Ecommerce SEO Audit

And what's necessary for a good plan? Knowledge.

In this case, I'll give you the knowledge plus actionable steps to improve your ecommerce store's SEO performance.

Having already helped countless stores with their SEO, this information will reveal:
- the steps you need to take,
- in order to see the best improvements,
- in the shortest amount of time.

Once you send me your website information, I'll reach out within 24 hours to confirm everything, and schedule the audit start & delivery date.

After the audit's completed, I'll compile all the information and action points into one clear and concise report. This way you'll know exactly where you stand and what steps to take to move in the right direction.

Once you've received the report and studied its insights, you'll have the opportunity to schedule a call with me, to go over the report together and cover any questions you may have.

That’s it.

The 5 things you need to do within this whole process are:
1. Submit your website and contact info.
2. Wait for the report.
3. Go over the report with me.
4. Have all your questions answered.
5. Implement the actionable steps and see your SEO performance grow.

An ecommerce site SEO audit always begins with a broad analysis of your current SEO strategy, to determine its strengths and weaknesses.

This generally delivers a birds-eye view of your situation, and helps identify the main elements that are either enhancing or hindering your SEO performance.

Knowing your current SEO strategy is only one part of the initial analysis.

Performing a competitor analysis on your main ecommerce competition is a crucial second step. It's important to reverse-engineer their overall SEO strategy, in order to pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses, and compare them to yours.

This second step will generally deliver a first batch of valuable insights, that will be useful when working on the remaining scope of the audit.

The first two steps of the audit will generally deliver insights on the SEO trends in your industry, especially on the keywords used by its main actors.

At this stage, it's time to dive deeper and strategize on what the primary and secondary keywords should be for each section of your website.

Once a clear plan is set out, the next step will be to map these keywords to all the key pages on your ecommerce website.

The keyword mapping process will take into account the search intent of each keyword, the search volume of each keyword, and match each keyword to a specific page, based on its content and purpose.

Is your content in line with what your audience wants? Is there enough content to also satisfy content-hungry search engines? Do you have any duplicate or practically-duplicate content on your ecommerce site?

These are the types of questions to ask when auditing your content. This applies to homepage copy, category or collection descriptions, product page descriptions, and of course, all the informational content and resources you have on your website.

Title Tags

Title tags, also known as page or meta titles, are one of the core on-page ranking factors.

It's therefore crucial that your key ecommerce pages, notably your category and product pages, have unique title tags.

The titles you choose should also be perfectly in line with your industry trends. In other words, make sure the words you use in your title tags contain the search terms your audience uses to find the products you sell.

H1 Tags

Exactly like title tags, H1 headings are one of the main ranking factors.

When performing an ecommerce on-page SEO audit, it's a best practice to check all H1 tags to make sure they are unique, and in line with the keywords your your target audience uses.

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions have a very unique way of impacting SEO performance. They do so by altering the click-through-rate (CTR) from the search engine pages to your website. A higher CTR will generally increase a site's SEO performance, and a lower CTR will do the opposite.

It's therefore important to ensure meta descriptions are unique, contain keywords your audience uses, and incentivizes potential shoppers to click on your site, rather than pursue their search.

Anything and everything that's affecting your ecommerce site's technical performance, is potentially affecting your site's SEO performance.

Look out especially for technical errors on the site and pages with sub-optimal page speeds. Optimizing your crawl budget is also an increasingly important factor to take into account.

Crawl budget is the amount of resources search engines allocate to your website, notably to find each page, render each page, and queue it for indexing.

With the world wide web growing at a faster rate each year, search engines need to limit the amount of resources they allocate to each site. If not, it would be too costly for Google, Bing, and the like, to operate their search engines. After all, these are private for-profit companies.

As a result, they limit the resources allocated to each site. It's therefore become crucial to make sure these resources are used wisely. For instance, you'd want these resources allocated to key revenue-generating pages and not to low value pages or 404 error pages.

Crawl budget optimization is something I look into very deeply within the audits I perform, as it can be hugely important, especially for the larger ecommerce sites with hundreds or thousands of pages.