If you run an online store, regular eCommerce SEO audits are a must.
Size doesn’t matter, every store benefits from a strong SEO strategy backed by a thorough ecommerce SEO audit.
What is an eCommerce SEO Audit?
An eCommerce SEO audit is like taking your car to the mechanic to be checked. It’s an SEO audit checklist consisting of to-do items to improve the SEO and overall performance of your online store.
It may throw up issues that you didn’t realise you had. You may discover that you have missing meta descriptions, inaccurate or misconfigured settings, missing image tags, and much more.
These problems, while not seeming bad, can impact your website's search performance. Therefore, you can audit your website and then fix the problems to ensure your website has the highest chance of ranking.
Why is an eCommerce SEO Audit Important?
There are a couple of scenarios where these types of issues could easily be overlooked. That’s why you need to regularly check them.
You may be in a rush to get your store set up. There are so many things to remember (especially if you’re doing it for the first time). Therefore, it’s natural to forget some search ranking factors for eCommerce.
For example, you could have a missing meta description, missing keyword, or garbled URL. And though appearing minor, it could be silently choking your business.
A missing meta description or keyword will result in you not being found by the customers wanting to buy your product. Even something like a poor URL with irrelevant or no keywords will result in the page ranking in an undesirable search position.
Therefore, you would be doing yourself an enormous favour by scheduling a regular eCommerce SEO audit for your site every 3 to 6 months. Also, if you don’t have the time or inclination to do it, you could just farm it out to someone else.
How to Audit an eCommerce Website (16 Steps)
Although you could get someone else to audit your eCommerce website, it makes sense for you to learn how to do it yourself. Knowing how your site works on a deeper technical level is an invaluable skill to have.
1. Set Up Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a must for all websites. It’s a ‘command centre’ for all search engine-related information and site problems.
If you haven’t already set it up, do so now. You’ll need it for the next step in this list.
2. Is Your XML Sitemap Set Up?
When Google crawlers arrive on your site, they’ll be looking for an XML sitemap. This is a constantly updated list of your pages, along with their links.
You can make one by going to one of many XML generators. Put it in the root folder of your site and put the direct link to your XML sitemap in Google Search Console.
Reference: XML Sitemap Example
This will increase the crawlability of your website or, in other words, make it more seamless to understand your website layouts and its content.
If you haven’t got an XML sitemap set up, this alone could improve your online visibility.
3. Set Up & Configure Your Robots.txt File
Not all pages need to be indexed in Google, such as site admin pages, site search URL strings and any membership area.
Blocking is done using the robots.txt file. Make a text file and add the following:
4. Check All Pages
Now, make a list of all your pages and start testing them one by one.
Check that none return a 404 page not found error. If so, mark it as a 410 Content Deleted. If pages are outdated or no longer needed, make a 301 redirect to the new page.
Just remember that if the webpage has traffic and backlinks, it’ll have some level of authority. When you 301 redirect this page to a new page, the PageRank will flow to the new page.
Also, if you have the budget, you can use a tool like Screaming Frog. It’ll then tell the status code of each of your web pages automatically.
5. Canonical Tags
If you have multiple pages for the same product, Google will get confused about which page is the ‘official’ page for that product. This is called the “canonical” page.
In the page setup, ensure you have the canonical tag with the correct URL.
6. Paginating Your Site
It’s possible to have an ‘endless scroll’ on your online store, but that doesn’t help your SEO. It’s much better to have page one, page two, etc. That way, search engines can find things quicker and more efficiently.
If you use WordPress, you can easily add pagination. Code can easily be added if not.
7. Optimising Your Navigation Menus
When setting up your menus at the top or bottom of the page, it’s tempting to put the kitchen sink in there. However, too many options ruin the user experience, and it’s very confusing for search engines.
Reference: Optimised Site Menu
Have only your main categories in the main menu, with a few sub-categories.
