Ecommerce SEO audit: Guide for online stores

As an ecommerce store owner, you operate with multiple traffic sources, from paid ads to social media. But, the one that probably takes the most effort and brings the most traffic is search engine optimization. Ranking high for crucial keywords requires combining a lot of processes, from website optimization to earning mentions online.

One integral part of SEO that is often forgotten about is auditing. Running an ecommerce SEO audit once in a while can help you understand how your efforts impact the results and find opportunities for growth.

In this article, you’ll learn what a proper ecommerce SEO audit looks like and how to run one on your website.

What is an eCommerce SEO Audit?

An ecommerce SEO audit is needed to understand how well your website performs in terms of search engine optimization. It combines manual research and using specialized SEO tools to analyze the website and its mentions online.

After the audit, you’ll learn which areas of your website can use some work to be more in line with Google’s standards and SEO best practices.

Doing a quality audit is hard enough for a regular website and even harder for an ecommerce site. The reason is that ecommerce websites typically have many more pages than, say, a plumber’s website.

This means you have to potentially analyze hundreds of pages across multiple areas like technical optimization, keyword optimization, and off-site mentions.

Many ecommerce business owners opt to do the SEO audit themselves, which requires specialized knowledge and tools. Often, ecommerce owners are jacks of all trades, handling everything from SEO to payment processing, but a quality audit requires deep knowledge of optimization processes and tools.

You may have an in-house SEO specialist who can handle both the SEO tasks and the audit. Some e-commerce owners prefer to hire an agency that specializes in SEO to run the audit for them or combine in-house employees with an agency.

If you want to go down that path, you need to find an agency with expertise in both SEO and ecommerce website architecture. One way to quickly find the right agency is by checking with SE Ranking’s Agency Catalog, which has hundreds of hand-picked agencies. Look for ones that specifically work with ecommerce sites.

Hiring someone might not be the right move for you at the moment, though. Here is how you can do an ecommerce SEO audit yourself.

SEO audit for online stores: Step-by-step guide

Search engine optimization includes many tasks. We can put them into three main categories: technical, on-page, and off-page SEO.

An SEO audit should go over all three of them. Some of these steps require using free Google suite tools, some require third-party paid tools, and some can be done manually.

Technical SEO audit for eCommerce

The first area of your ecommerce site to check is technical SEO. Technical SEO is the optimization of a website's internal architecture, specifically the aspects that influence your ranking overall. Having poor technical website health can negate other SEO successes, so it’s the best place to start.

Here are the six major areas you should focus on.

Indexing and crawlability check 

Before your page can show up on search engine result pages, Google has to discover it via a crawl and add it to its index. In this step, you have to check whether this process goes smoothly.

You can do it in your Google Search Console by running a Page Indexing Report. It will show which pages are indexed. If you see that some aren’t, run an Index Covering Report.

This report will highlight the issues that prevent pages from being indexed.

The most common issue is that a page is not linked to another place on the website, so it exists in a vacuum and cannot be indexed. 404s and accidental blockage in robots.txt are also common.

This GSC report will highlight issues and give suggestions on fixing them.

Response codes analysis 

Response codes are given to pages according to how they respond to requests. 2xx codes show success, like 200, which means the page is successfully loaded. 3xx codes show redirects, like 301, which means the page has been moved permanently. 4xx codes show a client-side error, like 404, page not found. 5xx shows server-side errors like 502, which is a bad gateway.

You can check your site for these response codes with a website crawler like Screaming Frog. It will return a list of all pages with the codes. You want most of them to be 200, with some redirects among them. If you see error codes, take a look at those pages and find the reasons for the error.

XML sitemap & Robots.txt file inspect 

Robots.txt is a file that tells Google bots what pages you don’t want to be crawled and indexed. Take a quick look at it and make sure nothing important is blocked.

Generally, you might have the admin login page blocked, duplicate content made on purpose, special deals and discount pages, or URL patterns like some filter identifiers. But not much more. Check for resources you might have blocked temporarily before and unblock them.

Another thing that must be in the robots.txt file is the path to sitemap.xml. This file is a directory of your website pages that makes it easier for Google crawler bots to discover new pages.

