E-commerce SEO Audit Checklist in 2024

You may need a map to know where you are going, and the SEO audit checklist serves as that map for success in e-commerce. E-commerce represents your global online presence and shapes your competitiveness while guiding your business forward. Even if you offer fantastic products or services, you must address gaps in reaching the right audience. 

In today’s digital world, focusing on digital marketing, mainly on SEO, is essential alongside other marketing methods. With over 70% of consumers making online purchases, businesses implement effective strategies to see the best results. However, staying informed about new trends, techniques, and comprehensive e-commerce SEO Audit checklists is essential for increasing customer engagement and driving traffic.

How does this work? SEO audits involve the critical elements that search engines prioritize, leading to increased visibility and, ultimately, higher engagement. So, to support your success in the online marketplace, we have compiled an e-commerce SEO audit checklist that details its significance and importance, which can help you raise your business to new heights.

What is meant by an E-commerce SEO Audit?

An e-commerce audit examines a business website for errors and SEO performance. It analyzes detailed search engine optimization factors and prepares the website for more traffic. Since e-commerce websites have many products and pages, a thorough e-commerce website audit will be used to fix this. Also, after analyzing the current SEO on the e-commerce site, the results show how well the checklist must be used to get organic traffic and location globally.

Importance of SEO Audit for E-commerce

Adding new product pages and revising existing ones is essential, as fresh and optimized content allows us to target a broader audience. A SWOT analysis through the SEO audit helps identify the website’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. 

Revising the marketing funnel and clarifying the website’s intent can capture users’ attention and enhance overall optimization. An audited and optimized e-commerce site effectively converts visitors into potential buyers.

4 Steps: E-commerce SEO Audit Checklist in 2024

We are here with the e-commerce audit checklist to help you maximize your visibility and boost your sales on digital platforms. This checklist includes:

1. On-page SEO Audit

An on-page SEO audit includes all the activities you perform on your website. It means optimizing every business page using unique content and the right keywords to generate sufficient leads. It helps you analyze your website’s health and performance on search engines compared to your competitors. The page contains many factors for which you can perform the best e-commerce SEO audit. You can increase your website search rankings by implementing our on-page SEO guidelines. These include:

Evaluate Your Keyword Usage

Keywords and the algorithms of search engines are directly linked with each other. If you want your carts to be loaded every time, then using the right keyword at the right place is significant because these keywords make your business visible to consumers on every digital platform. 

The keyword placement at the start of the content, tags, and meta description can take your shoe off. Moreover, Google’s search console can help you quickly analyze your search results. Here are some places where auditing is critical to get a better rank:

• Analyse Current Rankings

You can measure the current rankings of your keywords using Google Analytics to rank your content and make your website more visible.

• Find and Incorporate Relevant Keywords. 

Opting for high-volume keywords can work for your e-commerce audit, and the keyword strategy can help. The most competing keywords can drive significant traffic and conversions by targeting your related audience.

• Analyze Competitors Rankings

Keeping an eye on competitors helps you analyze your performance. Comparing keywords and correctly using highly searched terms can help you stand out from your competitors.

• Focus on Search Intent

Consumers visit the website from different perspectives: they only want information about the product or want to buy it. The point is how attractively you present your product and its information to persuade consumers to buy it. On top of that, Google has solved your queries by categorizing search intent for your businesses. 

• Measure Keyword Difficulty

It shows the difficulty of specific keywords to rank on digital platforms. More keyword difficulty leads to tough competition. So, by SEO auditing, you can replace these keywords with low difficulty to get visible and generate leads because focusing on highly searched keywords cuts your budget.

• Keywords search volume

You can use Google Keyword Planner to identify the keyword search volume because it helps you to learn your competitor’s visibility. During the SEO audit of your business, you can focus on keywords with less competition and more volume. With a strategy, you can gain traffic and conversions.

• Examine URLs

Using keywords in your website URL makes it easy for Google to crawl and find the target keyword. According to the new Google algorithm, too much keyword stuffing causes website negligence. 

