E-Commerce SEO Audit Checklist

In the digital era where the marketplace is saturated and every click counts, the ECommerce SEO Audit stands as a critical catalyst for growth and differentiation. It’s more than a routine examination; it’s a strategic deep-dive that dissects and analyzes the very DNA of your online presence, identifying strengths to leverage and weaknesses to rectify, ensuring that your eCommerce site not only ranks higher but resonates more profoundly with your audience.

Envision transforming your website into a magnet for engagement and sales, where every element is optimized, every page is a portal to value, and every SEO facet is honed to perfection. This audit isn’t just about compliance with best practices; it’s about crafting a bespoke strategy that aligns with your unique brand and market position.

Embarking on the ECommerce SEO Audit journey equips you with the insights and tools to refine your digital footprint, enhance your visibility, and engage with your customers on a deeper level. It’s an essential step toward not just growth, but sustainable and impactful online success. Unlock the potential of your eCommerce business by mastering your SEO audit checklist, and set the stage for a future where your brand doesn’t just exist but thrives online.

What is an Ecommerce SEO Audit?

An ecommerce SEO audit is like a complete check for your ecommerce store. It checks how easy it is to find and use your website in search engines. It looks at things like how fast the pages load, if it works well on mobile devices, and how other websites link to yours. 

The aim is to find problems that could be affecting how well your website shows up in search results and to figure out how to make it better. Regularly checking and improving ecommerce websites using SEO helps them in three important ways:

• Find mistakes and improve your website using the SEO audit findings. This can make it rank higher, get more visitors, and make more sales
• Make sure your website stays ahead of the competition. An ecommerce SEO audit can help you adjust to new algorithms and how people use the internet
• Gives you data about how well your website is doing. Audits help you measure how well your SEO work is paying off and make sure your plans match your business goals

ECommerce SEO service providers place paramount importance on eCommerce SEO audits as they lay the groundwork for formulating impactful optimization strategies, ensuring that online stores are primed for maximum visibility and conversion. These audits provide the critical insights needed to tailor bespoke SEO approaches that drive traffic, improve user experience, and enhance overall business growth in the competitive digital marketplace.

Why is it Vital to do an Ecommerce SEO Audit?

Nowadays, most people buy things online to save time, and they can also get discounts and special deals when shopping online. If you have an online store, you need to compete with big companies like eBay, Amazon, and Flipkart.

These big websites are really popular and it’s hard for other websites to compete with them. With a good plan, you can compete with them. To make your website better for search engines, you need to know what parts of it need to be fixed.

The best way to find those elements is to do an ecommerce SEO audit. It examines how well the website is doing with SEO. It also points out what the website is doing well and what it could improve. This test is important to see if the website fits with search engines and what users want.

An audit checks for problems on a website that could make it harder for search engines to find and understand the content, like broken links, repeated information, or slow loading times. Improving these technical things makes the website better and helps people use it more easily.

It checks if the keywords used on product pages and other content are relevant and effective. By choosing the right words, businesses can reach more people and show up higher in search results without having to pay for advertising.

Examining other businesses in the same industry is an important part of checking SEO. Knowing how well your competitors show up in search results helps businesses improve their plans, find missed chances, and stay ahead in the market.

An ecommerce SEO audit is really important for keeping a website showing up on search engines, getting more visitors, and increasing online sales. Regular checks help you keep up with changes in how search engines work, what customers want, and what’s popular in the industry.

What to do Before an Ecommerce SEO Audit

Define Goals and Objectives

Having clear goals helps the audit process stay on track and work towards specific targets. These goals could be to make a website rank higher in search engines, give users a better experience, get more natural web traffic, or solve technical problems.

By identifying goals, businesses can clearly see what areas of their online store need to be reviewed and made better. This clear information helps with the audit and makes it easier to see if the SEO strategies that are used afterwards are successful.

Set Benchmarks

Creating a starting point to measure how well your website is doing, such as how many people visit it, how many people buy something, and how well your keywords are doing, helps you see how you are doing in the future. These benchmarks help businesses see how well their SEO efforts are working.

By knowing how well things are going now, companies can better keep track of getting better, figure out what’s working well, and measure the return on investment of SEO efforts after an audit. Creating goals helps you use data to make your website better for people using it to shop online.

