How to carry out an ecommerce SEO audit

Getting your products seen and bought in the ecommerce sector relies heavily on search engine results page (SERP) visibility. Sometimes, though, your website is live and running yet the traffic isn’t rolling in, leaving you scratching your head as to why. As many ecommerce sites are quite complex, it means there are a variety of reasons you’re not finding an audience online.

Luckily, ecommerce SEO audits can help you to quickly identify any issues and resolve them fast – either doing the work yourself or bringing in an ecommerce SEO agency.

What is an ecommerce SEO audit?

An ecommerce SEO audit is an in-depth review of your online store’s structure, content and quality and how that impacts its performance in search engines.

It looks at technical, on-page and off-page factors, uncovering any issues with each area and highlighting what you must do to improve your website’s traffic flow.

The goal of an ecommerce audit is for to make the best of your SEO strategy, leading to greater SERP visibility and higher impressions, which will eventually lead to increased sales and boosted revenue.

Why are SEO audits important for ecommerce sites

SEO audits are important for a variety of reasons, many of which are about visibility. You are aiming to improve your SEO to make your products more likely to appear for the relevant search queries.

An ecommerce SEO audit is useful for:

1.      Revealing what’s holding your website back

SEO audits help to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of your website’s organic performance. It discovers problems like broken links, slow loading times, crawl errors, and your backlink profile, all of which you can build on.

2.      Matching your products and website with user queries

Audits reveal ways to match your product and category pages with user intent using keyword analysis, content evaluation, and journey mapping. Targeting relevant keywords, optimising content, and looking at how users become customers all contribute to website visibility.

3.      Improving user experience

The audit shows the best ways to streamline the user journey, enhancing the user experience and leading to more conversions. This often leads to more loyal customers who recognise and recommend your brand. It’s said that you can increase conversions by 200% with a well-crafted user interface.

4.      Competitor analysis

Ecommerce audits also reveal what competitors are doing well and how they’re making a splash in the SERPs, whether it’s through schema markups, strong post-sale services, or any other reason, it will show you what’s working. Competitor analysis also unveils gaps in your competitors’ market you can fill with unique selling points – or USPs.

5.      Keeping up with algorithm updates

Search engines update their algorithms frequently, but audits ensure your website aligns with the changes so that you retain your rankings and explore new potential areas to gain new visitors.

Factors of an ecommerce SEO Audit

An ecommerce audit will look at three main areas:

1. Technical factors: For an ecommerce’s site’s SEO to be technically sound, it needs to have a good Pagespeed and be mobile friendly, while issues around indexing, crawlability and structured data also need to be resolved. We’d also look at navigation hierarchy to make sure the key converting pages are high in the hierarchy.
2. On-page SEO factors: An ecommerce audit might look at your keyword rankings, research meta data, check the content quality across key pages, and whether there has been any content duplication.
3. Off-page SEO factors: Finally, an ecommerce SEO audit will check how many backlinks you have, as well as auditing your social media profiles, online reviews, and local SEO listings. It will also check that, if relevant, your products are able to be surfaced through Google’s own marketplace.

Read out more about technical SEO audits.

Technical factors

The technical factors an ecommerce SEO audit looks at include – but are not limited to:

Website speed

The faster and more responsive your website is, the lower your bounce rate will be. Google says that users will leave your site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. An audit can reveal whether images need to be compressed, product pages paginated, or server response times improved.

Mobile friendliness

A lot of traffic comes from mobile devices (70% as of 2024), so it’s vital to make your website mobile friendly. Users are impatient and won’t stick around if a site is taking too long to load. It’s reported that 74% of visitors will return to a site with a good mobile user interface.

Crawling & indexing

A website that’s not crawled and indexed simply won’t appear in search engines, so it’s vital to ensure your site is crawlable.

Structured data

Structured data is vital for ecommerce companies because it presents products in a digestible, convenient SERP structure – schema markups are a good example of this.

