Ecommerce SEO Audit Checklist for Improved Search Engine Rankings

Conducting an ecommerce SEO audit is a crucial step in ensuring your online store is optimized for search engines and driving more traffic to your site. This process involves evaluating your website's technical, on-page, and off-page elements to identify areas for improvement.

A well-structured ecommerce SEO audit checklist can help you stay focused and ensure you don't miss any critical elements. This checklist should include tasks such as checking for duplicate content, optimizing product descriptions, and ensuring all pages are crawlable by search engines.

Regularly auditing your ecommerce website's SEO can help you stay ahead of the competition and improve your search engine rankings. This, in turn, can lead to increased sales and revenue for your business.

To get started, you'll want to review your website's technical SEO, which includes tasks such as checking for mobile-friendliness, page speed optimization, and SSL certificate installation.

An eCommerce SEO audit is a detailed evaluation of your online shop's performance in search results. It assesses various parameters to reveal performance gaps and help your site rank higher.

Google assesses over 200 ranking parameters to index your page, and this number is constantly growing. Failing to keep pace with these parameters can lead to declining traffic and lower profits.

An eCommerce SEO audit helps you detect and remove mistakes, raising rankings and conversions. It also retains a competitive edge by adjusting to changing consumer behaviors.

An eCommerce SEO audit is a detailed evaluation of your online shop's search engine presence. It assesses various parameters to reveal performance gaps and improve your site's rankings, traffic, and sales.

Google assesses more than 200 ranking parameters to index your page, and this number is relentlessly growing. This means your site needs to keep pace with those parameters to avoid declining traffic and lower profits.

An eCommerce SEO audit is a way to detect early flaws and prevent them from becoming serious issues. By regularly performing an SEO inspection, you can ensure your website's welfare and compliance with recent search engine upgrades.

Routine eCommerce store SEO audits can grant you several benefits. Here are some of them:

An Ecommerce SEO Audit is a thorough examination of your online store's search engine optimization. This process helps identify areas for improvement, ensuring your website appears in search results and drives more sales.

Enhancing categories with SEO content makes the page theme easier for search engines to comprehend. This is seen in the example of **************/Guitars.html, where SEO content helps search engines understand the page's theme.

A well-structured site map is essential for search engines to crawl and index your website efficiently. This is where SEO content comes in, helping search engines understand the site's hierarchy and organization.

SEO content can also be used to optimize product pages, making them more discoverable by search engines. For instance, product pages like **************/Guitars.html can be optimized with relevant keywords and phrases.

A thorough eCommerce SEO audit requires careful preparation and planning to ensure you're analyzing the right areas of your website. Consider starting with a content audit to evaluate your existing content's performance and identify opportunities for improvement.

You can expect huge wins from a content audit, as seen in the example of Vitrazza, which achieved a 965% increase in strategic content revenue and a 940% increase in non-branded keyword traffic by reworking their existing blog and product pages.

To complete a content audit, download the eCommerce Content Audit Toolkit, which provides a step-by-step guide to help you identify areas for improvement. This will save you time and effort in the long run.

A well-structured audit checklist is essential to ensure you cover all the necessary aspects of your website. Consider using a comprehensive audit process that covers website data analysis, design evaluation, content assessment, functionality evaluation, security assessment, and SEO evaluation.

Here are the key aspects to examine during a content audit:

By focusing on these areas, you can identify opportunities to improve your website's user experience and search engine rankings.

Technical SEO is a crucial aspect of an ecommerce SEO audit. A technical SEO audit looks specifically at the backend of your site, revealing what Googlebot and other search engines see when they crawl and index your pages.

Ecommerce sites are prone to duplicate content issues, with multiple instances of the same product pages and reused manufacturer's product descriptions. To address this, use canonicals, "noindex" tags, robots.txt rules, and unique elements like FAQ sections and product reviews.

A technical SEO audit should also check for site speed, mobile-friendliness, and URL structure. Slow loading pages will suffer an organic ranking penalty, so it's essential to optimize images and consider caching and lazy loading.

Sitemaps are a crucial tool for technical SEO, specifically XML sitemaps that tell search engines how to handle your website's information and pages.

These tools are created to give search engines an efficient set of instructions for moving through and indexing your most important pages, which is essential because there's so much material on the average eCommerce website.

To get the most out of your sitemap, be sure to submit it to Google Search Console and review the coverage report, from which you can easily see where broken links, missing pages, or improper redirects need to be fixed.

Sitemaps help search engines crawl your site more efficiently, which can improve your website's visibility and ranking in search engine results pages.