Perform Keyword Research

Keyword research involves finding and studying the words people search for online. This process helps businesses figure out what customers want, find out what people are searching for, and match the content on their website with the words their customers use. 

Businesses can use specific words to make their products and website show up more often in search results. Continuously looking for popular keywords helps the website stay competitive and visible in the market. A good keyword plan is important for getting more people to visit your website without paying for ads, and for making your website show up higher in search results.

Review Analytics Data

Businesses use tools like Google Analytics to look at how people behave, where they come from, and how they decide to buy things. This information shows how well your current plans are working, finds the best pages, and shows where you can do better. 

Understanding how users interact with a website, how often they leave without exploring further, and the process of turning visitors into customers helps improve SEO strategies to better match what users like. Analytical data is important for businesses to see how their SEO work is doing and make decisions to improve the user experience and increase sales.

Analyze Your Competitors

Studying other businesses is important before starting an ecommerce SEO audit. This process involves looking at what other companies in the same industry are doing and how well they are doing it. Businesses learn about what they are good at, what they need to work on, and the best words to use online. This helps them make their SEO better. 

Studying what other companies are linking to, the quality of their content, and how they are seen online can help you find ways to do better and stand out from your competition on your website. This study helps businesses make smart decisions by changing their SEO strategies and keeping up with industry trends. This will make them more visible online and help them rank higher than their competition in search results.

Checklist for Ecommerce SEO Audit

1. On-Page SEO Audit

If you want to learn how to do an ecommerce SEO audit, begin by looking at your on-page SEO work. On-page SEO means making changes on your website to help it rank higher in search results. Here are some important things to look at to make sure your SEO campaign is working well.

Check How You Use Your Keywords

The first thing to do for an ecommerce SEO audit is to check the keywords used on your website. Using specific words can make your website show up in search results when people are looking for similar things, which can bring more visitors to your website and more people buying things.

Make sure your ecommerce website is optimized for search engines by checking if your main keyword is used correctly on your pages and in important places like meta tags. This will help your website rank higher in search results.

You can use Google Search Console to see which pages on your website don’t show up well in search results. When you find those pages, you can check how often the keyword is used on the page.

What to do if your keyword isn’t on the page enough? If you don’t have the keyword on your page a lot, you’ll need to add it more so that your page can rank for that main keyword. Make sure to use the main keyword in your product title and description.

What should you do if your keyword appears enough on the page? If you see that you have used the keyword a lot, you might want to look for other similar keywords to focus on. Google Search Console can show you what words people use to find your pages, which can help you find new words to use.

Check Your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Next on your ecommerce SEO checklist is to check your title tags and meta descriptions.

These two tags are the first ones that people see when they search for something. You should check these tags to make sure you’re creating titles and descriptions that make people want to click on your page.

Google Search Console can show you how many times people have clicked on your website’s link in search results. When you can see how many people click on your page, it will help you know if your tags are interesting enough to make people want to click on them. 

Remember that where you show up in search results will impact how many people click on your link. If your website is on the second page of search results, not as many people will click on it. Simply put, a listing on the first page of search results will get more clicks.

What if your click through rate is low? If not many people are clicking on your links, try changing the title and description to get more clicks. Make sure to use your keyword in both tags, so people can see that your listing is important. Use clear titles and descriptions so people know what’s on your page.

What if your click through rate is high? If you get a lot of clicks but not many people are buying or signing up, you might need to change the title and description of your website. Your title and meta description may not match what’s on your product page, so people click on it but don’t end up buying anything. You might have to update your tags so they match your product page and show up in more useful search results.

Analyze Your Website’s On-Page Content Plan

Next, you need to look at the content on your website to see how well it is optimized for search engines. The information on your website is very important for where it shows up in search results. Your audience wants helpful information, and when you make content for them, you give them that information.

You want to check your website content to see if there are any areas that need to be improved. You should check what kind of content your competitors are making and compare it to your own to see if there’s anything you’re missing.

Adding this task to your ecommerce SEO audit list will help make sure you are making a plan for your website that brings more visitors to your business.

