Mastering E-commerce SEO: Your Ultimate Audit Checklist

The Basics of E-commerce SEO

The majority of buyers head to Google when they want to buy something. No wonder, Google owns the global search engine market with a huge 90% share.

Additionally, 53% of total global website traffic is organic, as online buyers prioritize organic results. So, as an e-commerce business, making it to the first page of SERPs is important to drive organic traffic to your site. You cannot achieve this without an effective SEO strategy.

E-Commerce SEO and its Significance

A recent study shows that top organic search results have a 79% click-through rate. This shows the significance of SEO for online stores.

E-commerce SEO is a strategy to optimize your site, improve its ranking, and get leads and conversions. You need to consider Google’s guidelines, analyze buyers’ intent, and implement e-commerce SEO best practices.

Key SEO Elements for Online Stores

Let’s discuss the main SEO elements that generate traffic, and boost brand awareness, and sales for your online store.

1. Technical SEO

Technical SEO makes it easier for search engine bots to crawl and index your E-commerce site. Besides, it also deals with other technical aspects and ensures your site is

• Mobile-friendly and secured (with HTTPS protocol and SSL certificate)
• Boasts a fast page loading speed
• Uses search engine-friendly tech and has well-structured content

2. Keyword Search and Content

As an online store, you should know which search phrases your target audience uses when buying a product. Choose keywords with a good ratio between competition and search volume. Next, create the most relevant content that answers your buyers’ questions.

3. On-site SEO

You need to optimize the on-page elements of your e-commerce site, including content and HTML, so search engines can crawl, index, and rank your page. On-site SEO includes:

• Title tags and meta descriptions for each page
• Simple, descriptive URLs
• Alt tags for images
• Good user experience
• Relevant keywords
• Adding strong calls to action (CTAs)

4. Off-site SEO

Off-site SEO includes external activities, including link building, which improves your online visibility. Having high-quality backlinks helps build authority and drive traffic.

The Role of E-Commerce SEO Audits in Maintaining Website Health

So, you have built your online store, created enticing descriptions, and added the best images. However, if you want your page to reach its peak, your SEO game needs to be strong. That’s where SEO audits for online stores can help you.

We understand that e-commerce websites keep updating product pages and navigational elements. Moreover, e-commerce sites have complex architecture.

An e-commerce website audit

• Gathers information about your site’s current status
• Identifies areas of improvement, and 
• Highlights issues before they impact your rankings

Using these insights from a professional SEO audit services company, you can optimize your site for SERPs, leading to higher rankings, increased traffic, and improved conversion rates.

Key Components of an E-commerce SEO Audit

You need to make sure all elements of your site, including meta tags, descriptions, URLs, and product pages, are optimized for SEO.

An e-commerce SEO audit analyzes your site’s performance based on different ranking factors. The report gives an actionable checklist and helps you take your business to the next level.

While an e-commerce SEO audit checklist includes many elements (which we will discuss in the later section), let’s focus on the key components.

Title Tag Optimization

The metadata of your site, i.e., your title tags and meta descriptions, tell search engines about the content of your pages. These tags are the first thing that appear in search results so it’s important to evaluate them. Make sure your tags are catchy enough to compel prospects to click on your listing.

You can optimize title tags and improve click-through rates (CTRs) by following these simple tips.

• Keep it between 50-60 characters (check your title length on this title page preview tool from Moz)
• Add the target keyword in your title tag
• Be descriptive
• Create unique titles for each page, including the home page, product, and category pages
• Use the product name as the title for the product page

Meta Description Best Practices

The meta description appears under the title and briefly summarizes your page’s content. You need to have compelling descriptions to improve your CTR.

Make sure your meta descriptions are:

• Within the recommended length (160 characters with spaces)
• Keyword rich and concise with a clear CTA (such as click here to buy)
• Aligning with the page content (home/category/product)

Just like the title tags, each page should also have a unique meta description. You can use product descriptions as meta descriptions for product pages. However, using the same description for multiple products may lead to content duplication.

In this case, it is best to start writing unique descriptions for your top-selling products and the pages with the highest organic traffic. You can continue with the remaining pages according to the time and resources available.

URL Structure Optimization

E-commerce websites have a complex site structure making it difficult to ensure they are crawlable and indexable. Additionally, trying to ensure a seamless navigation and shopping experience across pages may also affect your SEO efforts if you don’t manage it properly.

