5 Things Never to Miss in an SEO Audit for an eCommerce Website

Have you ever wondered about vital aspects in an SEO audit for an eCommerce website? Any eCommerce website or store that wants to sustain its growth and performance must implement Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies. Merchants and store owners may use SERPs to improve visibility, awareness, authority, traffic, and sales. 

However, most store owners neglect to optimize their eCommerce sites, which is a well-known fact. The majority of stores are under-optimized, allowing competitors to take advantage of the opportunity. Furthermore, those that devote their time and money to boosting their eCommerce websites may frequently overlook some of the most basic and essential SEO elements.

In this post, we’ll go through how to do a thorough SEO audit of your eCommerce site. Additionally, to make sure you never miss any of these important steps, you can get a comprehensive site audit from AberSEO agency

Crawling your Website

The initial and most essential step in any SEO audit is to do a comprehensive crawl of your website.

You can crawl your website with tools like Screaming Frog SEO, DeepCrawl, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and other crawling software. These tools may assist you in crawling your website in a manner that is comparable to how the search engine might do it. You may also use this method to find out what your website’s structure and optimization level are. The procedure for crawling your website will vary depending on the tools you use. The goal of any tool is to find search engine optimization problems and flaws such as dead links, scant content, missing alt tags, and redirects.

Finding Indexation Issues

It’s critical that all pages of your eCommerce website are indexed by search engines for any of your SEO efforts to succeed. If pages are not indexed, they will not show in search engine result pages.

You may quickly determine whether your website is indexed or not, as well as which pages are indexed and which aren’t. You can do this in 2 ways:

  • Go to Google Search Console > Google Index > Index Status and check the index status.
  • The alternative approach is to utilize the search operator “Site: URL of your website.”

The second approach, while not as reliable as using Google Search Console, is still somewhat effective.

There may be a discrepancy in the number of indexed pages in eCommerce sites. This is because businesses don’t want all of their webpages to be indexed. Some of the pages may include “Thank You” pages, auto-generated sites, and other low-value but essential ones. This is because crawling these pages might cause suboptimization bloating and crawl budget constraints.

Checking On-Page SEO

On-page SEO refers to any improvements you make on your website that aid in its ranking. Look into the following areas to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your SEO efforts:

Evaluate your Keywords

The first step in an On-Page SEO audit is to analyze your website’s keyword usage. Keywords help your sites show up in relevant search results before relevant consumers, which may lead to increased website visits and completed shopping carts.

To get the most out of your eCommerce SEO, audit your pages for your main keyword to make sure it’s being used correctly on your sites, as well as in the proper locations, such as meta tags.

Examine your page rankings using a tool like Google Search Console to see which pages on your site aren’t performing well in search results. Check the keyword usage on those pages to determine whether you’ve used it enough.

Analyzing Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

The title tags and meta descriptions of your pages are the next items on our list.

These two meta tags are the first thing that appears in search results. Make sure you’re using compelling title tags and meta descriptions to entice visitors to click on your listing by double-checking these tags.

Google Search Console can help you figure out how many people view your listing. You may check the click-through rate (CTR) on your page to see whether your tags are generating enough interest for people to click on them. Keep in mind that your CTR is affected by where you appear in search results. The CTR of a listing that appears on the first page of search results will be higher.

Evaluate your Content Strategy

The next stage in your eCommerce SEO evaluation is the on-page content analysis. The significance of your search result rankings’ content cannot be overstated. Your audience is searching for reliable information, and you may give it to them by producing content for them.

You’ll want to evaluate your on-page content strategy to see if there are any gaps or areas where you can enhance it. Examine your competitors’ content planning to see what type of content they create and compare it to your own to determine what more you can do. Including this on your eCommerce SEO audit checklist will assist you in creating a content strategy that will boost traffic to your website.

Off-Page SEO Audit

Off-page SEO consists of factors that affect your site’s ranking but are not visible on the page, making them impossible to modify directly. You’ll want to examine two things as part of your eCommerce SEO audit.

Analyzing your Backlinks

Backlinks are essential for improving your search engine rankings. Backlinks are links to your site from other websites. Backlinks from reputable, trustworthy websites can improve your ranking and foster trust and authority if they come from recognized sites.

Use a tool like Ahrefs backlink checker to see who is connecting to your material. Simply input your domain name into the tool to discover what links your site has. Your site may get links from both authoritative and reputable sites as well as less-reputable or spammy sources.

Evaluate your Social Standing

Many marketers believe that social media has an indirect impact on search engine rankings. You may improve your rating by adding pages from your website to social media, as well as gaining more visitors and links, which will aid you in improving it.

You should inspect your social media accounts while performing an eCommerce SEO audit to ensure that you’re linking to your content and product pages.

Technical SEO Audit

When conducting an eCommerce SEO audit, don’t overlook the technical side of things.

The technical SEO of your website has an influence on how it operates and how search engines discover your pages. An eCommerce site may have thousands of pages with your products, information, and more, which might result in technical difficulties.

Checking Robots.txt and XML Sitemap

Search engines need your robots.txt file and XML sitemap to understand the whole of your eCommerce site.

  • Robots.txt: Using the robots.txt file, you can indicate to search engines which pages they should and should not crawl, reducing the strain on your site. This may be used to tell Google not to crawl specific pages, such as shopping cart pages and wish lists.
  • XML Sitemap: This file tells Google which pages to evaluate and directs it to index your site’s most essential pages. 

You’ll need both of them if you want Google to crawl your site and index your content. However, they might be a bit challenging to create which is why I recommend getting professional help from AberSEO agency.

Page Load Time

Don’t forget to assess your website’s loading time when performing an eCommerce SEO audit. It has a significant influence on your search engine rankings, so don’t overlook it! If your website takes too long to load, users will abandon it and head for another. You must have a quick website in order to give visitors timely information.

You must ensure that your website loads in two seconds or less so that users are satisfied.

Use a tool like Google Pagespeed Insights to determine where you can make improvements by measuring the load time of your site.

Ensure Mobile Friendliness

You should also include mobile-friendliness in your eCommerce SEO audit checklist, in addition to fast load speeds. As the number of mobile users worldwide increases, you’ll want to make sure your site is optimized for tablets and smartphones.

If your users have a poor mobile experience, they will bounce from your page and affect your rankings.

Google also employs mobile-first indexing, which assesses your website’s mobility when ranking it. As a consequence, if you want to improve your search engine positions, make sure your site is compatible with mobile devices.

Conclusion

The goal of a successful SEO audit is to help you identify areas that need improvement and then focus on those specifically. You should be able to accomplish this by following the suggestions in our eCommerce SEO checklist, which will guide you through what needs to be done for your site. If there are any other services or products related to marketing, design, programming, etc., we can also provide them as well at AberSEO agency. For more information about our company and how we can help with your online store optimization process please contact us today.

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