How to Conduct a Successful E-Commerce SEO Audit

The E-commerce niche has peculiarities for SEO promotion. The general SEO principles function here but with slight yet essential aspects.

What is E-Commerce

It is the branch of the digital economy that involves transactions on the Internet. In short words, it is buying and selling online.

The scope of e-commerce includes online stores, banking, SaaS services, and other platforms through which you may perform online transactions. Whether a person owns a website about traveling, he may be as creative as possible. However, it is harder to be expressive and unique when selling, for example, irons.

SEO for E-commerce

SEO for E-commerce is a set of tasks with the primary goal of raising the site to the search engines top. It would be best if you improve the website's technical condition and usability to implement that. This optimization will lead to increased targeted SEO traffic, conversions and sales.

Besides, organic search brings the highest number of visitors compared to other channels. The Statista report shows what SEO elements influenced the search ranking the most in 2021. The on-page SEO, which involves working on improving the HTML code and visible page content, wins there!

SEO Audit

It is an inevitable part of SEO promotion. You will need it to assess the effectiveness of a web resource by measuring its performance in the search. SEO analysis of the site establishes the current optimization quality and finds weaknesses. As a result, you will know the growth points and will be increasing traffic from the organic search engine results.

How to do it correctly? It is not enough to read a few articles, as long as the process hides a lot of bottlenecks. You may need some practice or invite experienced specialists. Yet, below we share the steps so you will get an idea of an ideal audit process.
Guide to Perform SEO audit

Technical SEO analysis

It supposes the particular metrics that indicate how well your site is performing. Potential buyers may turn away from your source if the loading speed is low, convenient pagination is missing, or filters do not respond appropriately.

Without this technical SEO monitoring step, you should not go further. No one cures illness without performing premier diagnostics in advance. It makes sense to find out mistakes and thus consider ways of improvement.
Here are the obligatory parameters one should check:

• Correctness of robots.txt;
• Relevance of sitemap.xml;
• The primary site mirror and the only URL format;
• HTTP headers returned by the server;
• Existing pagination;
• Availability of redirects and their correctness;
• Occurring of server errors (presence of links with a 5xx response code);
• Website adaptability for mobile devices;
• Presence and correct configuration of micro-markup of site images;
• Page loading speed;
• Original links from the site.
• As you may see, many rough aspects require the attention of a skilled specialist. If you have Seo guys in your team, delegate the task to them. Alternatively, you may contact third-party assistance. We only want to highlight that this point is one of the most important, and you should never skip it. When you check and notice all the errors according to this list, keep going on with the next step.

Internal SEO analysis

It is when you may take a look at your existing content plan with described actions, topics, and schedules. You should notice what is present on your website. Then start developing a new content plan. Including the latest issues that will add new meanings make your website advanced. Create a technical task with anchors to include and send it to writers.

If you have no team, we add the tips and a list of experienced writers who will be your big help. If you have any articles in the blog section, check if they are unique and do not repeat any others on the Internet.

Apart from that, you should check on-page optimization. It is about meta tags for titles, descriptions, alt tags, headings, and breadcrumbs.

Likewise, you should double-check the entire website structure: categories, subcategories, product pages, filters, the 404-page, duplicated elements, and so on. Specialists claim that the ideal case is when a person can find a required product within three clicks after coming to your website.

The last remark about the content part is that search engine algorithms are learned to check the readability of the articles. They may indicate how real people evaluate your content. The more time they spend on your source, the better. Thus, you must write copies for potential clients and readers, not search bots.

External SEO analysis

Off-page SEO is the vital branch and task to create reliable connections from other sources to your website. You may check with different online tools, payable or free of charge. Ahrefs is one of the most popular tools that gives the advantage of seeing what external sources provide links to your eCommerce store.

All the domains have different authority levels. The higher it is, the more points of trustworthiness the search bot gives. It is better to have fewer links from Forbes and Apple than hundreds from the "no-names" with disputable reputations. There are white SEO techniques to use when coming to that topic. Never play jokes with that point. Use HARO (Help a Reporter Out), guest posts approach, or personal interaction with respectful website owners. It is a long way, but still, it is worth it!

Competitive SEO analysis and keyword research

By analyzing keywords, you analyze your competitors at the same time. You see what topics they highlight and may know what you miss on your source. Alternatively, you see what niche is free and may fill it. Before choosing a list of keywords, you should consider many options because they will become the basis of your site and provide faster or slower growth.

Usability audit

The user experience is crucial for an online store. Check if the buttons, filters, pagination, etc., are convenient. Perhaps, the font or color does not match or is hard to notice? Or should you rename some tabs? Or avoid using such colorful banners? Some tools allow tracking the clients' paths to detect such not apparent items.

With the help of an SEO audit, you can find out what is wrong with your website and where you need to tighten or correct errors. Thanks to it, you will make your site better and more visible to Google, which will increase traffic and conversions as a result. We wish you good luck on that way!