A technical review is a crucial step in ensuring your website is optimized for search engines. This involves checking for technical issues that might affect crawling and indexing, such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, and URL structure.

Your XML sitemap should contain only the main canonical versions of your URLs, without any URL parameters, and should be set to be automatically updated as pages are added or deleted from your site.

A technical SEO audit should also check for crawl errors, which occur when a web crawler encounters issues navigating your site's pages. These errors negatively affect your SEO and must be resolved.

To identify crawl errors, you can run a site crawl report through a company like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs, which will give you a good idea of how search engine bots move through your site and what data they see.

A slow page loading speed is another issue that can negatively impact user behavior and search engine rankings. To improve speed, you should optimize JS/CSS (minify, compress, and reduce unused CSS/JS), reduce the impact of third-party code, serve static assets with an efficient cache policy, avoid excessive DOM size, and set up back/forward cache (bfcache).

Here are some key things to check for in a technical review:

By addressing these technical issues, you can improve your website's search engine rankings and overall user experience.

Category Errors can be a major issue for online stores. They can reduce a site's visibility in Google search or display irrelevant queries.

For instance, a category page like https://**************/shop-by-category/guitars/electric.html appears for searches like "guitars" and "guitars for sale Ireland". This is not ideal, as it targets irrelevant queries.

A correct category display should target specific searches, like electric guitar-related searches. An example of a well-targeted category page is https://www.**************/Guitars.html.

Ecommerce stores can avoid category errors by creating well-structured category pages that group items in a logical way. This can be done by organizing items into different categories, like spices or guitars.

Not Configured Metadata can be a major issue for your website's search engine optimization (SEO). A missing or incorrect title is a common mistake, and it's easy to fix.

According to Example 1, a title not configured according to SEO rules is a major issue. This can lead to poor search engine rankings and fewer clicks on your website.

To fix this issue, make sure your title is unique and descriptive, and includes relevant keywords. This will help search engines understand what your page is about.

Here's a quick check to see if your title is configured correctly:

By fixing these issues, you can improve your website's visibility and search engine rankings.

Pagination is a crucial aspect of ecommerce sites, helping to split long category pages into manageable chunks of 100 products at a time.

This technique enables search engine bots to discover and crawl paginated pages from the main category, which is essential for visibility.

You don't want paginated pages to have "noindex" tags, as this could lead to search engines ignoring these pages.

Canonical tags pointing to the main category page should also be avoided, as this could affect the visibility of large sections of your site.

Structured data is a crucial aspect of technical SEO that helps search engines understand your website's content. It's like providing a map to help search engines navigate your site.

Using structured data can be extremely valuable for ecommerce sites, as it tells crawlers exactly which elements on your page fit a predefined taxonomy. This helps Google and other search engines better understand your on-page content and generate rich SERP snippets for your products.

The most relevant markups for ecommerce sites are Product, which helps pull relevant details into a rich Google snippet, and Breadcrumb, which helps place individual product pages in the broader context of your site's hierarchy.

You can implement schema markup, a type of structured data, across your website, particularly for product pages. This code provides additional context to search engines and helps them understand the content better by identifying elements such as prices, reviews, and more.

Google is showing more and more pieces of structured data in your search results, making it essential to include information about each product's name, price (including currency), estimated shipping times, and return policy. This information can be consumed by search engine bots and displayed in your search results.

Here are some key benefits of using structured data:

By implementing structured data on your ecommerce site, you can improve your website's visibility, drive more traffic, and increase sales. It's a simple yet effective way to enhance your technical SEO and stay ahead of the competition.

On-page SEO is a crucial aspect of an ecommerce SEO audit. A thorough on-page SEO audit will cover every product page, optimizing keyword usage and meta tags to attract the right kinds of shoppers. This includes examining title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and URL structures.

Make sure your titles feature your brand name, as recommended by Kyle. Each page on your ecommerce website has features that impact your SEO value, positively or negatively. A comprehensive ecommerce SEO audit provides real, analytical insights into these critical features.

Here are some key areas to focus on:

Let's take a look at some real-life examples of how to improve your eCommerce website's On-Page SEO. Recently, an Irish online store specializing in musical instruments and accessories conducted an eCommerce SEO audit, and the results were eye-opening.

Analyze search queries to understand user behavior is a crucial step in optimizing your website.

The audit highlighted the importance of creating a relevant page structure with a clear hierarchy, including categories and subcategories.

Implementing the correct webshop structure for SEO is also essential for improving visibility in Google search results.

Categories contain errors that reduce the site's visibility in Google search or display irrelevant queries. For instance, a category targeting electric guitars was appearing for irrelevant queries like "guitars" and "guitars for sale Ireland".

