Ecommerce SEO audits: Simple Step-by-Step Guide

E-commerce is one of the most competitive online places, and being different takes more than having beautiful products. When it comes to search algorithms, if customers can’t find your site, your business does not exist. But that’s where an ecommerce SEO audit comes into play.

An SEO audit is like a health checkup for your website. It can help you find problems, fine-tune performance, and ensure your site performs well for search engines and visitors. In this guide, we’ll take you through the process step-by-step so you can confidently do an SEO audit.

Ecommerce SEO audit: What is It?

An ecommerce SEO audit is a detailed analysis of your website’s performance in search engines. It examines technical factors, all on-page and off-page content, and local SEO to identify areas for improvement.

The simple goal is to ensure your website is primed to rank, load, and serve efficiently. By doing an audit, you’re creating a road to recovery and laying the groundwork for sustainable success in the long term.

Stat: Companies that have their website pages loading faster tend to have a 7% higher conversion rate for every second they save on page load time.

Why is an ecommerce SEO audit Important?

Ecommerce SEO audits are not a “nice-to-have” task — they are an essential practice for any company looking to remain relevant within today’s digital marketplace. It is a key part of the SEO strategy adopted by top ecommerce marketing agencies. An audit lets you see your website’s strengths and weaknesses, which lets you ensure that your website performs well for both search engines and users. Here are some of the main reasons why these audits are essential.

Identify Hidden Issues

Your site may appear fine on the surface, but behind the curtain, issues are quietly sabotaging your rankings. An SEO audit catches issues such as slow page load times, duplicate content, missing meta-tags, or serving broken links that can often be overlooked.

• Broken Links: A bad user experience is created each time a visitor clicks on a broken link, and search engines punish sites stuffed with errors.
• Duplicate Content: Duplicate content appears on multiple web pages (with the same or different domain name). Around 29% of websites experience duplicate content problems.
• Page Speed Slow: A slow website loses users. A 1-second delay in page load time can cause a 7% decrease in conversions.

An SEO audit reveals these hidden problems and gives you a clear path ahead to resolve the issues – so your site can run at its full potential.

Boost Traffic

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, indirectly aims to increase organic traffic. An accurate audit helps to keep your site in good shape so that it can show up in front of search engine users more often, landing more traffic from search engine results pages(SERPs).

When you optimize the technical aspects of your site, such as page load speeds, mobile-friendliness, and accurately targeting your keywords, you increase your site’s likelihood of landing on the first page of Google.

Stat: 65.6% of clicks go to the first 5 organic search results.

More visitors don’t just translate into more visitors; it translates into more visitors you can turn into paying customers.

Improve User Experience

SEO stands for “Search engine Optimization” and “User Experience.” If your site loads quickly, is easy to navigate, and serves relevant content, users will likely stick around, engage with you, and convert.

This continues to signal the importance of the user experience in ranking decisions because Google places so much stock in the Core Web Vitals. These metrics focus on:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The loading performance metric.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability.
• First Input Delay (FID): Measures how interactive a page is.

Stat: Sites meeting Google’s Core Web Vitals don’t have a problem with users abandoning them—they’re not talking about who can remain under or over 24% anymore.

An audit helps ensure your site meets these criteria so users are happy and your rankings improve.

Stay Competitive

E-commerce is a ruthless business, and if competitors are spending on e-commerce SEO services and you are not, you are putting them ahead of the game. A good SEO audit should help you get on par with your competitors and highlight where they might beat you.

For example:

• Would your pages outrank their category pages?
• They may have more backlinks or product details.

This can help you understand their strengths and optimize your strategy to do better than them in those areas. And remember, every click that goes to your competition is an opportunity lost for your business. So hire SaaS SEO services today and rise above your competitors.

Adapt to Algorithm Changes

Google and other search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to serve better results to users. These updates can impact your rankings, even if your site ranks well.

