Ecommerce SEO Audit: How to Perform It Effectively

One of the best methods to continuously generate money online is to set up an e-commerce business. The key to its success is internet traffic, and eCommerce SEO is one of the best long-term approaches to ensure traffic.

Did you know how to perform your eCommerce SEO audit? If not, don’t miss this article.

What Is an Ecommerce SEO Audit

An eCommerce SEO audit entails assessing your site's organic visibility and finding issues that need to be addressed. A standard audit will look at your existing SEO situation and assess how effectively your site performs across various ranking variables. The result is a report that includes a top-level score and a prioritized list of SEO repairs.

Why to Perform Effectively SEO Audit for eCommerce Sites

Organic traffic is controlled by search engines. There are many different types of traffic, but organic traffic should always be a component of your plan, regardless of your budget, company size, or expertise.

These statistics below will show you why you need to perform an effective SEO audit for your eCommerce business:

• eCommerce revenue is projected to reach 54 trillion US dollars by 2022.
• 81% of people use the internet to look for products or services. People use search engines daily.
• Organic visitors generate 33% of website revenue, with a year-over-year increase of 21%;
• Organic traffic generates the best conversion rates after referral and paid traffic.
• Organic traffic is a long-term investment. Paid traffic only lasts as long as you pay for it, but organic traffic takes longer to establish traction but lasts far longer (and is less hard on the budget).

When you look at the total statistics, you'll notice that organic traffic is still one of the top eCommerce conversions/revenue sources. As a result, SEO isn't going away anytime soon. Now that you understand why an eCommerce SEO audit is necessary let's get started on the fundamental phases of your eCommerce SEO audit!

How to Perfectively Perform an eCommerce SEO Audit

It is critical to understand the site's particular scenario in SEO best practices to optimize the impact of SEO efforts on any eCommerce business. This may be accomplished with the help of an e-commerce SEO assessment, as shown below.

Technical SEO Audit

Indexation: The Indexability tab in Google Search Console gives you a quick overview of indexability. The dashboard displays a list of URLs that Google has crawled and their status (Valid, Excluded, or Erroring). You may then look into the particular cause for each URL's status and take the required steps to resolve any concerns.

Crawler control: It's critical to control how search engine bots crawl your site to maintain crawl efficiency. Besides, you also need to avoid content cannibalization concerns. This may be done in a site's robots.txt file.

Mobile-friendliness: Mobile-friendliness is a major issue for eCommerce SEO audits since customers are more likely to browse on their mobile devices than on their computers. Google even employs mobile-first indexing, which considers a site's mobile-friendliness when determining its ranking.

Page speed: Because the speed with which a site load is a ranking component in Google's algorithm, several site speed audits tools, such as PageSpeed Insights, are available. The tool gives you a score for your site's speed on mobile and desktop and suggestions for how to improve it.

International setup: Broken hreflang tags, poor canonicalization, and delayed server response times are common technical SEO difficulties for international eCommerce websites. Subdomains, ccTLDs, and subfolders on the X.com domain are other options.

Structured data setup: Schema markup aids search engines in deciphering the intent of a website and can even win your content-rich results in Google. Product schema is one of the greatest forms of schema to use since it gives more information on your items' pricing, availability, and customer ratings.

Core Web Vitals: In June 2021, the Core Web Vitals (CVW) were added as a ranking component. This collection of metrics, including LCP, CLS, and FID, measures page experience metrics.

Content Audit

Keyword targeting map: Conduct keyword research to learn how your target consumers look for your products or services and prioritize the queries with the highest number of searches. Then, using a keyword targeting map, match the possible keywords to current and future sites based on search intent. The basis of your content strategy will then be built on this.

Metadata: A page's title tag is one of the key ranking factors in search engine algorithms. Thus, using the target keyword(s) is feasible. Although the meta description is not a ranking criterion, it should be optimized because interesting descriptions encourage people to click on the page.