Here are some key takeaways from the audit:

A correct category display should target specific searches, like "Guitars.html" for electric guitar-related searches.

HTML heading tags play a vital role in your website's SEO, and web crawlers prioritize them when indexing your site, which influences your search rankings.

H1, H2, and H3 tags are HTML heading tags, and they're crucial for structuring your content. H1 tags are the most important, and they should accurately reflect the main topic of the page.

Headings (especially H1 headings) are one of the important on-page SEO details that should be updated with keyword research. This helps search engines know what page content is about.

H1, H2, and H3 tags are used to break up content and provide a clear hierarchy of information. This makes it easier for both humans and search engines to understand the content of your page.

A well-structured page with H1, H2, and H3 tags can improve your website's usability and accessibility. It also helps search engines crawl and index your content more effectively.

Here's a quick rundown of the recommended character limits for meta titles and descriptions, as well as the importance of headings:

Remember, using relevant and descriptive headings can improve your website's SEO and user experience.

Internal linking is an effective way to assign authority to specific pages on your website and guide traffic towards conversion-optimized pages, thus improving your site’s SEO and user experience.

Internal links help spread "link juice" from more authoritative pages throughout the rest of your site, giving search engines and users a path to follow when looking for specific information or products.

You should prioritize your pages during an SEO audit to make internal link-building decisions based on their hierarchy of importance. This means considering which pages are the most and least important/authoritative.

Broken links can create a bad user experience and negatively impact your SEO, so make sure both your internal and external links point to pages that actually exist.

Internal linking also helps guide traffic towards specific pages, improving your site’s user experience.

Category pages are a crucial part of an eCommerce website's on-page SEO. Analyze search queries to understand user behavior and create a relevant page structure with a clear hierarchy, including category and subcategory pages.

A well-structured category page can help guide traffic towards conversion-optimized pages, improving both SEO and user experience. Internal linking is an effective way to assign authority to specific pages on your website.

Grouping items into different category pages is an easy way to add content to your online store and boost search visibility. For example, if you sell spices, you could create pages for each category, such as Indian spices, Italian spices, or curry spices.

To optimize category pages, correct category errors, including meta-data and SEO content. This will help your site's visibility in Google search results. Increase category backlinks and brand mentions through outreach articles and crowd links.

Here are some key considerations for category pages:

Optimizing your product images is a crucial step in improving your ecommerce site's on-page SEO. Slow loading pages will suffer an organic ranking penalty, and product images are often the main culprit.

To start, make sure your images have descriptive file names. This will help search engines understand what your images are about and improve your site's visibility in image search results. Descriptive file names are a key element of improving page speed.

Including relevant alt text is also essential. This text will be displayed if an image can't be loaded, and it helps search engines understand the content of your image. Image optimization not only contributes to SEO but also enhances the overall user experience.

Compressing your images will also help with page speed. Caching and lazy loading your images, i.e. only loading them once the user scrolls down to see them, can also make a big difference. This will reduce the amount of data your site needs to load and improve the user experience.

Off-Page SEO is a crucial aspect of an ecommerce SEO audit. A high number of trustworthy external domains pointing to your site tends to increase its authority and gives it a ranking boost.

Having a strong backlink profile is essential for improving Google search rankings. External links from authoritative sites to categories improve Google search rankings, but you need to correct category errors, such as meta-data and SEO content.

To improve your backlink mass and brand mentions, increase category backlinks through outreach articles, crowd links, etc. You can redistribute some of your backlink power to help other key pages rank better by adding internal links from pages that have many backlinks.

Here are some key takeaways for Off-Page SEO:

Backlinks direct traffic from other websites to yours and serve as strong indicators of your site's expertise, authority, and trustworthiness for search engines. To get high-quality backlinks, create high-quality content that is worth being shared by other websites.

Maintaining brand compliance is crucial for a consistent user experience. This involves using your brand's terminology and tone of voice across all pages of your site.

Your content should reflect your brand's personality and values. This will help visitors feel like they're interacting with a cohesive and authentic entity.

Using proper terminology ensures that your content is accurate and informative. It also helps to build trust with your audience.

Misspelled content can give off an unprofessional vibe and undermine your brand's credibility. Make sure to proofread your content carefully to avoid this.

Consistency is key to creating a strong brand identity. Ensure that your content adheres to your brand's tone, voice, and style guidelines.

Off-Page SEO is all about building your online presence beyond your website itself. It's like networking, but instead of attending conferences and shaking hands, you're getting other websites to link back to yours.

