Meta titles and meta descriptions appear in the SERP snippets, and they are the first impression a user will have about your site, whether it’s a blog site or an e-commerce site. Therefore, they should be unique for each product page on an e-commerce site and instantly entice the user to click through to your site.

When you audit an E-commerce site, check that your title and meta descriptions are within the character limit to ensure that the search engines can display them fully. The most recommended character limit from Google is:

Meta Title: 50 to 60 Characters

Meta Description: max 160 characters

6. Identify duplicate content.

Duplicate content issues are especially prevalent on e-commerce sites. Most of the duplication is due to the multiple instances of the same product pages. Moreover, retail services websites also include duplicate product descriptions in their listings.

An e-commerce SEO audit should initially address numerous duplicate content issues by utilizing canonicals, robot.txt files, tags, etc. Your content itself can further differentiate your canonical pages by including rich snippets. some unique elements like FAQs, product reviews, and some other shopping guides.

7. Keyword Targeting: 

On e-commerce sites, keyword targeting is usually difficult since multiple products often belong to the same category and terms. To some extent, while auditing, try to differentiate your product pages. So that they aren’t competing with each other for the same user searches. You can solve this problem by using unique and long-tail keywords and long-tail descriptions for each product page.

8. Structured Data or Schema Markup: 

Structured data is always valuable to e-commerce sites. It tells search engine crawlers exactly which element on your page fits a predefined taxonomy. It also helps Google and other search engines to understand your on-page content better. And to generate rich snippets for your products.

Schema Markup is the best way to make structured data according to the search engines’ rules. For e-commerce sites, the most relevant schema markups are:

Product markup helps pull relevant details into a rich Google snippet.

Breadcrumb helps place individual product pages in the context of your site’s hierarchy.

Off-Page SEO Audit for Ecommerce:

After technical SEO and on-page SEO, the final step in the E-commerce SEO audit is off-page SEO. So let’s look at the backlink profile.

9. Backlinks Checking: 

A high number of authentic and trustworthy external domains pointing or linking to your site tends to increase the site’s authority and boost its ranking.

Review your backlinks and the pages they are pointing to. If they’re linking to a broken page or a 4XX error page, make sure to add a 301 redirect URL to an equivalent page that’s still relevant to the backlink type.

You can also add internal links from your site’s pages with many other backlinks to other main pages you’d like to improve.

10. Negative Links SEO: 

Backlinks you build for your site can sometimes backfire. This means that if your website receives a high proportion of so-called toxic links from malicious or fraudulent sites. It will negatively impact your organic ranking and traffic. Should your SEO audit find such toxic links, you can use the Disavow tool to tell Google that you don’t want your sites to be associated with these external links. 

Some handpicked resources for you:

• THE FUTURE OF SEO | TOP 5 SEO TRENDS
• WHAT ARE THE 11 DEADLY SINS OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO?)
• HOW DO I IMPLEMENT SEO IN WORDPRESS
• WHAT ARE THE TOP 10 BENEFITS OF SEO?

Final Thoughts: 

After the whole process, including the E-commerce SEO audit, the question arises as to how often you should have run the E-commerce SEO audit. The standard recommendation is to audit your site every three to six months. Also, it depends on how often you rotate your stock. Also, we have a professionalized team to audit your e-commerce site. We give you an insightful guide to doing it in a better way. If your site has been running for a long time but has never been audited regularly, it should be. Do so as soon as possible to improve your website for the search engines. Contact us now for your website’s SEO audit.

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