How to Conduct an E-Commerce SEO Audit: The Complete Checklist

Today’s marketing scenario is hectic, and organic search plays a critical role here. New customers who have the potential to become regular and loyal find your website through an organic search. Hence, you must conduct an e-commerce SEO audit regularly to ensure brand compliance. For your e-commerce business to become successful, you need to build, populate, and maintain your website to conform to a complete e-commerce SEO audit checklist.

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Before we delve further, let’s look at the basics. 

What is E-Commerce SEO?

E-commerce SEO is a scientific method that helps you present your brand to your target audience easily. An e-commerce SEO site audit may recommend that you have your title tags, Meta description, content, and internal and external links perfectly aligned for the best results. It may appear daunting, but it is crucial for improving your website performance and for figuring at the top in search results. And it is not enough to conduct an e-commerce site audit now and then; you must do it regularly to ensure rank and performance.

Your e-commerce SEO audit may be time-consuming, but it must be part of your marketing strategy. With constantly changing algorithms and customer preferences, your website needs to be tweaked regularly to keep it optimized for emerging conditions.

E-commerce SEO enhances user experience, which is one of the main ranking factors recommended by Google. Your content must target the relevant keywords to reach your target audience. They may have several queries that your content can answer, which Google considers a positive experience and ranks you high on search results.

How To Conduct an E-Commerce SEO Audit?

A comprehensive e-commerce website audit may take a few days to complete, especially if your site has several pages. The good news is that you can split the task into smaller sections to handle it one by one.

Here’s a step-by-step e-commerce SEO audit checklist that will help you improve brand visibility and website performance.

1. First step: Review your Google Analytics

You need to check if the data on your website has been configured correctly. To know this, you must check if your Google Analytics and Google Console are configured correctly to track your e-commerce website’s data. The metrics to track are traffic, clicks, impressions, CTRs, sales, revenue, etc.

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Now’s the best time to audit your website’s Google Analytics setup, well ahead of the migration to Google Analytics 4 in July 2023.

While you check your analytics setup, ensure you implement a custom GTM code on all your web pages. It helps you conduct complete data analysis.

2. Second step: Have SEO tools in place

Crawling all the pages on your e-commerce site is a Herculean task and wastes precious time. All you need to do instead is to find the best SEO tools to complete the task successfully.

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You may want to add SEO tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics to your tool kitty. You can also have Ahrefs and GTmetrix as a backup since they can generate accurate SEO analysis reports and tell you why your website needs to be tweaked. These tools can also tell you how Google’s spiders crawl your website and report what they see. You get valuable insights into whether the crawl depth is low enough.

Keyword research tools are crucial to e-commerce SEO audits and can help you attract more customers. They also tell you about the users’ search queries, particularly the phrases they use while searching for a product or service. This helps you generate new content ideas and write on trending topics. You may want to check out SEMrush, one of the best SEO tools.

3. Third step: Conduct a technical SEO audit

Once you have all the SEO tools organized, it’s time to conduct your e-commerce website SEO audit. It is better to start with the technical SEO audit, which is more about the backend of your website. Unlike the front end, which reveals what your customers see, the backend audit tells you what Googlebot and other search engines see while crawling and indexing your web pages.

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E-commerce companies have several thousand web pages on their websites. It is challenging to keep track of so much information without any bit slipping through unnoticed. If a few pages get lost in the mass of pages, it can confuse Google’s spiders and frustrate your customers. A technical SEO audit is crucial to ensure your site architecture is intact, letting the spiders crawl your website and your users enjoy a great experience. It helps enhance your website’s organic performance.

Sitemaps are a critical part of technical SEO, especially XML sitemaps because they tell Google and other search engines how to process the information found on your website. With an e-commerce site having tons of material, it’s challenging for Google’s spiders to crawl all of it. A sitemap tells them how to scan and index the critical pages of your site.

Site architecture is another area that provides excellent optimization opportunities. Site structure is about the internal linking strategy and navigation system. Ensure your significant web pages are closer to your homepage to make navigation effortless.

What is Not Included in an E-Commerce SEO Audit

An e-commerce SEO audit gives less importance to the e-commerce website itself. Hence, it does not go into analyzing organic competitors. It also doesn’t consider general keyword research critical for SEO audit as it is more concerned about your site having no errors. An e-commerce SEO audit doesn’t care much for compliance and digital accessibility, so you need a separate audit.

In a Nutshell 

To summarize, auditing is crucial to ensure that the overall sales of an e-commerce company are good. Audits also help you get an overview of your business’s performance and what issues need fixing. SEO audits help you learn if your e-commerce business is up to your expectations.

The above points will help you understand how critical SEO audit is for an e-commerce website. Reading the step-by-step SEO audit guide ensures that your site is performing well.

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