Congrats! You’ve opened your own E-commerce website and filled it with dozens of amazing products. It’s been a lot of work, but you managed to do it with style. You’ve got a snazzy homepage, informative product pages, and a bit of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) knowledge under your belt but your organic traffic is still few and far between.
If this is something you can connect with, it’s time for an E-commerce SEO audit. And you’re in luck, I’ve got an entire E-commerce SEO Audit checklist for you to follow to help you optimize your e-commerce website and boost your online presence.
A SEO audit is all about taking stock of your website’s organic visibility and understanding areas that need improving. By the end of an e-commerce SEO audit you should be able to understand what your website is currently succeeding in and what SEO items you need to fix.
E-commerce sites should be audited on a regular basis to understand the ever-evolving digital landscape.
Why is E-Commerce SEO so Important?
Three words: cost-effective marketing. With millions of people searching on Google per day, marketing your website with a focus on search engines can help your business become more visible to online shoppers. For businesses looking to expand their online presence, enhance customer acquisition, and reach a wider audience of customers, SEO is a cheaper alternative to paid advertising or social media marketing.
Without SEO, businesses have no visibility online, making it difficult for a customer to build trust, and in turn, purchase from the business. Focusing on SEO is a cost-effective alternative that can grow your business, build credibility and trust, and drive sales.
Ready to get started? Follow along with my comprehensive E-Commerce SEO Audit Checklist to make sure your site is SEO optimized to the fullest.
How To Perform an E-commerce SEO Audit - 15 Step Checklist
Performing your first SEO audit can be daunting and overwhelming if you’ve never looked into the data previously, but fear not, this guide will help you every step of the way.
I’ve broken this audit down into 15 steps, making it totally accessible for anyone, whether you own a small business or are part of a marketing team, to audit your own e-commerce website.
Ecommerce SEO Audit Tasks:
XML sitemap
Google Search Console Verification
Schema
Structured Data
Page Response Codes
Duplicate Content
Canonical Tags
Navigation and Crawl Depth
Page Speed
Meta-Titles and Meta Descriptions
Headers
Image SEO
Content Quality
Keyword Targeting
Backlinks
Are You on Google?
A SEO audit won’t mean a thing if you aren’t on Google! The first step to a successful SEO audit is to ensure that Google is crawling your site.
XML Sitemap
If you haven’t done it yet, verify your domain on Google Search Console. In GSC you can submit your XML sitemap, which is a file that lists all of your website’s essential pages and tells Google to crawl your website. You can find your XML by using a free program such as xml-Sitemaps, if your website has less than 500 pages. If you are running your shop on Shopify, you can find your sitemap here.
Google Search Console Verification
Next step is to verify your website with Google. This is super important because Google needs to confirm ownership of your website before allowing you to access private Google Search data.
The easiest way to verify your ownership is using an HTML tag.
How To Verify Your Website in Google Search Console
In your Google Search Console account click Add Property from the drop down menu.
Enter your website URL in the provided field and click “continue”.
Choose the “HTML” verification method. Copy the HTML tag provided by Google.
In your website provider (Wix, Shopify, Wordpress) click to edit code. Locate the <head> section and paste the copied HTML tag after the opening <head> tag.
Save changes and go back to Google Search Console. Click Verify.
Structured Data and Schema
Did you know that your website code has its own language? Schema is known as the language Google uses to find all structured data markup in a website’s code. By adding these codes to your website, you have the ability to share details about your products right in Google Search.
See this? This is called a snippet. Google using schema to make theses.
The best way to ensure your website is utilizing structured data and schema is to install a plugin such as Yoast SEO for Shopify or WooCommerce SEO to automatically add this code to your site.
So now you’ve got all the basics covered, it’s time to dive a little deeper into technical SEO.
Technical E-commerce SEO Audit
Page Response Codes
404, 401, 500, what do all these numbers mean?
HTTP response codes are numbers that let you know about your webpage’s status. When running an audit it’s important to look at these numbers and note any pages that may need to be updated.
To find these codes:
Using a Chrome browser, right-click the screen and click “inspect”.
Click “Network” on the top menu. You should see the status codes under the “status” column.
Read through the response codes and make note of any codes that are not “200”.
You can also use an SEO program to find these codes.
Common HTTP Status Codes:
200-OK
301 - Moved Permanently
404 - Page Not Found
5xx - Server Errors
Most status codes will be the four mentioned above. Once you’ve taken stock of the statuses, you can go in and fix any issues.
Duplicate Content & Canonical Tags
Google hates duplicate content, so making sure you don’t have any duplicate content on your site is a great idea. Google gets a little confused when it sees the same content on multiple URLs, making it difficult to figure out which one to rank higher. Instead, Google may rank both URLs lower.
This is most important for E-commerce sites due to the nature of product pages. If you are selling a dress in 3 different colors, you want to ensure that all the product variations are on the same URL. If not, your site will be creating new URLs for each version of your product, which will result in hundreds, if not thousands, of duplicate pages.
If you are loaded down with duplicate content, the best way to go forward is to utilize canonical tags. Using the tags tells Google to focus on one page and ignore the duplicates.
