Conducting a regular SEO e-commerce site audit must be part of your online marketing strategy (if not). As an e-commerce business, your website is the most critical touchpoint on your customer’s journey. And the primary conversion source and income. If you don’t have a physical presence, your online store is even more critical.
Optimizing it according to the best practices of vertical customer expectations and rising, of course, a good start. But regardless of industry trends and customer insights, there is one more variable. That must determine how you define and further optimize your website: search engine.
Search engines use algorithms comprising several ranking factors to provide the most relevant search results for user requests. These algorithms continue to change and update. But most of these updates will not be significant in the scope to require complete makeovers from your website.
However, you still want to regularly optimize your e-commerce site to maintain its relevance in the changing algorithm, and SEO website audits are a good starting point in this process.
What is SEO Audit?
SEO e-commerce audits involve testing current performance and health from all your e-commerce websites and solving:
Identification of SEO problems that currently affect the performance of your website
Suggest optimization for improved performance. Contribute directly to the overall increase in website performance, visibility, and organic traffic.
In the end, SEO e-commerce audits guide your SEO strategy by illuminating the area you need to improve and how to do it. Besides, if SEO is part of your online marketing strategy, auditing websites can help you compare your current optimization campaign results until before.
This allows you to evaluate better whether and how much your SEO efforts pay off.
If SEO is not a priority until now, the audit will be a good starting point to see where you stand, by providing a snapshot at T = 0 to have a comparison benchmark when you test the results.
Typical SEO audit checklists will cover the following fields:
Technical SEO:
The technical aspect of your website ensures that search engines can crawl and index it. As an “SEO hierarchy need” MOZ places it, accessibility crawling is the basis of any SEO strategy (and therefore technical SEO must be the starting point of your SEO audit);
Analysis on-and off-page –
Content gaps and opportunities:
Even though the content is part of SEO on the page, it requires a separate section in your audit. As “SEO hierarchy needs to” show, content contributes to the off-page SEO too (because it can get links, quotes, and others. Therefore, the content has a doubt goal – to increase organic traffic and increase authority;
User experience –
Regardless of relevant and qualitative content, search engines aim to give users the best overall experience. That’s why they will always prioritize websites that are in harmony with the latest UX best practices.
Technical SEO.
Because we described earlier, technical SEO is about making your e-commerce website easily crushed, indexed, and ranked by a search engine robot.
Search engines use robots (also known as “spiders”) to find content. To do this, they follow the link, and that’s why an external and internal connection influences the discovery of your website. When accessing your website, the robot analyzes its structure to determine the relevance and rank in the SERP.
Crawling is the first step in the ranking process, but you know what they say, “First impression is the last impression.” To avoid search engines reject your website to index your low indexation or rank, you want to have a fully optimized setting.
Your SEO audit must begin with crawling your e-commerce website. Several tools simulate the crawling process, and you can configure them to behave like search engines you are interested in (Google, Bing, etc.). They will diagnose technical problems that need your attention.
Robots.txt.
Robots.txt file tells what search engine robots are allowed and cannot crawl and index from your website. I usually find this file in:
<Code> https://www.domain.com/robots.txt </ code>
There will be certain parts of your e-commerce website that you don’t want to knit and be indexed (for example, test pages, page thank you, shopping basket pages, etc.). However, be careful when preparing the robots.txt file, if not you risk preventing the search engine robot from finding essential areas on your site.
Meta Robots.
Meta robots are like the robots.txt file because they instruct the search engine to crawl your website. However, the Meta Robot also allows further directives such as whether to index a page, and whether to follow the links contained.
It is recommended if you have a page that you want to love but does not appear in SERP, or if you do not wish to transfer the authority of your domain link to the included link. These pages can contain duplicate content (e.g. filter pages).
XML sitemap.
XML maps are just a list of all relevant pages on your website. As we said, the creeping process consists of a search bot after a link and finds new content from one link to another. If essential pages of your website do not contain internal links (we will talk more about them later), bots may be challenging to find and crawl them.
The XML map will provide more structures to your website, prevent search bots from facing essential parts and making the ministering process more efficient.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content refers to the content on several pages, both from the same domain or in all more disciplines.
Google understands that certain types of duplicate content are non-evil. However, punishment will be triggered when the same content is made to manipulate search engines.
We hinted this before – like an e-commerce business, your website will most likely have a filter page that creates the risk of duplicate content. When the user can filter the product based on variables such as types, sizes, colors,., your existing content is entirely narrowing, making some examples of the same product content. The same can occur with category pages.
Conclusion
The e-commerce audit site might look like a frightening task. Regardless of the typical problems encountered in each SEO audit, the e-commerce website brings its complex layers to work, with all the products and dynamic pages discussed.
But don’t be afraid, once you start systematically auditing your website, you will see why this task is not scary. It only takes time, and with all SEO tools in hand, even the time spent minimize. Make sure you focus on many elements that you will audit. Stay systematically.