An ecommerce SEO audit enables your site to follow the new best practices. For instance:

• Mobile-First Indexing: Google now ranks the mobile versions of websites first.
• Mobile-friendliness: Your ranking might stay the same if your site responds to or works adequately with mobile devices.
• Local SEO Updates: For businesses with physical stores, maintaining your Google Business Profile is essential to being displayed in local searches.

With regular audits, your site may stay caught up. E-commerce web design services can help you optimize performance issues on any device.

Support Long-Term Growth

SEO is not a one-time task; it’s a constant activity. An audit is a great starting point for ongoing improvements, providing a stable baseline for adapting your site as your business and the digital landscape change.

From launching new products, expanding into new markets, or even redesigning your website, regular audits ensure your SEO strategy works towards your goals.

The Step-by-Step Guide to ecommerce SEO audits

Let’s break down the process into manageable steps.

Step 1: Technical Audit

A technical audit centers on the backend structure of your website–that invisible framework that holds everything else in place. Consider it to be the skeleton or base for your eCommerce shop. Without a strong foundation, neither on-page content nor clever design will make up for it. A comprehensive technical audit will ensure that your site works perfectly, is accessible, and is optimized for search engines and users. Here’s a step-by-step overview of the core areas you must cover:

Indexability and Crawlability

They must discover and index your pages to appear in search results like Google. Indexability makes your pages eligible for appearing in search results; search engines need to crawl your site to find your content.

How to Check:

Use Google Search Console to track what happens with pages in the index.

Locate “Coverage” reports in the Search Console for errors, excluded pages, or warnings.

Common Issues:

• Pages blocked by robots.txt.
• Nonlinked links that won’t link to anything.
• Accidentally added no-index tags to key pages.

Why It Matters: More than 46% of all Google searches seek local or specific information. Non-indexed e-commerce pages mean lost opportunities for potential customers.

Robots.txt File

A robots.txt file is a small text file that tells search engine bots what areas of your site they can and can’t crawl through.

How to Check:

• Navigate to yourdomain.com/robots.txt to view your file.
• Ensure necessary pages (product categories, product pages, and landing pages) are not unintentionally blocked.

Key Tip: Block duplicate pages (such as paginated content) or admin panels. But never block JS, CSS, or pages important to your content. Going into specifics, it’s essential to note that txt files can drastically reduce search engine visibility.

XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a roadmap of your website that tells search engines how your pages are set up and organized.

How to Check:

• You can use WordPress to generate the sitemap or Screaming Frog using Yoast.
• Add your sitemap to the Sitemaps section of Google Search Console.

Best Practices:

• Ensure the URLs are canonical (the most helpful page version).
• Remove irrelevant pages from crawling, like thank you pages or duplicate content.
• Make sure to keep your sitemap up to date with site structure.

Response Codes

Response codes are the messages your site sends to browsers and search engines whenever a page is accessed.

Common Response Codes to Monitor:

• 200 OK: Anything loads successfully
• 301 Redirect: Permanent redirection to another URL
• 404 Not Found: The page doesn’t exist (a massive problem for SEO)

How to Fix:

• Identifying Broken Links (404 errors) – You can use tools like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs.
• Configure the appropriate redirects for old or relocated pages (301 or 302).

Why It Matters: Broken pages make for a bad user experience and hurt your rankings.

Canonical Tags

Often present in the e-commerce space, duplicate content is the issue of having identical product details across your 100s (if not 1000s) of pages on your site. Canonical tags indicate which version of a page is the “master copy” to prevent penalties for duplicate content.

Stat: Roughly 29% of the web suffers from duplicate content that hurts ranking.

How to Check:

• Implement tools such as Screaming Frog to track duplicate content across your site.
• Make sure that your canonical tags are correct on every single page.

URLs and Their Structure

URLs—Your URLs need to be clean and descriptive, and each word or path needs to make sense and be readable. Search engines and users prefer short and keyword-optimized URLs.

Best Practices for E-commerce URLs:

• Use descriptive text (for example, “/mens-running-shoes” rather than “/product12345”).
• Do not use special characters, random strings, or extended query parameters.