Check this file as well and update it. Remove or add pages to reflect pages on the site and make sure there are only pages that return 200. If you have multiple broken pages and redirects in the sitemap, Google might start ignoring it.

Category pages pagination check

Since ecommerce websites have hundreds of products listed on them, category pages will typically have pagination. This is notorious for being hard to manage regarding SEO, and there have been various approaches to handling pagination before.

In a SEO audit, you have to focus on these areas:

• Pages have a unique URL, like using the “?page=3” query parameter;
  
  

• Pages are indexed;
  
  

• Pages don’t link with “rel=canonical” to the first page.

It’s important to link to the first page from all pages, but the “rel=canonical” attribute will prevent other pages from indexing. Having them indexed won’t affect ranking as Google will understand which page is the first one, and crawlers can use pagination to discover products that are down the list.

Mobile-friendliness scan

While mobile optimization is not a ranking factor on its own, it improves bounce rate and site loading speed, a part of Core Web Vitals, which are a ranking factor. In a mobile-friendliness scan, you’ll need to audit your site manually and with a free Chrome tool.

For a manual scan, go to Inspect in Chrome and press the “Toggle device bar” button in the left top corner of the panel. This will show you how your website looks from most mobile platforms.

Go through all the major parts of the site to confirm the website displays correctly. You don’t have to go through each category and product page, though; just confirm that the page template works as intended. 

You can also try following a typical customer journey:

• Visit the home page;

• Go to a category page;

• Use search;

• Use filters;

• Use pagination;

• Click through images on the product page;

• Go through checkout.

If you see problems with this, plan to improve website design in the future. If the UX of the site displays correctly, check website performance. You can combine it with the next step.

Core Web Vitals testing

Core Web Vitals are Google’s standards of website performance. They include multiple metrics that show how fast a website loads, whether content on the page shifts during loading and other issues that can affect site loading and experience.

You can check for issues in this area with an SEO tool or rely on Google Chrome’s Lighthouse report. Generate it for mobile to see how the website loads on mobile platforms.

The report will show you a general website health score across three areas and provide a detailed breakdown of things that you need to improve.

In many cases, the most pressing issue for ecommerce sites like the one above is large image files taking too much time to load and blocking the entire page from loading. To fix this, you can either compress the files or load a dummy image first and the full-sized picture after the page has loaded.

It’s also a good idea to lazy-load product videos.

On-page SEO audit for eCommerce

Technical optimization is about checking your website coding and architecture performance. On-page optimization is more about formatting and using keywords on each page. Here are the areas that you need to focus on. 

Keywords usage 

Search engines look for keywords to understand what your page is about and to decide which search queries would benefit from visiting your page. That’s why SEO is so centered around keywords — researching thousands of them, grouping them into categories, and optimizing pages for them.

This is one of the most important areas to check in an e-commerce search engine optimization audit and one that may take a lot of time. You want to make sure each product and category page on your site has its target keywords in these parts of the page:

• URL;

• Title tag;

• Meta description tag;

• H1;

• Image alt tag;

• First hundred words of the text.

Doing that for hundreds of pages will take ages, so here’s how you can save time.

The first option is to manually check your most important pages. Use your own judgment of what they are or a Google Search Console report on worst or best-performing pages and check those.

The second option is to use an SEO spider like Screaming Frog. It will crawl your site and show the URL as well as title tags, meta tags, and H1’s of all pages. You can either go through the list manually or compile a CSV document with page addresses and main keywords and cross-reference the two with a custom script.

You can view image alt tags as well with Screaming Frog, but you’ll have to go through each image manually, as one image can often shown on multiple pages.

Content strategy audit

This stage includes a content audit of the product pages and your blog. First, take a look at what content your product page template includes, compare it with the competition that ranks higher than you in SERP, and find opportunities to add more information about the products.

Then, compare your blog content strategies. Look for types of content that rank high in competing sites and consider adding those to your content strategy.

To do this, you’ll have to google a few search terms and go through SERPs manually, analyzing competing blogs. You can also use an SEO tool to speed up the audit process.

Images optimization 

Images have two roles in ecommerce SEO. They can include a keyword in the image alt tag and be optimized for faster loading. That’s exactly what you have to check in an audit.

