Last Updated on August 4, 2024 by Admin
Struggling to draw organic traffic to your online shop?
Here’s a useful tip.
Regardless of how impressive your e-commerce platform looks or how extensively you tweak it, growth is unlikely without substantial organic traffic.
That’s where conducting an SEO audit for your e-commerce site becomes pivotal. An SEO audit pinpoints areas needing improvement and offers a roadmap to enhance your search engine rankings.
In this blog, we’ll explore what an e-commerce SEO audit entails, its importance, and how to perform one using a straightforward checklist.
What is an eCommerce Website Audit?
A website audit reviews the performance, functionality, and content of your site. Consider it a comprehensive check-up for your blog, business website, or e-commerce platform.
For those managing online stores, performing an e-commerce website audit is critical. This process involves evaluating various components such as:
- Page loading times
- Mobile compatibility
- Site navigation
- Organic search rankings
- Keyword implementation
- Quality of content
- Internal links
- Security features
- User accessibility
These factors can influence your search engine positions and overall user experience. Reviewing them allows you to detect problems and pinpoint areas for enhancements.
Why is it Essential to Perform an eCommerce Website Audit?
Running an e-commerce site audit helps you spot technical problems that might be holding back your website’s ranking, boost its performance, and improve the user experience.
Here are additional benefits you could see:
- Boost Conversion Rates: A 2022 survey showed that 37% of shoppers leave a poorly designed site. Another 33% abandon a site that loads slowly. Regular audits help fix these issues. Improving user experience can increase sales by keeping visitors longer.
- Gain a Competitive Edge: Strong e-commerce SEO gives you a significant advantage over competitors. It helps you stay ahead in your industry.
- Reduce Marketing Costs: Good SEO practices can boost search rankings and visibility. This can reduce spending on ads and marketing. It’s especially beneficial if you’re on a tight budget.
- Enhance Security: Top SEO audit tools can find security risks. They detect issues like outdated plugins, malicious code, weak passwords, and old security protocols.
How to Audit Your eCommerce Website?
Given the complexity and importance of SEO audits for e-commerce sites, it’s understandable to feel daunted by the process.
The following step-by-step checklist is designed to simplify the audit, outlining key focus areas. You can divide an e-commerce SEO audit into three main parts:
- Technical SEO audit
- On-page SEO audit
- Off-page SEO audit
This structured approach helps ensure a thorough review of all critical aspects.
Technical SEO Audit
Technical SEO is important for all websites. It is especially crucial for e-commerce companies. E-commerce sites have dynamic content and complex structures. They face unique challenges to ensure they are crawlable and indexable.
When you are doing technical SEO audit for your e-commerce website, pay attention to the following elements:
Analyze XML Sitemaps and Robots.txt Files
XML Sitemaps guide search engines to pages that need reviewing, urging them to index your more significant pages.
Robots.txt files tell search engines which pages can or cannot be accessed. This is important so that your website is not overrun—let us say by preventing such pages as shopping carts from being accessed.
When it comes to proper crawling and indexing by Google, both a robots.txt file and an XML based site map are very important. The lack of these things means you need to include them on your site.
The method for creating the file can be found on Google’s website, while for site-verification settings, look for Google Search Console in the application store.
Check Page Loading Speed
Slow-loading pages not only threaten to drop your organic search rankings but also significantly hinder conversions on e-commerce sites. Thus, minimizing your page load times should be a primary focus.
In your e-commerce SEO audit, evaluate how quickly your pages load. To streamline the process, test representative URLs from different page templates on your site, like the homepage, product pages, and category pages.
E-commerce sites often have multiple images per product, making image optimization vital for boosting page speed. Consider using image caching and lazy loading techniques, which ensure images only load as they enter the viewer’s screen.
Evaluate Your Indexability and Crawlability
The next step in your e-commerce SEO checklist is to examine your site’s indexability.
Check if Google can index and crawl your site to ensure it appears in search results. It’s important to review this to ensure your site is visible to potential customers.
Use Google Search Console to confirm that Google can properly crawl and index your site. If Google has trouble accessing some pages, examine your robots.txt file. Ensure your robots.txt file isn’t blocking access to important pages. Also, link your internal pages to other relevant pages.
Additionally, try to gain backlinks as they help search engines find and crawl your site.
Optimize Pagination
Pagination breaks up long category pages into manageable sections on your e-commerce site. Typically, each page will show around 100 products. For instance, your category page might begin with “yoursite/category” to display the first 100 products. The next set would be shown under “yoursite/category?page=2” for another 100 products, and this pattern continues for subsequent pages.