For instance, if your URLs are not indexed, organized, or canonicalized, they will impact site navigation as well as SEO.

So, make sure your site has a simple URL structure, as it enhances user experience. Your URLs should also be readable. This will make it easier to share your products on other platforms and social media. You can also check Google’s guidelines to improve your URL structure.

Product Page Optimization

Many e-commerce websites focus on home and category pages but forget to optimize product pages. Their products, even if they have the best features, fail to make it to the first page of the SERPs. Are you making the same mistake? Well, if you want to get organic traffic and improved visibility, optimize your product pages for search engine bots and users.

When optimizing product pages for SEO ensure to group items in categories. Also, each page should have unique content (up to 250 words) highlighting the key features of your product to improve quality and increase keyword saturation.

Organize Category and Product Pages

Experts analyze category and product pages to highlight areas of improvement. During the SEO audit, they check:

• Metadata to ensure they have target keywords
• Structure of pages to ensure they are easy to crawl

Remember that well-organized categories make it easier for visitors to find their desired product. Yes, writing unique content for hundreds of product pages is difficult but you can use the same trick we shared for meta descriptions.

Start with the top-selling products followed by pages that drive the highest organic traffic. You can also use canonical tags to consolidate URLs of duplicate product pages.

Optimize Product Descriptions

These should be concise, keyword-rich, and compelling. You can add high-quality images, product videos, and CTAs (such as “add to cart”) to improve your descriptions.

Add Reviews

Reviews help shoppers compare different products and make an educated decision. Adding reviews to your site also helps build trust and increase conversion rates. So, encourage customers to leave reviews on your site when they buy your product.

Add Out-of-stock Notification

Add a note to keep your customers updated if some of your products or product categories are out of stock. You can also add links to related products or redirect the page to a similar product if you don’t plan to restock an item.

Image Optimization

Image optimization in e-commerce SEO is one aspect that some businesses overlook. Product images can drive sales and improve your online search visibility.

Here are a few tips to get you started.

• Use small but high-quality images 
• Use alt tags for images; keep them descriptive
• Add keywords in alt tags and file names
• Don’t overcrowd your page with images

Now that you know the basics, let’s move on to the main part.

Best Tools for Ecommerce SEO Audits

Step-by-Step E-commerce SEO Audit Checklist

Now that you’ve all the tools, let the audit begin. We have divided the process into three parts – Technical SEO, on-site SEO, and off-site SEO.

Technical SEO focuses on your site’s structure, coding, and other aspects that impact its performance. The list includes:

1. Analyze Your E-Commerce Site for robots.txt and XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap shows the overall structure of your site listing all URLs. Search engine bots use it as a reference to find all pages to crawl.

Robots.txt is a file that lets search engine bots know what parts or pages of your site they can crawl and index. Make sure your active robots.txt file is not blocking site crawlers from accessing a page that you want indexed.

If your site doesn’t have an XML sitemap or robots.txt file, you can create them and submit them to Google using the Google Search Console.

2. Analyze Indexability and Crawlability

When analyzing indexability, ensure that Google can find and access all pages of your website and they are not blocked by robots.txt. Go to Google Search Console’s “Coverage” tab to check this. Moreover, check if Bing is indexing all your website pages in the Bing Webmaster Tools.

Next, you need to find out if Google can crawl your page. Technical issues cause search engine bots to leave your page, affecting its ranking ability. So, ensure your site is well-developed and has properly organized content and well-written code.

3. Check Crawl Stats

Go to Google Search Console > Crawl > Crawl Stats to find the number of pages of your website that Google has crawled in the last three months.

If the number of pages doesn’t increase or you see a decline in the pages being crawled, find the root cause. Google Crawl Error report highlights the issues preventing the bot from crawling your site in the last 90 days.

4. Track Your Site’s Indexation Rate

Indexation rate is the percentage of your site’s pages the search engine is indexing. To track this metric, go to Google Search Console > Coverage > Indexation.

If you notice a downward trend even when you’re publishing content regularly, you may need to dig deeper and examine the issue. Remember, indexation issues affect your pages’ visibility, PageRank, and ability to rank for keywords.

5. Check Your Site’s Security

It’s important to ensure your site uses HTTPS to encrypt data between a user’s browser and your website. HTTPS is one of the ranking signals and Google will mark your page as “Not Secure” if it’s not upgraded.

You can upgrade your site’s security by installing an SSL certificate on your server. Hence, visitors to your site can see an HTTPS in the page URL with a lock icon.