HTML heading structure: Well-structured pages are rewarded by search engines since they aid in determining the page's overall relevancy. Ensure that every page on your website, notably the H1 element, has the proper HTML heading structure. To assist search engines in comprehending the page's relevancy, the H1 tag should include the page's principal target term.

Content on category and product pages: The keyword ranking potential of category and product pages is aided by well-written content. Create unique content for each category page that describes the sorts of products that the consumer will discover in that category.

Cannibalization: Multiple pages competing for the same query, often known as keyword cannibalization, can occur on eCommerce sites. This is especially frequent on product pages with comparable features and measurements. An eCommerce SEO audit will determine the best way to eliminate cannibalism so that the pages have the highest chance of ranking.

Informational content: Not only for transactional keywords, but eCommerce companies should also strive for visibility along the conversion funnel. At the contemplation stage of a customer's journey, informative material may assist raise brand recognition and give relevant solutions.

On-page Audit: User Experience (UX)

Internal site search: This data may be utilized to detect possible roadblocks in the user journey and which products to emphasize on category pages and cross-sell modules.

Out-of-stock products: Out-of-stock product management is a crucial factor for SEO and User Experience (UX). Removing these products might hurt organic exposure by robbing you of precious backlink equity and a chance to upsell related products. An eCommerce audit will show you how to manage stock availability at a large scale to increase conversions.

Read more: On-page SEO for Your Dropshipping Store

Off-page Audit

Evaluating backlinks: Backlinks are still one of the most significant ranking criteria in Google's algorithm; therefore, maintaining a solid backlink profile is critical for eCommerce sites to stay competitive in the SERPs. Backlink health checks should be performed on a regular basis to discover potentially detrimental backlinks to the site and disavow them so that search engines ignore them.

Building backlinks: An eCommerce SEO audit will also outline a tiered link-building approach, including unlinked mentions, broken backlink recovery, and reactive comment chances, as well as op-level advice on link-building.

Benefits of eCommerce SEO Audit

eCommerce SEO audits aid in the development of a solid website and marketing plan, as well as the fine-tuning of the website. It also provides information on what our rivals are up to. When even a little CTA might increase your website's exposure, keeping a watch on rivals' activities is vital.

Ranking signals are used by search engines to determine a site's search engine ranking. The top 7 SEO audit benefits of an eCommerce business are shown below.

Improves Your SEO Strategy: An eCommerce SEO audit reveals algorithm changes and helps you to optimize your online store's SEO approach. As a result, timely auditing is critical since it allows you to evaluate your plan to develop your eCommerce website.

Improves Conversion Rate: An eCommerce SEO audit is useful in examining the top landing pages, as well as their content, design, and CTAs, which all play a part in increasing conversion rates.

Identifies Offsite & Onsite Issues: A website audit detects the faults that cause visitors to leave your eCommerce site. Spam, hostile URLs, and broken backlinks are just a few examples.

Improves The Content: On your eCommerce website, a technical SEO audit may assist you to discover which content works and which content doesn't. Improved content might lead to increased interaction and a higher organic Google ranking.

Improves Keywords Strategy: Extensive research and an eCommerce SEO audit are required to develop a successful keyword strategy. An eCommerce SEO audit aids in the development of better keywords, increasing the likelihood of organic search presence.

Discovers Revenue Sources: If influencers work together for your eCommerce company, you may be able to reach millions of consumers all at once. Keyword research can also assist in locating these possible influencers. This is where an audit of your eCommerce site comes in handy, as it will provide you with a list of top influencers and bloggers that use comparable keywords.

Enhances Usability: The usefulness of a website is determined not just by its aesthetic appeal, but also by how well it is organized and laid out. In addition to detecting which web pages are working effectively, a website audit may also discover drop rates on certain websites that can be changed for better outcomes.

Final Words

An eCommerce SEO audit should be done on a regular basis to have a deeper knowledge of the website and to stay ahead of the competition. We hope that this article has given you a better understanding of why SEO auditing is so important for your eCommerce store's success. Discover more about eCommerce strategies at DSers Blog.