What should you do if your content plan has gaps? If it looks like your content plan is missing some pieces, fill in those gaps. Make new content to cover those areas and get more people to visit your website. You can use SEO tools to find ideas for things to write about and to find words to use.
What to do if your content plan does not have any gaps? If you don’t see any problems with your content, keep making more for your website. Creating more things to share will help more people come to your website.

2. Off-Page SEO Audit

Next, you need to check off-page SEO on the e-commerce website. Off-page SEO refers to things outside of your website that can still impact how it ranks in search results. You can’t control these factors directly. You should include two things in your ecommerce SEO audit.

Evaluate Your Backlinks

Backlinks are really important for getting your website to show up in search results. Backlinks are when other websites link to your website. These links help you rank higher and build trust if they come from credible websites.

You can use a tool called Ahrefs backlink checker to see who is linking to your content. Just type in your website name to see the links on your site. Remember that your website may have links from good and trusted sites, but also from bad or spammy sites.

What should you do if you have bad backlinks? If you look at the websites linking to yours and see that they are not trustworthy, it could lower your website’s score. If you see bad links to your profile, ask the people who put them there to take them down. If they don’t, you can choose to ignore the links. This is usually not necessary.

What to do if you have many good backlinks? If you see that most of the links to your profile are good, try to build more good links. Contact these companies with content that is related to their business and ask them to put links to your pages on their websites. Also, you should find other experts in your industry and ask them to look at your content. This will help you get different kinds of links to your website.

Check Your Social Media Profile

Social media may not directly affect how high your website shows up in search results, but some experts believe it can still have an effect on it. Because you can share pages from your website on social media, it can help more people visit your pages and get more attention online, which can make your website more popular.

During your ecommerce SEO check, make sure to check your social media profiles to make sure you are sharing links to your content and products.

What should you do if you haven’t shared links to your pages? If you haven’t told anyone about your pages, now is the perfect time to start. When you make new things or have a sale, you can share links to your pages with a fun message to get more people to look at your stuff.
What should you do if you have shared links to your pages? If you are already sharing links to your profile, check how well those links are doing. Monitor your profile’s statistics to see if people are clicking on your links. You can find out which links get the most clicks to make your strategy better.

3. Technical SEO Audit

When you learn about doing an ecommerce SEO audit, remember to also check the technical aspects of your website. Technical SEO is important because it can affect how well your website works and how easily search engines can find your website’s pages.

As an online store, you will have many pages with products, information, and other things, which can cause technical problems. Use this checklist to check if your ecommerce website is working properly.

Check Your Website for XML Sitemap and Robots.txt File

Your XML sitemap and robots.txt are important for search engines to understand your website. If you want Google to look at your website and add it to their list, you need to have both elements.

XML sitemap: This file tells Google which pages to look at and tells Google to include important pages from your site in their search results.

Robots.txt: It is a file that tells search engines which pages they can and cannot crawl. It helps to prevent your website from getting too many requests at once. You can use this to tell Google not to look at some pages, such as shopping cart pages, wish lists, and others.

What should you do if you don’t have XML sitemap or robots.txt? You should add them to your website. You can find instructions for making a robots.txt file on Google’s website. You can also use Google Search Console to make an XML sitemap.

What should you do if you have XML sitemap or robots.txt? Check to see if they are set up correctly. Make sure they are working properly. For instance, many companies block Google from accessing their website using robots.txt. Make sure you are showing Google the important pages on your website that you want it to see.

Analyze Crawlability and Indexability of Your Site

Next, check if your website can be found by search engines and if they can easily go through all your web pages. If Google can’t read your website, it won’t show up in search results.

It’s important to check this information to make sure you can meet with potential customers.

You can use Google Search Console to see if Google can visit and list your website.

What to do if Google can’t crawl or index pages on your website? If Google can’t read or find pages on your website, check your robots.txt file and connect pages within your website to help Google find them. You can also try to get backlinks to help search engines find your website.

What should you do if Google can crawl or index your website? If Google is able to properly crawl and index your website, then you don’t need to take any action.

Check Page Load Time

The time it takes for your website to load affects how high it shows up in search results. So, make sure to check this when doing SEO for your online store. If your website is slow to load, people will leave and find another website. You should make a website that loads quickly so people can find information quickly.

Visitors want your website to load fast, usually within two seconds. Make sure your website loads quickly. Use a tool like Google Pagespeed Insights to check how fast your website loads and find ways to make it faster.

