eCommerce SEO Audit Checklist: Identify – Improve – Rank

There are many ways you can go about your website SEO Audit. But no matter how you decide to perform it, the SEO Audit Checklist will provide you with the necessary information on what to check and will make sure that you don’t miss or forget anything. Plus the report, in the end, will provide you with the information on what to improve in order to rank high on SERPs and grow your organic traffic.

Posted on 24.09.2021 | by Margarita | Content Manager

 68Shares

Have you decided to invest money in creating an awesome eCommerce business? That’s great! You have done your first step in business success. However, be ready for a long and challenging journey.

Running an eCommerce business is not easy and does pose many challenges. There are many aspects of this business you might struggle with, getting organic traffic being on the top of the list.

Organic traffic is the people going on your website from search engines. The problem is that people don’t usually go past the first page, maybe some will go to the second, but that’s about it.

Ranking high on the SERP is not an easy task and needs lots of dedication, work, strategies and time. Here is when SEO comes into play.

Strategy Before Action

eCommerce marketing strategies are a great way to hop on the train called SEO and maximize your traffic and earnings. SEO is a must in our world of digital marketing, since if your website doesn’t show up on the search, then you will not be able to move forward and reach your full potential.

However, if you do not take proper care of your ecommerce SEO strategies, it will not change your rankings and give the desired results. Is there any solution? Of course, there is!

Get the Ball Rolling

To analyze and improve your SEO strategies you need an SEO audit. SEO is really dynamic, and what is trendy today, can stop working after a month. You need an eCommerce SEO audit for being in the loop of changes and improving your ranking.

SEO consists of three major parts, including on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.  After thoroughly examining every detail about the eCommerce SEO audit, you can come up with a list of all the details you need to check. You can have a separate on-page SEO audit checklist and off-page one, but it is easier to have an all-in-one solution for your convenience. You can even download a free SEO audit checklist that is really comprehensive and will guide you through this process.

In order to identify your problems and find solutions, you need to take into consideration your eCommerce website audit checklist. Here is the list of issues that you should cover in your SEO audit:

1. Check Speed, Navigation and Mobile Friendliness of your Website

These are three different issues that have a great influence on your website performance. They are insuperable parts of an on-page SEO audit checklist. The reason is that they create a user experience, which has a direct connection to your rankings and conversions. Let us have a look at these three issues separately:

Navigation

Without having a simple and accessible navigation bar your visitors will fail to get what they want. It will take them to your competitors. To avoid it you can use navigation testing tools.

Mobile Friendliness and Speed

Imagine your life without mobile devices. It is impossible for most people. It means that people will visit your website mostly on their phones. Your website should be optimized and fast for all possible devices. Through PageSpeed insights you can check your page speed. It is a free tool by Google.

2. Indexing and Technical Errors

There are a lot of web pages that Google is not indexing. Finding and deleting each of the details that harm the indexability of your website is another important issue in your eCommerce SEO audit checklist. Search engines crawl your website for a limited amount of time, and if they come across large pictures, pages that ages to load and or duplicate content they will index only a small portion of your site since all these problems slow the crawling rate. So, to avoid these issues that can leave a negative impact on your website you can use SEOprofiler or other tools.

3. Fix Broken Links

Having broken links instead of useful content will create a bad image of your website for not only search engines, but your visitors as well.

Your visitors want a professional approach before making a buying decision. This frustrating experience will decrease your chances of a competitive marketplace. Your ranking is really hard to boost! Try not to lose it with actions that are easy to solve. There are a number of ways through which you can fix these problems, like Web-based SEO Audit Tool,  Google Search Console, Online Broken Link Checker Tool, etc..

4. Analyze Competition

Having competitors is challenging and demands extra efforts to show your advantages and be ahead. However, it is a great thing, as it makes your business better. You can make this competition motivation to better your business. How to make the competition work for you? Of course, doing a competitor audit.

It helps you to find out what makes them more visible and try to improve the strategies they use to gain a competitive advantage. You can even analyze online reviews to improve your website performance.

