eCommerce SEO Audit [A Complete Checklist by Experts]

If you have an eCommerce store, you’d probably need to check whether it’s headed in the right direction time and again. Maybe you are doing everything right, or perhaps it’s just missing a vital strategy that could take it up a notch.

That’s where SEO audit comes in. Even if everything is aligned and headed the way to success, you cannot reach the ultimate level without an ecommerce SEO audit.

This helps analyze your SEO practices and can help you achieve optimal SEO levels.

What Does an SEO Audit Do for Your eCommerce Business?

An SEO audit can boost your business ranking and give it a jump above competitors across search engines.

Once you are at the top, people are more likely to click their way through your store, increasing your sales revenue via greater conversions.

Being at the top makes you more noticeable and approachable.

An SEO audit can help ecommerce companies in the following ways:

1. They create high-quality SEO content that will likely get greater clicks, shares, and direct traffic your way.

2. They help attract more SEO-optimized traffic your way.

3. Use effective strategies to provide maximum returns on your investment.

ECommerce SEO Audit – Explained

ECommerce SEO audits check your web presence, particularly the website, and devise a plan of action for improvements. Then it also helps your business through the process of implementing those improvements.

As a result:

1. Your store ranking improves
2. You get more potential customers clicking your website
3. There’s a higher number of conversions.

The audit process looks at different angles of your eCommerce business. However, the two focal areas of the audit are your product page and category page.

1. Products

Often the biggest mistake people make when designing a website is placing all focus on the home page. The home page looks classy and attractive and may even feature special offers.

But the actual pages the potential customers are attracted to are often neglected.

They are either incomplete, lack contact information, or may be unoptimized.

Hence, to increase the conversion rate, you need to optimize the content of these pages for potential customers and search engines.

Products Optimization
Here are some effective strategies for optimizing your product page:

1. Use keywords in your meta description, page description, and title. Use effective keyword tools like Ubersuggest, Semrush, Ahref, etc.
2. Keep the format simple and easy to navigate through
3. Insert discount offers, free shipments, coupons, and other attractive offerings
4. Add indexed alt text and images
5. Insert internal links and backlinks

2. Collections

The category pages should have target keywords in the meta description and title tags like the product pages.

Also, the category pages should not be too cluttered and easy to understand and navigate through.

Photos, too, are important to give the buyers an idea of what to expect and how the product would look like in real life.

Comprehensive Checklist for eCommerce SEO Audit

ECommerce website audits are explicitly designed for each page and business. However, there are some common areas across all businesses.

Let’s go through the checklist for eCommerce SEO Audit.

1. Keywords Research
Keywords are important for effective lead conversions. The more optimized your web pages, the higher your chances of converting the targeted lead customers.

These keywords will also optimize your website and rank it higher on search engines. Ensure you insert these keywords in your title, description, URL, meta and title tag, images, categories, content, and other tags.

2. Technical SEO
Next, the website’s technical aspects are checked for your website’s positioning in a search engine.

It includes checking things like:

Website structure
Architecture
Title tags and other tags
Image
Links
Indexation
Coding
Crawlability

3. Crawling & Indexing

The search engines index some of the web pages. Index analysis helps find those pages. Tools like Google Search Console can help you track indexing.

It’s best if your main product category pages are on the indexing. Else your page won’t show up in the search results.

The search engines index some of the web pages. Index analysis helps find those pages. Tools like Google Search Console can help you track indexing.

It’s best if your main product category pages are on the indexing. Else your page won’t show up in the search results.

4. HTTPS
HTTPS upgrade boosts user confidence in your website. If your website has SSL certification and SSL installed, users will feel safer navigating your pages.

Upgrading to HTTPS is easy and doesn’t take much effort.

5. Metadata

Metadata should be concise yet descriptive and include the target keyword.

Similarly, an SEO audit also looks into the title tag. It should be precise yet detailed and give the visitors a gist of your website’s content.

6. Content Duplication
Often websites list the same products in different categories. They may even have the same descriptions and guides etc.

These are marked as duplicate content and could confuse the search engines, and they may index the wrong pages. Such duplication should be avoided and rectified.

7. Content Gap Analysis
Another aspect SEO audit looks into is content gaps. That means opportunities to add quality content to the web page may exist.

The audit also looks into content that can be updated or elaborated.

8. Broken Links
Broken links occur for a variety of reasons. But the most common issue is that pages get deleted over time or move to new URLs.

Broken links can add to the dismay and distress of website visitors. They often switch to other pages when they can’t find the content they are looking for.

Hence it’s important to analyze the links and fix them right away.

9. Alt Text
Alt text gives information about the image. Users seek this information to see how relevant the image is to them.

When it lacks the needed description, it can cause confusion affecting your site ranking.

10. Page Speed
People easily shift or close the website if it takes too long to load. Check your webpage’s loading speed via tools like Pingdom or GTmetrix.

The ideal timeline for a page to load is about 2-5 seconds max. Any longer, the visitor will lose interest, and you will forego a potential customer.

You can boost your webpage’s speed by:

1. Upgrading to a dedicated server for your business
2. Use small-sized images
3. Caching plugins

10. Website UI
Customers may visit your website via their laptops, mobiles, or tablets. Ensure your website is optimized and has a user-friendly interface for all devices.

eCommerce SEO audit also checks how mobile-friendly your website is. It may suggest you to:

1. Use a responsive design so the webpage automatically adapts itself to the screen size of different devices.
2. Use simple website design and small fonts
3. Disable JavaScript