A high number of trustworthy external domains pointing to your site tends to increase its authority and gives it a ranking boost. This is why having a strong backlink profile is crucial.

You can improve your backlink profile by increasing category backlink mass and brand mentions through outreach articles, crowd links, and more. This will help improve Google search rankings.

To conduct a complete SEO competitor analysis, you need to look beyond your site itself and examine its backlink profile. This includes reviewing all your backlinks and the pages they're pointing to.

Some backlinks can actually penalize your website if they're from irrelevant sites or spammy content. So, it's essential to create high-quality content that's worth being shared by other websites.

Here's a quick rundown of the types of backlinks to aim for:

By focusing on off-page SEO, you can increase your online visibility, drive more traffic to your site, and ultimately boost your sales.

Negative SEO can happen to anyone, and it's not just about getting links from bad neighborhoods. In rare cases, backlinks can backfire and negatively impact your organic ranking.

Toxic links from untrustworthy or harmful sites can harm your site's reputation and performance. You can use the dedicated Disavow tool to proactively tell Google that you don't want your site to be associated with these external sources.

Don't let toxic links ruin your online store's performance. By identifying and disavowing toxic links, you can protect your site's ranking and reputation.

Google Search Console and Google Analytics are essential tools for monitoring your site's performance and fixing any issues that might arise. Make sure both tools are configured correctly and tracking relevant data for your eCommerce site's needs.

A custom GTM code is also crucial for conducting a full data analysis. Without it, you won't be able to see the full picture of your site's performance.

A competitor analysis is a crucial step in off-page SEO, and it's not just about looking at your competitors' websites. It's about studying their strategies, identifying gaps in the market, and finding opportunities to outshine them. You can conduct a competitor analysis by looking at their backlink profile, which includes the number and quality of links pointing to their website.

This will give you an idea of their authority and credibility in the eyes of search engines. By analyzing their backlink profile, you can identify areas where you can improve your own website's link building efforts. You may also identify gaps in the competitor landscape, which you can use to solidify your niche.

To conduct a competitor analysis, you'll want to look at their keyword research, which can help you identify target keywords that have been driving traffic to their website. You'll also want to assess their speed, searchability, and overall user experience, as these metrics can help you set benchmarks to surpass.

Providing your top competitors to an SEO specialist can help take analysis a step further and provide you with insight into their traffic data, so you can develop an effective positioning strategy.

Social media integration is crucial for ecommerce stores because social signals can indirectly impact SEO.

Having social sharing options on product pages can contribute to increased visibility, making it easier for customers to discover and share your products.

Social signals can indirectly impact SEO, so it's essential to examine how well your ecommerce store integrates with social media platforms.

Consistent branding between your website and social channels creates a cohesive experience for your customers, which is vital for building trust and loyalty.

Make sure to use consistent branding between your website and social channels to create a cohesive experience for your customers.

To ensure a thorough ecommerce SEO audit, it's essential to have a solid analytics setup in place. This includes reviewing your analytics configuration to ensure accuracy and reliability.

Your analytics setup should be configured to track key metrics such as revenue, sales, and traffic. This will help you understand your website's performance and identify areas for improvement.

You'll also want to confirm that Google Search Console and Google Analytics are configured correctly and tracking the right data for your ecommerce site's needs. This will give you a clear picture of your website's traffic, sales, and revenue.

Google Search Console should be implemented for all versions of your domain, and you should double-check for any security issues or manual actions. This will help you stay on top of any potential issues and ensure your website remains secure.

Most ecommerce websites rely on Google Search Console and Google Analytics for data, but there are other analytics platforms you can use to supplement your data. Your ecommerce website platform may also provide analytics information, so be sure to review what's available.

Here are some key metrics to track during an ecommerce SEO audit:

By tracking these metrics, you'll be able to identify areas for improvement and optimize your website for better performance.

Keyword research is a crucial step in creating effective SEO content, and it's essential to do it right. A strong keyword strategy is at the heart of any ecommerce SEO effort. Evaluate the relevance and effectiveness of the target keywords used on product pages, category pages, and throughout content on the website.

The best ecommerce keywords tend to be specific and descriptive, such as "Red T-shirts" instead of just "red". This is because specific keywords help you turn up in search results.

To create effective SEO content, you need to do proper keyword research. This involves assigning search intent to page themes, such as product pages for buyers close to making purchasing decisions and blog posts for buyers in the research phase.

Here are the steps to create an effective keyword research strategy:

If your current keyword strategy is not working, review your content rankings in Ahrefs or Semrush to identify areas for improvement.