5. Improve your Link-building Strategies

Search engines find backlinks as one of the most essential ranking factors. These are links that direct one website to another. Why improving your link-building strategy so important for your website ranking? The reason is clear: Google gives its preference to websites that use high-quality backlinks. It finds this type of website more relevant, and a great reason to boost its ranking.

In case you use them in unrelated content, it will be treated as an indicator of a penalty. This is the main reason for auditing the backlinks of your websites and if needed, replacing them with high-quality links. Using eCommerce SEO audit tools will keep your website away from spammy backlinks.

6. Improve your Content

Writing quality content is an ever-lasting marketing strategy. A lot of companies prioritize it and concentrate all their efforts on content marketing. Your content should be high quality, informative and relevant as it is among the most essential ranking factors for search engines. Auditing your content is a very powerful tool. You may think it will take time, however it is critically important. You do not waste your time, you invest it to get high results.

Writing new content and sharing fresh ideas is great. However, you can do it after analyzing your existing one, as it will give you an overall idea about the strengths and weaknesses of your content, helping you make improvements. You can find a great number of tools for auditing and improving your content.

7. Test your Meta Descriptions and Rewrite Meta Tags

Your Meta descriptions should have an optimal length and format. How to understand what is best for your website? Again with the help of eCommerce SEO audit tools. If you write your meta well, with relevant keywords, it will drive a lot of traffic to your website.

Meta descriptions and titles give an overall idea about website performance. So, they should correspond to people’s queries in order to gain visibility. There are online audit tools, like Seo Site Checkup, through which you can test them.

8. Integrate SEO into your Own Marketing Strategies

Every business is unique. You can represent different products or services. However, all the eCommerce businesses share the same goals in some terms: having business awareness, increasing ranking, sales, traffic, and conversions. For this reason, it’s important to follow eCommerce marketing best practices.

Auditing your marketing strategies and comparing them with the current digital marketing trends is important for your business growth. It will give you an overall idea of whether your marketing activities target the right audience and provide your business success.

9. Make User Experience Analysis

Your website visitors create and develop your business. Everything you do is to cover their needs. You need to take customer-centric actions, as without “paying customers” it is useless to build a business. Making user experience analysis can give you an overall idea about your targeted market. Creating a positive UX with the right tactics will increase your conversion rates and boost your sales.

You need to pay attention to UX evaluation and research. Following a guide will give you detailed information about your future actions on improving UX.

10. Make Keyword Analysis

For attracting the relevant and targeted audience you need to have a good and well-developed keyword strategy. It is not a secret that keywords and SEO are intertwined. These are the number one ranking factors. In order to have a good SEO performance, you need to put a great emphasis on your keywords.

Keywords target your potential customers. That’s the reason you need to analyze and audit your current keywords and make them relevant to the search intent. Besides, it will help you to correct your SEO mistakes and find out new opportunities to help you rank.

Auditing your keywords as well will give you an idea about your competitor’s tactics in using keywords. Following an informative guide will give you detailed information on how to perform your keyword audit.

Closing Argument

Identifying issues that harm your rankings on search engines with the help of a website audit checklist can keep your business away from a number of errors. Having a good user experience and a good search engine performance can successfully build your business.

eCommerce website audit checklist will give you a thorough analysis of a lot of important factors that can harm your business. You need to give enough time for this process. The aim of following eCommerce website audit checklist is to:

  • Fix your website links
  • Identify how your website SEO profile goes with best practices
  • Improve your visibility on SERP
  • Uncover and fix errors to increase the visibility of your website
  • Uncover which on-page and off-page factors are important for your website.

This is an ongoing process that should be an inseparable part of your marketing tactics. It will help you to keep ahead of the growing competition. eCommerce business is a never-ending race, so you should take proper care of it. Also, check these SEO best practices that will help you throughout the optimization journey!

If you follow the eCommerce website audit checklist and pay proper attention to all the important details, slowly but surely you will bring your website to the first pages of search engines. Through it, you can boost organic traffic, have sales with higher conversion rates. 

Margarita | Content Manager

Margarita has been working in digital marketing for over 5 years now. She is an SEO enthusiast and Smarketa Content Manager. She believes that the right punctuation can save lives.