On-page factors

On-page factors refer to elements included in the structure and copy of your website, such as:

Title tags & meta descriptions

Title tags and meta descriptions affect how your pages show up in Google. The meta description of a product page for shoes saying, “Discover high-quality, affordable XYZ brand trainers today”, will appear in the SERPs like this, affecting how your brand is represented.

Keyword research

Keywords identify what users (your target market) are searching for, informing how your products are packaged and sold in your store. An audit reveals what keywords you’re ranking for while uncovering new ones – essentially telling you which terms to use to gain higher traffic.

Content quality

If you’re producing informational content (guides, blogs, etc) as big ecommerce brands like Shopify do, then it’s recommended to ensure it adheres to Google’s E.E.A.T standards (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness). E.E.A.T factors don’t directly affect rankings, but implementing these guidelines can only help.

Off-page factors

Off-page SEO refers to factors that improve your website’s SERP ranking without making changes to your website’s content.

Backlink profile

Backlinks are when external websites link to your website. Audits examine the quality of backlinks and how to improve it, for example, it might reveal toxic links, which can harm your authority scores, affecting your organic ranking. This presents a solution, in this case using Google’s Disavow tool to remove those links.

Social media

Ecommerce audit unveils the health of your social media channels, and the extent to which it’s helping you sell products, showing you the sales process from social media impression to conversion.

Online reviews

Online reviews directly affect your rankings, for good reasons or bad ones. While SEO audits can’t improve or manipulate reviews that are already live, your optimisation of user experience will contribute to getting good reviews in the future.

What tools do you need for an Ecommerce SEO audit checklist?

There are many subscription-based and free tools out there that can be used for Ecommerce audits, but at Edge45, we’ve found the following indispensable:

1.      Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog crawls websites to identify various SEO issues such as broken links, duplicate content, and indexing snags. It also analyses metadata, page structures, and image data, while providing custom reports, making it a useful long-term tool.

2.      SEMRush

SEMRush provides analysis of URLs, domains, and keywords. It can also track organic rankings and analyse traffic sources, informing you all about your website’s performance with metric-based explanations.

3.      Python

Python is a programming language that automates SEO tasks. It can write meta descriptions in bulk, group keywords into topic clusters, and automate redirect maps, simplifying complex workflows.

4.      Little Warden

Little Warden allows you to monitor important SEO details like HTTPS status, website downtime, and domain expiration across multiple websites at once.

5.      Ahrefs

Ahrefs performs similar functions to SEMrush, such as keyword research, site audits, and rank tracking, but it excels at activities like backlink analysis.

6.      Lumar

Lumar is another tool that crawls websites, unearthing SEO issues. It streamlines the process by providing custom alerts, automated testing, and plain-as-day reporting.

7.      Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is good for organising data; it can analyse massive datasets, put them into charts and graphs, and make them easier to categorise and process.

Don’t know where to begin? Hire SEO experts to do a full SEO audit for you.

Other tools for a streamlined ecommerce SEO audit

Technical tools can help streamline the process, including:

1. txt files

Robots.txt files are useful for the crawling and indexing process as it tells programs like Screaming Frog and Lumar which pages to prioritise and which to avoid, saving crawl budget and ultimately, time.

2. Sitemaps

Sitemaps (usually XML sitemaps) provide search engines with information about assets like webpages on your website, telling Google to prioritise the pages listed there when it crawls them, saving crawl budget.

Learn more about sitemaps.

Craft an ecommerce SEO audit to your goals

An ecommerce SEO audit can up your visibility, boost a brand awareness, and drive quicker, more seamless sales. It’s important to know your goals before starting the audit process., and to ask yourself, does the fix help you hit those goals? A refined approach will help you to be efficient and precise as you assess your analytics and identify technical snags.

Contact us if you want a committed team of technical experts to do your audit for you. Using a 200-point audit, we will evaluate all technical aspects of your website that could impact its ranking ability and drive organic traffic.