Unlike traditional business websites, eCommerce websites face a unique set of challenges when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). While a standard SEO audit is beneficial, it’s essential to use an eCommerce SEO audit checklist to ensure you don’t miss any industry-specific details.
eCommerce sites often have extensive product catalogs with hundreds or even thousands of individual pages. This generally involves duplicate content and dynamic URLs that change based on filters, categories, or a user’s shopping cart. These factors, among others, can make it harder for search engines to identify the most authoritative pages and properly index and rank the content.
Regular SEO audits can prevent technical and other issues from negatively impacting your site visibility in search engine results. In this guide, we provide a comprehensive eCommerce SEO audit checklist so your site can become a leading name on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Why You Should Perform an eCommerce Website SEO Audit
Online visibility is a non-negotiable for eCommerce success. But because algorithms and consumer trends are constantly evolving, your marketing strategies need to adapt accordingly to stay ahead of the competition.
An eCommerce SEO audit examines all the elements that impact your website’s visibility and ranking in SERPs. It enables you to identify areas for improvement and address technical issues. An audit can also optimize your content to drive qualified traffic and boost brand authority.
Performing SEO audits regularly ensures your website remains compliant and competitive. For instance, small, standard websites should conduct a full audit at least once a year, with more frequent check-ins every three to six months. Highly competitive and dynamic industries (such as eCommerce) will want to run audits monthly or even weekly to stay competitive and consistently rank well. Also, perform an audit if you notice a significant decline in your organic website traffic or if there are changes to ranking algorithms.
SEO checkups are like cleaning your garage. You don’t have to do it every day, but things start to pile up if you avoid it too long. SEO may take a few months initially to fully take effect and yield results. So, the longer you wait to implement an effective eCommerce SEO audit checklist, the more time competitors have to build ranking credibility with search engines.
The Complete eCommerce SEO Audit Checklist
eCommerce websites have many moving parts with ever-evolving product pages, category setups, local and global elements, and “recommended product” widgets. These complexities can make audits overwhelming and arising issues easy to overlook.
This eCommerce SEO audit checklist covers five key areas to review for a thorough assessment. By doing so, you can ensure consistent visibility and performance for your online store.
1. Technical SEO Audit
This examines the foundational elements and underlying technical infrastructure of your eCommerce website. A technical audit evaluates the following:
- Do you have a page speed load time of less than 2.5 seconds? (You can use Google’s PageSpeed tool to assess this).
- Are site pages and functions optimized for mobile viewing and transactions?
- Are URL structures clean and logical?
- Does your site have a valid XML sitemap that updates automatically?
- Do you have a properly configured robots.txt file? This blocks irrelevant sections of your website so your crawl budget is allocated to the important pages. Pay special attention to parameter rules and pagination to ensure critical pages aren’t blocked.
- Are redirects pointing to the correct URLs? Avoid redirection loops (redirecting crawlers to each other), long redirect chains, and broken links.
- Use HTTPS to secure the connection between the user’s browser and your website’s server.
2. On-Page SEO Audit
No eCommerce SEO audit checklist would be complete without on-page SEO checks. Use these to evaluate and optimize individual product, category, blog, and other pages to draw relevant traffic.
- Do your product and category page titles, meta descriptions, and header tags contain target keywords?
- Do titles and meta descriptions meet the character length requirements?
- Are product descriptions unique? Do they feature detailed and unambiguous information with relevant keywords?
- Have you optimized images with both alt text and captions?
Also, ensure consistent use of schema markup across your website to structure data hierarchy and highlight key snippets. This type of structured data gives search engines additional context to better understand elements like prices and reviews.
3. Off-Page SEO Audit
Off-page SEO entails online activities outside your website, such as external links, social media engagement, brand mentions, and reputation. Essentially, positive external engagement signals both brand authority and trustworthiness to search engines.
- Analyze the quantity, quality, and relevance of backlinks. Take down any broken links. Note that a large number of links from untrustworthy or questionable sites can negatively affect your ranking.
- Examine your social media presence and activity. Are your social media pages linked or integrated with your site?
- Do you have social sharing options on product pages?
- Is branding consistent between your website and social channels?
- Is your Google Business profile complete and optimized with relevant keywords and information?
- Ensure your NAP (name, address, phone number) information is consistent and accurate across online directories, review sites, and other local listings.
- Engage with customers on review platforms. Also, promptly respond to feedback and actively collect five-star reviews and testimonials.
4. Content Audit for eCommerce SEO
While our eCommerce SEO audit checklist already mentions content keyword optimization, this section focuses more on content quality and handling poor-performing content.
Poor-performing content includes outdated product descriptions and posts but also thin pages or those with low-value content. They typically have low user engagement, few sessions, impressions, and page views.
The following steps can boost your content value:
- Provide thorough and detailed product descriptions.
- Provide blog posts with extensive, informative, and educational content.
- Integrate relevant internal links.
- Eliminate or update outdated or irrelevant existing content.
- Prevent search engines from crawling outdated pages until you update them.
- Encourage customers to leave product reviews on site.
5. User Experience and Conversion Rate Optimization
This evaluates the user-facing aspects of your eCommerce website. Specifically, it aims to identify opportunities to improve the customer journey and ease of use.
- Is site navigation straightforward with clear categories and product labels?
- Are page layouts, information, and features displayed in an organized and easy-to-navigate way?
- Do you feature related product suggestions and a one-click checkout to enhance user experience (UX)?
- Do you provide clear calls to action? • Where are customers dropping off during the purchase journey and why?
- How can you simplify the checkout process and reduce the actions customers must take to complete a purchase?
- Are there any mismatched expectations when coming from an ad?
Why an Expert-Led eCommerce SEO Audit Is Worth the Investment
An SEO audit takes significant time and expertise, but the long-term payoff is well worth the investment. By partnering with an eCommerce SEO expert, you can ensure your website stays compliant, adaptable, and positioned for sustainable growth in an ever-evolving digital landscape.
Unleashed Technologies is a leading provider of digital strategy, custom software, and web development services. Our expertise in eCommerce enables us to pick up often-missed details, making small changes for big results.
We regularly monitor and analyze key metrics, such as traffic, conversion rates, sales, and user engagement. With these insights, we continuously adapt and optimize your website to enhance its impact. Reach out today to boost your eCommerce success.
