You can’t afford to take your foot off the pedal when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO), especially if running an online store. To maintain or exceed your current eCommerce rankings, you must adapt to the evolving nature of SEO.

You may need to adjust your strategy for many reasons, such as forward-thinking competitors, trending keywords, and dreaded Google updates. Also, one or more technical issues could impact your site’s SEO profile, such as page speed problems, broken linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages., or indexing issues.

Routine SEO audits are fundamental to an eCommerce site’s success in the SERPs. If you don’t analyse, optimise, and update your online store when necessary, you run the risk of it shooting down the SERPs or disappearing altogether.

Don’t allow your competition to take the lead. Read this ultimate eCommerce SEO audit guide for better rankings.

What Does an eCommerce SEO Audit Include?

An eCommerce SEO audit will pinpoint the gaps stopping your online store from reaching its visibility potential online.

Our SEO agency can analyse every aspect of your website to identify potential problems and quick wins, helping to boost your rankings as soon as possible.

For instance, we’ll review your site’s technical SEO, such as its mobile-friendliness, metadataPut simply, metadata is data that describes data. It’s a labelling system designed to help machines and humans understand what is contained within a packet of data., page speed, and even your website code.

Plus, we’ll evaluate your keyword densityKeyword density is a measure of how often a keyword or phrase is repeated on a given web page. and placement, analyse your backlink profile, and ensure your site is in line with Google’s Core Web Vitals.

What Makes an eCommerce Website Audit Unique?

An eCommerce SEO audit differs from traditional SEO audits. The latter often requires an SEO agency to analyse blog posts, web copy, videos, infographics, and other forms of content for SEO best practices and accurate keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business. placement.

However, an online store is different, as it will primarily feature product pages, category pages, and product descriptions. Some may have an active blog, but the site will mostly feature product and category pages.

For this reason, each page will need to be optimised for the correct target keywords. Also, it’s essential to identify the best-performing pages with high conversions. Also, other forms of online content will need to be audited, too, such as videos, infographics, etc.

Technical SEO factors are important for online stores, as page speed, mobile friendliness, and site security can impact the user experience and conversions.

For instance, visitors are likely to click away from your eCommerce site if a product page doesn’t load quickly.

Also, it is essential to identify and remove duplicate contentDuplicate content is content that appears more than once across a single website. Duplicate content can be a sign of poor resource management, low trust, or a lack of quality control., which is a common issue for an online store, as it may sell the same products in various colours or sizes, or it may have near identical pages that may confuse Google.

How an Audit Will Help Your Online Store

A regular eCommerce SEO audit will help your business in many ways. Even if it is ranking highly at the top of the SERPs right now, there is no guarantee it will continue to do so.

SEO evolves, and you must adapt to the changes to maintain or improve your online store’s rankings. It only takes one Google update to cause your pages to disappear from the SERPs in an instant, which will be detrimental to your business.

Also, an SEO audit could uncover opportunities to improve your online store. For example, you could conduct new keyword researchKeyword research helps websites unearth the best keywords to drive traffic and visibility. This research is supported by a number of powerful web-based tools, the best of which we’ve listed here. to find more relevant search terms for a poor-performing product page, which could boost its ranking and increase organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page..

An eCommerce audit could even identify opportunities to boost your site’s conversionA conversion is a desirable result on a website that leads to an action such as completing an order, filling out a form, or simply clicking on a link. rates. The likes of Google Analytics and Google Search Console are a great way to uncover your store’s highest-converting pages.

You can then analyse the pages to learn how to replicate the success across the site. For instance, you could introduce the same techniques or similar content to boost sales, such as using the same or a similar CTA.

Your eCommerce SEO Audit Checklist

A considerable amount of time, effort, and expertise is needed when performing an e-commerce site audit.

To help you absorb what’s involved in the process, we have split our e-commerce audit checklist into these three categories:

• On-page SEO
• Technical SEO
• Off-page SEO

On-Page SEO

An eCommerce SEO audit will analyse on-page SEO to identify if tweaks and changes are necessary on your website.

For instance, you might need to incorporate relevant keywords into your product descriptions, add keyword-rich alt text to images, or write more compelling meta descriptions.

Also, you might need to optimise the user experience, such as placing important product information in the top half of a web page.

Most reputable SEO agencies will analyse the following when conducting an e commerce audit:

• Keyword research and placement
• Metadata
• Product and category pages
• URL and site architecture
• Product images

Technical SEO

After assessing on-page SEO, our team will turn their attention toward technical SEO factors.

It is crucial to review behind-the-scenes issues that might be holding your online store back before performing necessary changes to make pages easier to crawl and index.

For example, a technical SEO eCommerce audit will help you:

• Identify and fix crawlability and indexing errors
• Improve page speed
• Prevent duplicate content by using canonical tags
• Bolster security with HTTPs and SSL certificates

Off-Page SEO

If you’re unfamiliar with off-page SEO, it is the marketing efforts you’ve made away from your website.

For instance, it will focus on:

• Link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. tactics
• Social media activity
• Guest posting
• Brand mentions
• Customer reviews

Conclusion

Online stores will have more unique challenges than traditional sites, as they have multiple product pages, category pages, and product descriptions.

In addition to running the risk of duplicate content, it’s likely a slow page speed, a high bounce rateBounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who visit only one page. A high bounce rate indicates that visitors are not satisfied with your website., or incorrect keyword research could prevent an eCommerce store from ranking highly in the SERPs and generating a large revenue.

If you would like to conduct thorough and regular eCommerce SEO audits, don’t hesitate to contact our friendly team at Click Intelligence. Our SEO service experts can help you identify mistakes holding your business back and quick wins that will transform your rankings as soon as possible.