Pro Tip: Maintaining consistent URL structures makes your site easier to navigate, boosting crawlability.

Navigation & Crawl Depth

Good navigation also helps both users and search engines find essential pages easily.

Key Considerations:

• It should take a maximum of three clicks to reach a significant page from the homepage.
• Guide users and bots with simple navigation menus, internal links, and breadcrumbs.

Why It Matters: The longer visitors stay on a site, the lower the bounce rate, which helps its SEO performance.

Page Speed

As discussed above, page speed is one major ranking factor affecting user experience and conversion rate.

How to Optimize:

• Minimize the size of big images and implement lazy loading.
• Minimize CSS, JavaScript, and HTML.
• Utilize caching tools to enhance loading speed for returning users.

Tools to Use:

• Google PageSpeed Insights
• GTmetrix

Mobile-Friendliness

Google now predominantly utilizes the mobile site version to determine rankings with its mobile-first indexing.

Stat: 63.38% of all website traffic worldwide comes from mobile devices.

What to Check:

• Is your site responsive?
• Do buttons and links require a tap to activate?
• Does the design resize correctly to fit smaller screens?

Tools: Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

Pagination and Category Pages

For e-commerce sites, categories and pagination are essential for contextualizing products.

Best Practices:

• Next and Previous Tags: Paginated Content (rel= “next, rel= “prev”)
• Use relevant keywords and unique descriptions on category pages.

Pro Tip: Category pages (landing pages) are prone to outranking product pages. So, spend time optimizing them to be both user—and search-friendly.

Internal Site Search Optimization

Your internal search function makes searching for particular items/ information easy for users.

Stat: As much as 30% of users use internal site search to look for what they need.

Optimization Tips:

• Take accurate and speedy search results.
• Refine search queries with autocomplete and filters
• Analyze search queries for a deeper understanding of your visitors and modify your content based on that.

Breadcrumb Navigation

Breadcrumbs are a secondary navigation tool that displays where users are on your site.

Why They’re Important:

• Make navigation easier to improve user experience.
• Assist search engines in understanding the structure of your site.

Best Practices:

• It is essential to use breadcrumbs on product pages and category pages.
• Keep breadcrumbs consistent across the whole site.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are a series of user experience metrics that center on:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability.
• First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity.

Stat: Fewer user drop-offs at sites that pass Google’s Core Web Vitals: 24% less likely to abandon a site.

How to Improve:

• Optimize images and fonts.
• Reduce unnecessary scripts.
• Reserve space for ads and images to minimize layout shifts.

Step 2: On-Page Audit

On-page audit is the most important aspect of your e-commerce SEO audit. Under it, you focus on the factors inside your website, which you can directly control, like content, structure, metadata, and usability. These factors influence how well your pages rank in search engines and how engaging they are to users. Let’s understand this aspect in detail to ensure all of your on-page SEO is playing in your favor with the help of ecommerce CRO service:

Keyword Targeting

Let’s not forget that everything you do in your SEO strategy revolves around the keywords. Without the right keywords, you’re missing traffic and sales.

• Know Your User Intent: The first step is to analyze the intent behind all your target keywords. Are they looking for information, ready-to-order, or comparison shopping? Your content needs to match their intent.
• Utilize Keyword Research Tools: Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Google Keyword Planner are examples of tools that can help you find the most relevant keywords for your audience. Find keywords with the right search volume and competition.
• Long-Tail Keywords: These tend to drive in more relevant traffic. For instance, instead of going after “running shoes,” try “best running shoes for beginners under $100.”
• Stay Away from Keyword Stuffing: Your target keywords should be organic throughout your content. When used excessively, they can damage user experience and relationships.

Title Tags & Meta Descriptions

The first things users see in search engine results are title tags and meta descriptions. As the primary driver of clicks, they are important to optimize appropriately.

1. Title Tags:

• Limit them to 60 characters or less to ensure they render correctly in search.
• Place your target keyword close to the title start.
• Make them compelling by focusing on benefits or solving a problem. For example, “Affordable Winter Coats – Stay Warm in Style!”