8. Correctly Configure International Pages
If you’re catering to an international audience, you may have your pages translated into different languages. Is someone from Germany seeing the German page? Is someone from Spain seeing the Spanish version? Etc.
Serving the wrong page language will turn people away. Make sure you have the “hreflang=”X”” tag on your links. X is the language abbreviation. EN is English. You can get the rest here.
9. Get Obsessive About Page Speed
Part of Google’s mobile-first indexing criteria is page speed. The faster each page loads, the higher (theoretically) you go in search results.
You can achieve this by optimising images to make them load faster and by removing all unnecessary elements from the page (especially social media widgets).
10. Checking metadata
Go through each page and see if the meta title and meta description have been filled out and optimised. This is what you would see on Google search results.
Reference: Metadata on SERPs
Make sure the title has the name of your product. The meta description should have an image of the item attached, as well as a concise description.
11. Removing or rewriting duplicate content
Google doesn’t like duplicate content (neither will your visitors). So, the next step is to review all product descriptions and other texts and make sure nothing is duplicated.
There are plenty of tools you can use. Siteliner is probably the best. It’s also affordable and incredibly easy to use.
Alongside this, read up on SEO copywriting and write concise, unique texts for each page. Also, make sure you write enough to avoid the ‘thin content’ penalty.
12. Remove Broken Links
Broken links also impact your Google position, as well as provide a bad impression on visitors who can’t find what they’re looking for.
You can manually go through each page (which is long and tedious). Or you can use a broken link checker.
Reference: Example Dr. Link Check Report
13. Use The Right Keywords
Your eCommerce store is never going to be found if you don’t use the keywords used by your potential customers on Google. If someone is looking for ‘black shoes’ and you only say ‘shoes’, they could click right past you.
The secret to SEO optimisation for online stores is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes – understand what keywords they will enter into Google to find your page.
14. Add Schema Markup
Schema markup is a way of organising data in a structured way which search engines can easily understand.
This schema or structured data can then be seen in the SERP results—for example, pricing, reviews, stock levels, images, etc.
Reference: Product Schema
There are loads of different types of schema you can select from. You can see all the common types here.
15. Check Your Backlinks
Backlinks are good. Backlinks build your ‘domain authority’ and show Google that your site is worth ranking higher. But backlinks can also be bad.
Toxic backlinks can be from places like spam sites, empty domains with only ad banners, malware-infected websites, and more.
Since the owners of these sites will likely not respond to link removals, you should use Google’s disavow tool in Search Console.
16. Is Your HTTPS Certificate Working?
If someone enters personal data and credit card details into your site, you will need an HTTPS certificate to stop hackers from stealing that data. Google also loves HTTPS sites and will delist any which don’t have one.
Your web hosting provider will give you one, or you can get one through Let’s Encrypt.
17. Are You Using AI?
You may think you’re saving time using AI to write product descriptions, but Google heavily frowns upon it. It’s also obvious to customers who would perhaps not take you seriously as a result.
By all means, use AI to make the first draft, but then rewrite it to make it sound authentic.
18. Are You Collecting Customer Reviews?
Finally, the difference between a sale and no sale will likely come down to customer reviews (or the lack of them.) So get an automated system in place to ask for reviews when a purchase has been made and the item delivered.
Using review sites like TrustPilot and TrustIndex enables you to set up automated review requests.
Final Word
Though this looks like an advanced SEO technique for eCommerce, it’s much simpler than you may think. The first time usually takes the longest, and any time after that, it’s smooth sailing.
Just be sure to focus on all three areas of SEO: on-page, off-page, and technical SEO for eCommerce. By doing this, you’ll get a full picture of your website's performance.
You’ll also be surprised by the results you’ll receive for auditing and fixing your website.
Therefore, track and measure your eCommerce SEO performance before and after making changes, unless you’d rather fly blind.
Need a hand? Get in touch with StudioHawk for expert eCommerce SEO services.