This setup aids search engine bots in finding and crawling the subsequent pages linked from the main category page. During your e-commerce SEO audit, watch for any pagination issues.
Specifically, ensure that paginated pages do not carry “noindex” tags or have canonical tags that point back to the main category page.
Such settings prevent search engines from indexing pages deeper in your site’s structure, potentially hiding significant portions of your product range from search results.
Check for Mobile-Friendliness
The more mobile users there are, the more it’s essential for one to make sure that his/her website performs well on tablets and smartphones.
This factor could lead to users leaving before even checking out what you have to offer. A situation that may harm your rankings on search engines such as Google. On the other hand, Google has given much weight to mobile-first indexing that looks at how your website displays when accessed through a mobile device to rank it better than traditional sites.
To improve your chances of appearing among the top outcomes when somebody types anything related to what you do or sell on Google, ensure that you have made this site mobile-friendly.
Ensure Your Website is Secure
For any e-commerce site, security is essential.
Customers provide personal details when purchasing from your site. They may hesitate to buy from you if your website isn’t secure. Also, Google prefers secure websites because they ensure the safety of users while they are browsing.
To check if your site is secure, type your URL into a browser and look for a closed lock icon next to it. A closed lock indicates security. Moreover, if your URL starts with “https” instead of “http,” this also signifies that your site is secure.
If your site lacks security, consider purchasing a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate. This certificate helps protect sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, that users enter on your site.
On-Page SEO Audit
To conduct an e-commerce SEO audit, you must examine your on-page SEO. This involves optimizations made directly on your website to boost its ranking. Focus on key areas to maximize your SEO campaign’s effectiveness.
Analyze Keyword Usage
Start your e-commerce SEO audit by evaluating keyword usage on your website. Keywords help your pages appear in relevant search results, attract more visitors, and increase sales.
Ensure your core keywords are adequately and strategically used across your pages, including in meta tags. Use tools like Google Search Console to identify poorly ranked pages. Check these pages for proper keyword usage and make necessary adjustments.
Evaluate Meta Titles and Description
Next, audit your title tags and meta descriptions.
These meta tags are the first thing users notice in search results. Ensure they are compelling and encourage clicks.
Use Google Search Console to check your pages’ click-through rate (CTR). This will show whether your tags generate enough interest.
Remember, your position in search results affects CTR. Pages on the first page of search results usually get higher CTRs than those on the second page.
If your CTR is low, reoptimize your title tags and meta descriptions to attract more clicks. Include your keywords in both tags for relevance and make them descriptive so users know what to expect.
If your CTR is high but conversions are low, your tags may not match your product page content. Revamp your tags to align with your product page and ensure they appear in relevant search results.
Assess Your Content Strategy
The next step in your e-commerce SEO audit is to assess your on-page content. Content significantly influences your search rankings. Well-crafted content can provide valuable information to your audience, improving your rankings.
Evaluate your current content strategy to identify gaps and areas for improvement. Compare your content with your competitors to see what they offer that you haven’t yet created.
Off-Page SEO Audit
Off-page SEO consists of factors impacting your site’s ranking that aren’t directly on your pages. While you can’t change them directly, they are immensely vital to include in your e-commerce SEO audit. Focus on two key aspects to ensure comprehensive coverage.
Evaluate Backlinks
Having many reliable external domains linking to your site can boost its authority and improve its ranking.
During your e-commerce SEO audit, review all your backlinks and the pages they point to. If a link leads to an outdated or broken URL, set up a 301 redirect to a relevant, active page on your site.
Additionally, you can distribute some of your backlink power to enhance other pages’ rankings. Achieve this by adding internal links from pages with many backlinks to other important pages you want to improve.
Go Through Your Social Profiles
While social media doesn’t directly impact search engine rankings, many marketers believe it has an indirect effect. Sharing your website pages on social media can boost traffic and earn links, which can improve your ranking.
During your e-commerce SEO audit, analyze your social profiles and ensure you consistently post links to your content and product pages.
If you’re already sharing links on your profile, assess their performance. Review your profile’s analytics to determine if your links are generating clicks. Identify which links are the most effective in refining your strategy.
Wrapping Up!
Your e-commerce SEO audit will give you a clear view of your current strategy and highlight areas for improvement. This checklist will guide you in identifying issues and making enhancements to your site.
If the audit process feels overwhelming, AlgoSaga can assist. Our team specializes in optimizing e-commerce SEO and ensures your strategy is effective and up-to-date.