Optimize Your Title Tags and Meta Description

People on social media and search engines categorize their posts using different title tags to locate content. Digital search engines thrive on title tags because they quickly determine the content page, and a unique one can attract many clicks.

These are the headers and essential parts of the snippet. That is why an e-commerce site strategically uses primary keywords in the title tag of pages to improve its search engine optimization. The ideal length of your meta description must be 160 characters, and your meta title must be between 50 and 70 characters. It is a crucial factor to revise during an SEO audit of your business website.

• Analyze high and low CTR
• Evaluate on-page content strategy
• Focus on content gaps

2. Off-page SEO Audit

It is challenging yet boring to find some business websites on search engines. This is because Google algorithms continuously change in a big way. Businesses must build more website links to maintain a high Google ranking. Off-page SEO audits are essential for all e-commerce businesses. Because having links to other sites back to your website may be even more critical today than ever. The auditing factors include:

Avoid Negative SEO 

Suppose you generate traffic from harmful websites through backlinks at your own eCommerce website. In that case, there are chances of backfiring and a decrease in organic traffic because Google prohibits these SEO techniques to maintain harm. Hence, you can delete such toxic sources and use external sources that are reputable and trustworthy. 

Assess your backlinks

Creating several backlinks with high domain and page authority and a lower spam score can build your business’s authoritativeness and increase your rankings. While performing e-commerce SEO auditing, focus on finding authentic links that are ideally linked to your website because broken ones can shift customers.

Focus on Social Profiles

Social media can create a continuous flow of traffic on your website. Social profile SEO audit is crucial because you gain more followers and reach when you publish fresh and attractive content on social profiles while sharing through internal and external linking. It broadens your reach and increases heavy traffic and followers, who interact through likes, comments, and shares. As a result, your presence increases, and you become visible on search engines, which builds trust. 

3. Technical SEO Audit

Technical SEO audits are performed to check a website’s mobility. They identify all the technical factors and ensure your complex website structure is used smoothly. Technical SEO involves changing your website’s source code and HTML to boost your ranking in e-commerce sites. Due to the many product and service pages on a website, Google finds it difficult to crawl, but technical SEO is a ladder to e-commerce success.

Site for robots.txt analysis

The robots and text help you understand the search engine for your business website. They give crawling and non-crawling instructions to Google to prevent your website from loading, such as non-crawling instructions on shopping carts. 

Analyse XML sitemap

At the same time, an XML sitemap categorizes your website’s pages to make it easy for Google to crawl them. With the help of XML, Google finds it easy to understand and crawl your essential pages. Moreover, it rebuilds your pages if they are deleted from your website.

Avoid Canonicals

As canonical means to create duplicate URLs of your website, many e-commerce sites use these links to bring customers to their website from different platforms, but it has a dark side, too. It makes it difficult for Google to identify the URL of the website, and sometimes, it flags it as duplicate. It is a side of black hat SEO, which should be avoided. Aduuign can help fix this issue on your commerce site.

Promote Mobile Friendliness

According to our research, more than 90% of users prefer mobile phones to navigate digital platforms. So, do they expect the e-commerce website to load faster in a few seconds? While SEO audit for your e-commerce business website, it is essential to check the loading time of different pages on multiple browsers, image optimisations, popups, and test forms, along with the website’s speed tests and signal structure for easy and long-lasting relations with visitors.

Organize Site Structure

Site structure is an integral part of auditing because when website pages are linked together, consumers are shifted from one product page to another, which leads to more purchases and revenue. E-commerce sites need to get consumers to stick with your store.

Check crawlability and indexability 

Indexability and crawlability are must checks in SEO audits because they easily handle search bots and make the directions and chance to appear on search engines. You can build sitemaps, authentic link-building strategies, and amendments in the robot.txt files, which are balanced factors. Tools like Screaming Frog and SEMrush help identify the website’s health, indexing, and crawling issues.

Adhere Response Code

It means a response of return on your website. If the response code is high, your SEO audit for business will be excellent and visible on search engines. You can link and unlink your pages anytime if your links are not more relevant to your product or service. With the help of SEO auditing, you can check the website for any issues while setting up the correct URLs and redirections for more responses.