2. Meta Descriptions:

• There should be 150–160 characters in these.
• Write an actionable copy, and say “Shop Now” or “See Our Collection.”
• That is your main keyword and straight action.

Stat: Meta descriptions result in 5.8% more clicks than when they are not used.

Duplicate Content

Search engines get confused by duplicate content and share the authority between two pages. These issues are immensely important to find and fix on-page through your audit.

1. Common Sources of Duplicate Content:

• Descriptions of products copied from manufacturers.
• Different URLs showing the same content (for example, with and without “www”)
• Problems Information Page in E-commerce category pages.

2. Fixing Duplicate Content:

• Canonical use to show the original version of a page to search engines
• 301 redirects are best for consolidating duplicate pages.
• You may create unique and enticing product descriptions for duplicate content.

Pro Tip: You can use Screaming Frog, Siteliner, or SEMrush to scan the site for duplicate content issues.

Structured Data

Schema Markup, or structured data, helps search engines better understand your content. For eCommerce sites, this can include improved placement in search engine results pages (SERPs) and added functionalities like rich snippets.

1. What to Mark Up:

• Products: Things like the price, availability, and reviews
• Breadcrumbs: Assist search engines in understanding the structure of your website.
• FAQs: Add schema for frequently asked questions to make your content rich.

2. Benefits of Structured Data:

• Provides enhanced visibility with rich snippets, like star ratings or price range.
• Increased click-through rates as a result of more comprehensive search result previews.

Stat: There is always a 30% increase of click through rate in the sites using structured data. 

Internal Linking

Internal linking isn’t merely about navigation—it distributes link equity across your site and directs users to key pages.

1. Benefits of Internal Linking:

• Allows search engines to crawl your site better.
• Relocates authority to key pages: product or category pages.
• Motivates users to consume more, lowering bounce rates.

2. Best Practices for Internal Linking:

• Use relevant key phrases as descriptive anchor text for the target page.
• Link your blog posts with your product pages to boost conversion.
• Don’t overpopulate a single page with internal links.

An internal linking strategy can increase page views significantly.

Image Optimization

E-commerce images are necessary but slow your site down and must be optimized. Images that load forever affect not only your rankings but also your users.

• Compress Images: Use services such as TinyPNG or ShortPixel to decrease file size without compromising quality.
• Use Descriptive File Names: This means renaming the file names using descriptive words with keywords, for example, “red-leather-jacket. jpg” instead of “IMG12345. jpg.”
• Add Alt Text: Adding alt text is necessary for accessibility and helps search engines determine the contents of your images.

Step 3: Off-Page Audit

Off-page SEO encompasses your website’s domain reputation and authority as determined by external signals, the most important of which are backlinks and social signals. This is a very important aspect apart from SEO for ecommerce Product Pages. These factors significantly impact how search engines assess your website’s trustworthiness and relevance. Let’s break it down further:

Evaluate Backlinks

Backlinks are among the most critical off-page ranking signals. Backlinks are like endorsements from other websites linking to your content, which tells the search engines that your content is valuable and trustworthy. That said, all backlinks are not made equal. The quality of the links is more important than the quantity.

Review your backlink profile with Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz tools.

Here are some questions to consider in regards to your links:

• Are they coming from top-quality, authoritative websites?
• Are the referring domains relative to your niche?
• Are any backlinks pointing to spammy or low-quality sites that can negatively affect your SEO?

Actionable Steps to Improve Your Backlinks:

• Disavow Toxic Links: If your website links to low-quality or spammy websites, use Google’s Disavow Tool to avoid getting penalized.
• Earn Links Through Content: Write great, original content like a blog article, a study, an infographic, or a case study with the help of ecommerce content marketing agency  like Wytlabs. This naturally attracts backlinks.
• Outreach Campaigns: Contact relevant industry blogs or websites and offer guest posts or collaboration on content.
• Utilize Broken Link Building: Find broken links on third-party websites in your field and recommend that they be replaced with links referencing your relevant content.