Navigation & Site Crawl
Website navigation can be considered the bones to any website. When visiting your site, you want your visitors to be able to easily navigate and find what they are looking for. The easier it is for visitors to navigate your site, the higher your conversion rate.
Take a look at your website. If you visited for the first time would you be able to find what you are looking for without much work? Your navigation should be simple and logical. Evaluate your site hierarchy and make any changes if needed.
Next, inspect your website’s URL structure. If you are selling men’s footwear, your URL should follow the same navigation as your site architecture.
Ex:
Homepage - Mens - Footwear
Understanding your URL structure will help your SEO as well as help visitors visiting your site.
Page Speed
Did you know that a good page speed for SEO is three seconds or less? Considered a ranking factor for desktop and mobile, ensuring that your website loads fast is crucial to any successful website.
To audit your website’s page speed, go to Google Search Console and check out the Core Web Vitals section. There, you’ll be able to see your website’s speed and which pages need some attention.
You can also use Google PageSpeed Insights to check on page speed, however, it only checks one URL at a time.
Once you’ve figured out what pages are slow, you can put together a strategy to help boost its speed.
Content SEO E-commerce Audit
Now that you’ve audited all of the top-level SEO of your e-commerce site, it’s time to go one level deeper and focus on optimization, keywords, and content.
Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions
My experience has shown that meta titles and meta descriptions are one of the most pushed aside facets of SEO because they seem like a waste of time and effort. Not true! Meta tags and descriptions are still relevant to website rankings and help categorize your content on Google.
While Google has the ability to grab this information from your website automatically, it’s better to provide it so you have control over what Google grabs. Crafting your own titles and descriptions can help persuade users to click on your link.
Each meta title should follow these best practices:
Under 55 characters
Specific
Incorporate the keyword
Make it interesting but not click-baity
And each meta description should:
Be under 155 characters
Include the keyword
Be specific and unique
Include a short summary of the content
Headers
While they may seem like a small part of SEO, headers are still a strong signal for SEO and lets Google understand your content as well as makes your page more user-friendly.
Think of Header tags as a book.
The H1 is the title of the book and also the most important. There is only one title, so there should only be one H1 per page.
H2 are the chapters, each describing the main topics.
H3-H6 serve as the subheadings, which can be used to define smaller topics inside of a main topic.
Do all of your pages follow this structure? Manually go through each page to identify the different headings and subheadings.
Image SEO
Is Google seeing your images? With 22% of Google Searches being Google Image searches, it’s clear that visitors want to see what you offer along with reading about it.
To ensure that Google understands your website and its images, it’s important to ensure that alt text is added to every image on your website not only for its SEO benefit, but to also provide accessibility to users.
Using an SEO program such as Semrush or Ahrefs, audit your website for image optimization which includes image size, load time, and if it is optimized.
Content Quality
Time is money when it comes to running a small business or e-commerce site, so I understand how enticing it is to have AI write content for you. And I get it! AI has been making leaps and bounds in the past few years.
But using AI for your business always requires a thoughtful eye. This part of the audit is subjective, however it gives you a moment to really look at your content, whether it's a home page or product page, and look at it through the eyes of a new visitor.
Does your content tell your brand’s story? Does it evoke emotion or does it seem like it was second-thought? Be your own critic and look through all of the content on your site and note any pages that may need a refresh.
Quality over quantity will always win in the eyes of SEO.
Keyword Targeting
What keywords is your website ranking for? Using Google Search Console, audit what keywords visitors are using to find your website. Does it fit your business intent?
Identify what keywords are performing well and why.
Research and figure out what keywords match with your business. Using a program like Semrush or Ahrefs can help you identify keywords that fall in your niche and allows you to create or optimize content on your website with those new keywords.
Keyword research is one of the most important aspects of any content marketing strategy, so make sure to spend an ample amount of time on this.
Backlinks
Lastly, let’s dive into some off-site SEO strategies, including backlinks. A backlink audit includes analyzing the quality, quantity, and relevance of links that are pointing to your website. Understanding what backlinks refer to you is important because backlinks are one of the most powerful ranking factors in Google’s search engine algorithms. The more high-quality backlinks your website has, the higher it might rank.
The easiest way to audit your website’s backlinks is to download the data from Google Search Console. It should be noted that Google only offers a sample of your links. For a full audit you would need to go through Semrush or Ahrefs.
What To Do After an SEO Audit
You’ve spent hours auditing your website for SEO and compiled all of your data. Now what? It's time to put all that data to work and optimize, optimize, optimize! The data you uncovered from your E-commerce SEO audit should have helped you understand the next steps you need to take to optimize your website to grow your business’s organic traffic.
I Still Need Help!
I get it. SEO is overwhelming and time-consuming. There’s a bunch of tech jargon that initiates more questions than answers.
So that’s why I offer comprehensive E-commerce SEO audits to clients.
Whether you are a small business selling homemade ceramics or a large clothing business, hiring an SEO consultant is a great way to understand your business’s Search Engine Optimization strategy without spending countless hours. SEO consultants, like myself, come to the table with experience (8 years in my case) and SEO applications, providing you with all the data and tools you need to grow your business’s organic strategy.
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