Perform Internationalization

E-commerce sites operate in different countries and languages, making it difficult for Google to identify the URLs. An SEO audit is compulsory for this internalization because it eases the complexity of using the hreflang tag. What is the Hreflang tag? It is an HTML attribute that separates the language and location. As a result, it makes it easy for Google to crawl the audience geographically.

Add Pagination

It means linking the website’s product and service pages or dividing them into parts such as 1, 2, 3, or following, previous. This aspect of technical SEO audit is essential for an eCommerce site to succeed because it alarms the consumer to shift to the next page and makes them satisfied scrolling your website. Moreover, it makes it easy for Google to crawl and analyze the website.

4. Content Audit

After performing on-page, off-page, and technical SEO of the website, it is time to check the content you have uploaded to inform your customers about your product. Some factors need to be checked while launching SEO content for your eCommerce website.

Repair Broken Links

Not just attaching internal and external links can work for your eCommerce business success. However, continuing SEO auditing can fix it by identifying whether the links pointing to the product or service keep a consumer on that page. If not, the customer will go immediately because of a bad user experience.

Structure Your Data

The data that is well structured can do wonders for your eCommerce site because Google quickly understands your content pages while generating high search engine result pages for your product and service. 

What’s more? You can achieve this by adding schema markup code to your website page to help search engines understand your content and product on SERPs. The product and breadcrumb can work effectively as they are relevant details and the right individuals for your eCommerce site.

Avoid Duplicate Content 

Most e-commerce site owners copy content from other websites through product descriptions and instructions, which flags duplicate content during SEO auditing. You can create unique content, guides, and review stories to make you stand out by resonating with your audience and providing something more than your competitors.

Consider Content Cannibalization and Keyword Targeting 

In this advanced time, many e-commerce businesses are running on different levels. Many e-commerce businesses offer the same products and services, but an SEO audit will work here. How? Using long-tail keywords in your content can help you compete with your competitors by cutting tedious, similar keyword searches.

Maintain Content Quality and Brand Compliance

Adding random content to your website will do everything. You can create valuable, helpful content for the customer, as it will convert your lead and build credibility on Google. How? You can create topic clusters, and by covering those topics in your niches, you can make the technical authority of your business.

Conclusion 

SEO is a hot topic at Google. While it takes time, it significantly improves your business website’s ranking when executed wisely. In today’s competitive digital time, continuously monitoring your website and its SEO factors is vital.

To achieve this, you can conduct on-page, technical, and content SEO audits that prompt consumers to inquire about or purchase your products. But what are the specific needs of e-commerce SEO audits? Given the complexity of e-commerce websites and their many services and products, regular checks and SEO audits are necessary to certify optimal performance.

Lastly, to help you maximize your profits, we have compiled a detailed e-commerce SEO checklist that outlines its importance. However, suppose you do not have the time to manage your website or want to maximize the SEO audit cost. In that case, Marketing Media Connect offers complete digital marketing and SEO services to reduce stress.

What is needed for an SEO Audit?

You need different tools to help analyze and fix the website’s performance. Some of the best tools used in auditing are:

• Google Analytics
• Screaming frog
• Ahrefs
• Google search console
• SEMrush

Is an SEO audit used to analyze a website?

SEO audits analyze a website’s performance by pointing out opportunities and development. They explore all the SEO aspects used to rank the website, from structure and content to optimization.

How to measure SEO ranking?

You can measure SEO ranking in the following ways:

• Returning visitors
• Keyword ranking
• Bounce rate
• Domain and page authority
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Time spent
• Organic traffic

Is SEO important for e-commerce?

Yes, SEO is essential for e-commerce. Because it helps your online business generate traffic through continuous visibility and brand reach.

What are the elements of an SEO Audit?

The most essential elements of an SEO Audit are: 

• On page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Technical SEO

Why is an SEO audit checklist necessary?

An SEO audit checklist is necessary because:

• It optimizes your website and helps you to follow the latest trends.
• It increases your visibility and UX performance.
• It improves on-page, off-page, technical, mobile, and content SEO.