What should you do if your website takes too long to load? If your website doesn’t load fast, follow Google’s advice to make it load quicker. These ideas might include making big picture files smaller or cutting down on how many times a website redirects. If you have a long list of things to do to make your website load faster, you can pay for page speed services to help you with that.

What should you do if your website loads fast? If your website loads quickly, check if there are any more ways to make it load even faster. Look for any additional improvements you can make to improve the speed of your site.

Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices

Along with making your website load quickly, it’s important to check if it works well on mobile devices when doing an SEO audit for your online store. With more people using mobile devices, it’s important to make sure your website works well on tablets and smartphones.

If users don’t have a good time using your website on their phone, they will leave and it will make your website rank lower on search engines. Furthermore, Google looks at how mobile-friendly your website is when deciding where to rank it. You can check if your website works well on mobile by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

What should you do if your website doesn’t work well on mobile phones? You should optimize it to work well on mobile phones by using responsive design. Responsive design makes your website able to change and fit on any device a person uses. Your website will look really good and work well on phones and computers.

What to do if your website works well on mobile phones? If your website already works well on mobile phones, you can move on to the next step of this ecommerce SEO checklist.

Make Sure Your Website is Secure

The final thing on your ecommerce SEO audit list is to make sure your website is secure.

If you have an online store, you need to make sure your website is safe. Your customers give their personal information to buy things from your company.

If your website is not safe, people won’t want to buy from you. In addition, Google likes websites that are secure because people feel safe when they visit those pages.

Check if your website is safe by entering the web address and look for a closed lock next to your name. If the lock is shut, it’s safe. Also, if your URL starts with “https” instead of “http”, it means your website is safe and protected.

What to do if your website is not safe? If your website is not safe, you can make it safe by buying an SSL certificate. This certificate will make sure that when users enter their personal information, such as credit card numbers, it is kept safe.
What to do if your website is safe? If your website is safe, you don’t have to worry. Just check when your SSL certificate ends so you can renew it on time.

4. Local SEO Audit

Local SEO helps more people near you find your business online. It can also help online stores, not just physical stores. Imagine your online store is in many different countries and has different languages for each place. You should use local optimization to give your clients useful information about their area.

An online store may also have physical offices, stores, showrooms, and deliver products to customers. If the customer sees that you are nearby or have good offers, they will probably pick you over your competition.

After the changes in the Pigeon and Possum algorithms, where a business is located became an important factor for how it ranks. Shortly after that, being close to the user became important in local search results. Things to look for in a local SEO audit:

• Ensure that the website has translated content in different languages for each local version
• The website should not have the same content in different versions
• Make a new one or update your Google Business Profile
• Check that the Name, Address, and Phone number on your website’s main page is the same as the information in your company profile
• Ensure that your location is included in important parts of your website
• See if you are already using geographic markup or add it to your website

5. User Experience SEO Audit

A website user experience SEO audit is a thorough check-up of how easy it is to use, how well it works, and what kind of impact it has on the people who visit it. Bad user experience means that even people who want to buy from you might not end up purchasing because.

For example, if your website doesn’t have their preferred payment method or it’s not clear where to click to make a purchase, they might end up leaving your site for a better one. A UX SEO checklist has important things to look at:

• Ease of Navigation
• Page Accessibility
• Links and Buttons Operation
• Responsiveness of the Site
• Page Loading Speed
• Core Web Vitals

When you’re optimizing a website for online shopping, try to make these measures better so that your visitors have the best experience. Google only shows users the best results for their search by looking at the quality of the content and how people interact with it.

6. Brand and Trustworthiness Audit

The brand and its trustworthiness are important in online shopping, since the image your company has amongst your current customers and also potential customers will define your growth. So, it’s important to check them when doing an ecommerce SEO audit. While performing this audit you have to think about the following things:

• Begin tracking how your brand name shows up in search results when people look for it. It’s important to see what kind of message your brand sends to your customers. You can also check how many times people look for your brand
• Use Google Alerts to keep track of when people talk about your brand. Examine where and when people talk about your brand. This might help you understand how to make your website and communication better
• Check if the “About Us” info on your website, prices, delivery terms, and anything else your customers care about are correct and important. These help to create trust between you and your customers

Action Plan After an Ecommerce SEO Audit

Consolidate Audit Results

The consolidation of audit findings is the most important step where the information gathered from the ecommerce SEO audit is combined to create a complete strategy. This means organizing problems, deciding which ones are most important, and coming up with practical suggestions for what to do about them.