6. Check for Duplicate Content and Add Canonical Tags

As an E-commerce website, you may have multiple listings with similar or same content, such as product descriptions and user guides. This can confuse search engine bots preventing them from indexing the right page.

The simple solution is to add canonical tags and let the bots know which page to index. Sometimes, category pages may also appear as duplicate content, so review each page to ensure the hierarchy is correct. Moreover, you can either delete duplicate content or redirect to another page.

7. Analyze Site Structure

Your site structure shows the organization and interconnection of pages on your website. Make sure your site has:

• A simple URL structure
• Well-defined categories for different products/content
• Smooth navigation setup
• Internal linking strategy to improve indexability
• Breadcrumbs (help visitors know where they’re on your site and let them easily navigate back to the homepage or other high-level pages)
• A sitemap listing all the existing pages of your site (check #1)

A well-structured site with easy navigation improves your search visibility, ensures proper page crawling, and prevents cannibalization issues.

8. Find Broken Links (internal)

A link appears as broken when the page it’s directed to gets deleted or moved. Broken links impact the user experience leading to higher bounce rates and lower conversions. You can use Ahrefs or Screaming Frog’s broken links checker to find these links and then redirect or update them.

9. Check Page Speed

Checking page speed is an important step of SEO audit for online stores. So, find out how long your web pages take to load when someone lands on your site. The faster the speed, the better for your rankings in SERPs. You can improve page speed by:

• Optimizing images and reducing their size
• Compressing the files on your site
• Using a content delivery network (CDN)
• Caching your pages

10. Check Mobile Friendliness

More than 60% of searchers use mobile devices when looking for a product or service. So, make sure your site has a mobile-friendly theme. Keep your site’s content, coding, and images lightweight.

Additionally, size images for low-resolution screens and use fonts that are easy to read on different devices. You can use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to check the mobile responsiveness of your site.

After taking care of the technical aspects, let’s move on to on-site SEO.

11. Keyword Search for Your E-Commerce Website

Start with finding the right keywords for your website pages, products, blogs, etc. Determine the search volume, keyword difficulty, and competition when choosing the keywords.

Once you have the targeted phrases, add them to your page title, meta descriptions, H1 tags, image alt tags, and product tags and categories.

12. Check Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Besides adding keywords, you also need to ensure that your title tags and meta descriptions are SEO-friendly. Keep your metadata descriptive, concise, and relevant to users’ queries and page content.

13. Evaluate Heading Tags

The next step is to evaluate heading tags. Every page of your website should have an H1 or main header tag. Further, break each page into sections using subhead tags (H2, H3, H4, and so on) to make it easy for search engines to scan it.

Adding heading tags will give an outline of the page so Google can understand the relevance of your content. Update the headers if they’re not relevant to target keywords.

14. Find Content Gaps

Review your content strategy and ensure it includes the keywords you want to rank for and caters to your target audience. If you find content gaps, create engaging, high-quality content to improve your SERP ranking.

15. Optimize Existing Content

Don’t forget to update or expand the existing content. You can do so by adding relevant, new information to old blog posts, creating new product or category pages, and adding new posts on trending topics.

16. Check Internal Linking

Internal links connect one page of your website to another and help search engines understand its structure. Besides, internal linking helps improve the rankings of individual pages on your site by spreading link equity.

Make sure all internal links are working and relevant; also, use the right anchor text for linking another page or product.

It’s time to check the external factors impacting your site’s visibility and ranking. Off-site SEO focuses on analyzing your backlinks and checking your social profiles.

17. Evaluate Backlinks

Having backlinks from trustworthy external domains helps increase your site’s authority and boost its ranking. During an E-commerce SEO audit, review all backlinks pointing to your web pages using a backlink checker tool.

If a website is linking to a broken or obsolete URL, redirect it to an equivalent page. Moreover, ensure you don’t have backlinks from spammy or less credible sites. You can diversify your backlink profile by writing guest posts and asking industry experts to check your content.

Conclusion

Your E-commerce SEO audit checklist completes here. Just make sure to tick all the boxes and use the right tools for conducting the audit. Regularly analyzing your E-commerce site will help identify areas of improvement, improve your SEO strategy, and increase conversion rates.

Don’t forget that your website cannot gain visibility in search results without optimization. While you have the ultimate checklist, if you lack technical expertise or find the process overwhelming, let our expert SEO auditors help you!