Stat: 3.8 times more backlinks on the top 10 pages on Google vs 2-10 pages.

This again highlights the need to build a powerful backlink profile to achieve top search rankings.

Analyze Your Social Profiles

Social Media plays a substantial indirect role in off-page SEO. While social media links don’t add to your website rankings, they benefit your content’s visibility and engagement, translating into more backlinks and traffic.

Steps to Optimize Your Social Media for SEO:

1. Ensure Consistency: Use your social media handles, business name, and website URL consistently across all platforms.
2. Publish Some Good Stuff: Share frequent updates that people will want to share. Those connected participants also tend to provide backlinks to your sites and blogs.
3. Engage with Followers: Reply to comments, address queries, and join conversations to foster brand loyalty.
4. Add Social Sharing Buttons: Add social sharing buttons so that users can share your content from your website in one click.
5. Utilize Video Content: One of the most shared formats on social media is video. Platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are great for expanding audiences.

Stat: 31% of referral traffic to sites is from social media.

With an expanded social presence, you increase brand visibility, foster organic sharing, and indirectly assist your off-page SEO strategies.

Step 4: Local SEO Audit

A local SEO audit is a must on the eCommerce SEO Checklist. Local SEO optimization is crucial if your business is regionally based or has a local customer base. Local Search Engine Optimization helps your business appear in local searches, assisting local customers in finding you easily.

Check Your Google Business Profile

Your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is the foundation of local SEO. When it comes to businesses in your industry, it’s often the first thing people notice when searching. Ensure the following when it comes to this profile:

• Your name, address, and phone (NAP) are consistent and match what is on your website.
• Add a business description with local keywords.
• Use good-quality pictures of your product, services, or location.
• Keep the posts, offers, or announcements on your profile regularly updated.

Optimize for Local Keywords

Use local-specific keywords to target your audience effectively. For example, instead of “coffee shop,” optimize for “best coffee shop in Dallas.” These keywords help you rank for queries where users seek local businesses.

Tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs can help identify your industry’s most relevant local keywords.

Ensure NAP Consistency

Ensure your website, social media, and directory listings have the same business name, address, and phone number (NAP). Inconsistent NAP information can confuse search engines and impact your rankings.

• Use tools such as Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs to find your niche’s most relevant local keywords.
• Use tools like BrightLocal or Yext to audit your online listings and resolve discrepancies.

Encourage Positive Reviews

The most essential aspect of local SEO is online reviews. Over time, you could build positive reviews on Google, Yelp, or pages relevant to your business. Responding to good and bad reviews shows that you listen to customer feedback, which leads to trust.

Here are some quick tips for making the best of reviews:

1. Request them after a sale or creating a service.
2. Add a “Leave a Review” button to your email newsletters. Ecommerce email marketing services can provide better tactics and strategies for email marketing and newsletters.
3. If allowed, incentivize reviews with discounts or special offers.

Optimize Local Citations

Citations are mentions of your business on various online platforms, typically on listing sites like Yelp, Yellow Pages, or TripAdvisor. Keeping this information accurate and current on these platforms will boost your local SEO efforts.

Use Schema Markup

Use local business schema markup on your website to tell search engines about your business details (like address, phone, hours, etc.). This can help improve your odds of being in rich snippets.

Focus on Mobile Optimization

Most local search happens on mobile devices. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, has fast loading speeds, and has responsive designs.

Stat: 61% of users are unlikely to revisit a mobile site they had difficulty accessing, and 40% will visit a competitor’s site instead.

Conclusion

Regular audits help you stay competitive and in line with the frequent updates by search engines.An ecommerce SEO audit can feel overwhelming, but it’s within your reach when broken down into these straightforward steps. By handling technical issues, optimizing on-page elements, building authority off-page, and refining local SEO, you create a site ready to rank, attract traffic, and convert visitors to customers. Wytlabs can help you optimize your ecommerce site like never before when it comes to SEO.