By bringing all this information together in one place, businesses can easily see what they need to do to fix any technical, content, or optimization problems. This is important in making your online store better. You want to improve how easily people can find you online, make the website better for customers, and make sure you do well in the online market.

Understand Current SEO Status

Understanding the current status of your SEO involves putting together what you learned from examining your online store through an SEO audit. Businesses organize and rank what they find out to get a clear picture of how well their website is doing.

This complete understanding includes technical, content, and competitive parts, which helps make a specific plan. It helps businesses track how well they are doing and fix any problems they find. After understanding how well the website is doing with search engines, you work to make it better by improving how it shows up in search results. This helps make sure the website is still competitive and keeps up with changes in online trends.

Create an Action Plan

Creating a plan that can be put into action after looking at all the audit findings is very important. This means taking the problems you have found and creating a plan with clear steps to solve them. Fixing problems with technology, improving the information, and making sure the right words are used are very important parts.

The plan should outline who is responsible for what, when things should be done, and how you will measure if you are doing a good job. Businesses make sure to put their SEO ideas into action in a focused and effective way. A plan that can be put into action will help make things easier and show the way to improve the ecommerce website’s visibility on search engines and make it better for users. This will help the website grow and compete better online.

Enhance SEO Performance

Improving SEO results after reviewing the audit findings involves using a specific plan based on what you have learned. This involves fixing technical problems, improving things on the web page, and making the content better based on important suggestions. Having a well-organized plan helps search engines and people find things easily, which makes your search rankings better.

Consistently keeping track of important measurements and adjusting plans based on changing trends ensures a lasting increase in natural website visitors. By listening and taking action on audit feedback, businesses can improve their website’s SEO and stand out online.

Monitor Your Performance

It’s really important to keep an eye on the performance after the action plan is implemented. This is so that you can make sure it’s working like it’s supposed to. Businesses must keep track of tasks, check how well they are doing, and see if any changes they make are helping. Continuous monitoring on all metrics of the performance is necessary.

This helps you make changes as soon as you need to, so that your plan stays in line with the latest SEO changes. Businesses can change their plans by watching how they rank in search engines, how many people visit their website, and how engaged users are. This step-by-step method makes the ecommerce site faster and helps it to keep getting better, so it can stay ahead in search engine rankings.

How Often Should an Ecommerce SEO Audit be Performed?

How often you need to do an SEO audit for your online store can depend on different things:

• The current condition of your website’s SEO. If your website is already not working well, it needs to be checked more often
• Size of your website. A bigger website may need to be checked more often
• The amount of competition in your specific area of business. If other businesses make their websites better and work on being found on search engines, you should do the same to stay competitive
• If you get a lot of visitors from search engines, or if you want to increase that, check your website for SEO issues regularly

A big online store with lots of product pages and changing content usually needs to be checked every month to find and fix any problems that come up. A small local business may only need to do it every quarter. We suggest auditing your ecommerce website’s SEO every time:

• You change how your website looks and works
• You notice a big decrease in organic traffic to your site
• Ranking algorithms are changed or new ones are added

Wrapping Up

Your ecommerce SEO audit will help you review your current strategy and find ways to make it better. This careful audit of a website’s SEO makes sure it matches the latest search engine rules and what users want. By carefully studying the technical details, analyzing the content, and learning from competitors, businesses can find ways to improve their visibility and get more people to visit their site without paying for ads.

The thorough look at an ecommerce website’s SEO goes beyond just ranking well on search engines. It also focuses on making the website better for users, fixing any technical problems, and increasing the number of people who make purchases. Businesses can track how well their SEO strategies are working by setting goals, using data, and comparing results over time.

Basically, an ecommerce SEO audit is not just a review, it is a plan that helps businesses succeed online in the competitive ecommerce world. It helps businesses improve their website, stay ahead of competitors, and meet the high standards of search engines and users. Use the above ecommerce SEO checklist to make your website better and succeed online. 

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