You may check the keyword optimization of image alt text tags with Screaming Frog, but that would require manually checking each image in the crawl results or writing a custom script to cross-check it with the keyword list. You can also use an SEO tool that finds pages with missing alt text tags.

Check image size optimization by checking image file sizes in your database. It’s best to have all of your images be no larger than 500 KB for faster loading. It’s even better to have multiple variants of one image and load smaller ones on mobile devices.

Duplicate content & Canonical tags errors

These issues are very common at large ecommerce sites. Both can make crawling and indexing harder for the search engines, sometimes resulting in wrong pages making it to SERP.

You can check all of your duplicate content with an SEO audit tool. Typically, duplicate content is the result of either poor copywriting or poor use of technical SEO.

In the first case, rewrite the content that shows as duplicate.

In other cases, duplicate content will show as indexed category pages with filters added like “/category?color=red/, pagination, internal search results, and duplicate paths to the same product. For instance, when a product can be reached via “/category1/product1/” and “/category2/product1/.”

In those cases, you’ll have to decide whether you want to add a “rel=canonical” or block certain pages from indexing. In many cases, Google will automatically understand those pages are duplicates and add a canonical on its own. Check Google Search Console for details.

That’s how you can check for canonicalization issues as well. In GSC, go to the Page Indexing report and go through flagged cases. Usually, the issue is that Google’s understanding of the canonical is wrong, and you’ll have to add the right canonical to the page.

Structured data implementation 

Structured data is a file that tells Google more about your page and can be used to show additional information in SERP, like this image.

You can check your site for structured data in bulk with an audit tool. If there are no structured data files, it’s best to plan to add them. Focus on the most performing pages first. It’s very useful when a page ranks in the top ten, so get a report on pages that rank high and start there.

If you have structured data, check how it displays in SERP by finding that page in Google or using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

Also, check the data for accuracy. Sometimes, the product image has changed and you have to update it.

Off-page SEO audit for eCommerce

This concludes your ecommerce SEO audit on the website. Now, you have to check off-page SEO efforts. Off-page includes building and earning mentions from other reputable websites. 

Here are two main ways you can monitor it.

Assessing the quality of your store links

A good SEO practice is to have a regular backlink report to see how effectively you build links. That could be a part of your SEO audit.

Another part is looking for poor-quality links. Sometimes, spammy sites link to yours, and that can bring down your site's rankings as Google associates you with them.

You can view sites that link to you on Google Search Console in the External Links report or with an SEO tool. Filter for recently acquired links if this is not your first ecommerce SEO audit.

Then, look through the list of links and find the ones that look out of place. It’s easier to do with an SEO tool as it often will show a website score. If a website is named weird, has poor website scores, and links to your site from multiple pages, it deserves a look.

Figure out if this site is legitimate or not and disavow it in GSC if it is. This will prevent Google from looking at links from it.

To build more links, try one of these ecommerce SEO strategies.

• Business aggregators. Sites like business directories, customer review sites, and coupon sites let you start a profile and have a link to your site.
  
  

• Listicles. Sites that frequently post about the best products in the niche may review and feature your product.
  
  

• Guest posts. Blog websites in your industry can accept your post or your comment as an expert and link to your store.
  
  

• Local news. If you have a local business and something newsworthy happening or comment on the industry that would interest local news, reach out, and you may get a link.
  
  

• Stellar content. Long, interesting articles with content quality, like a product guide or comparison chart, may attract links on their own.

Evaluation of your social profile

Even though links from most social media platforms don’t directly influence rankings, they can bring traffic and encourage linking to your pages from other sites. Add a social profile linking report to the SEO audit to see how it impacts your ecommerce store.

The best way to do this is to add a Google Analytics traffic report filtered by social media links. This can help you understand which posts bring more shares and traffic.

Summary

A recurrent ecommerce SEO audit is a long process. It’s even longer if you’re doing it for the first time because there might be dozens of issues that need to be found and fixed.

But this process is important for your SEO efforts. Without a clear understanding of how your website is optimized, traffic data may be incomplete. With regular audits, you can find the exact issues that are preventing your pages from ranking higher and fix them.