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26/09/2024

E-commerce SEO Audit Checklist in 2024

SEO, as a technique of digital marketing, is useful in bringing new leads and returning customers. In a sea of brands that have gone digital, your brand becomes the highlight when it becomes more visible. According to my understanding, search engines are like places where people search for the products they need, the information they want, and the brands they want to find. Therefore, optimising the website to fit the rules and regulations of search engine algorithms is important. 

The use of SEO techniques and elements to rank on top of the SERPs is essential for your brand's reach. Your SEO team has to look at the website's performance using SEO parameters and check for different elements to improve the performance. The SEO audit looks at the infrastructure and various elements of the website so the team can take steps to improve its visibility and conversion ability towards new customers. A timely SEO audit is a process that I recommend brands take up every six months. 

What Is An E-commerce SEO Audit?

E-commerce companies use the internet as a vast marketplace where they can reach their customers. The web has a billion users every hour and is a profitable marketing place for an e-commerce business. However, to enhance the reach of an e-commerce business, SEO marketing is important. SEO guidelines of major search engines like Google go through updates periodically. Therefore, SEO marketers have to review and analyse the e-commerce website's SEO elements and performance from time to time.

SEO Audit Checklist For The Next Website Audit

For a proper SEO audit, there are many areas and elements that need reviewing. A website is not just one web page; it is a collection of visual, textual, and media elements. A SEO marketing team has to do a thorough analysis of different parameters to find out the latent issues and areas of improvement. For a thorough SEO audit, here is a checklist I prepared. If you are conducting an SEO audit for the first time for your e-commerce website, you should refer to my checklist and get things done serially. 

Keyword Analysis 

Keywords help in setting the rank of a website on the SERPs. Keywords are what people use to search for a product or site. An e-commerce website needs to create a keyword strategy that aligns with the market niche and audience the business targets. 

The relevance and efficiency of the target keywords change over a period of time. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the keywords used and check their relevance. The audit also examines the frequency of use and the distribution over different web pages. After an audit, the team can tweak the strategy to make it more effective. 

On-page SEO Audit 

When you start to clean your house, you first start from your room. In the same way, when conducting an SEO audit, it is important to go for an on-page SEO audit first. An on-page SEO audit shows the elements across individual pages that need optimisation. 

During this process, the title tags and meta descriptions, as well as product descriptions, go through multiple checks. The headers and URL structures also need examination during the on-page SEO audit. 

Site Architecture and Structured Data

Evaluate the structure of the website and make sure that it's logical, meaningful, and easy to navigate both in terms of users and search engines. Websites added with structured data are beneficial to help search engines understand the content and its information. For example, product schema, item listing schema, etc can be used on ecom websites to enhance its visibility on SERP through rich snippets. 

Mobile Friendliness 

Checking mobile friendliness of your website is an important step you should undertake in an e-commerce site audit. Assess how well your eCommerce site performs on mobile devices because search engines prioritize mobile-optimized websites, and it directly impacts user experience.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Analyze your website's elements to improve the user journey and increase the conversion rate. This involves optimizing product pages, checkout options, website forms, pop ups, and calls-to-action buttons to turn visitors into customers.

Technical SEO Audit 

When conducting an SEO audit, the technical aspects of a custom website also need to be checked. The technical SEO audit looks at problems in indexation and crawlability of your e-commerce website. You can go to the Google Search Console and check the coverage report. 

The report will show the pages that are indexed and pages that are not properly indexed. The report will also show the reason why some pages are not indexed. The SEO team can then work on the issues that are flagged. A technical SEO audit looks for sitemap and robots.txt errors on the web pages too. 

Error Check 

Identify and fix issues such as broken links such as 404 errors, server errors, improper redirects, broken images, etc. While doing the SEO audit, you need to identify the list of pages that show poor page experience and performance of the search engines. Try out Google Search Console to identify the list of pages with on-page issues and ensure proper redirects maintain user experience and preserve the SEO value of your site. 

User Experience 

The user experience arising from a website is a huge part of its success in bringing more customers to the brand. An e-commerce website should ideally have a great user experience. The website is usually the first point of contact for anyone who comes across the brand. Even if the website ranks highly, if the user experience is not excellent, the user engagement levels fall.

When indexing websites, the search engine algorithms also take the UX layout and experience level into account. For example, the site load speed, responsiveness, and navigation elements should be reviewed during an SEO audit. The SEO team sometimes has to work closely with the website design team to bring some positive changes in the UX layout and experience so the website becomes a high-authority site for the search engines. 

Audit The Internal And External Links

A website does not function and rank on its own. The quality of links it has, both internally and externally in backlinks, is important for its SEO score. With blogs and articles, as well as high authority off-page links, SEO friendliness is increased. The SEO audit team has to check the quality of the backlinks to make sure that the website can maintain its high rank. 

Moreover, the website also needs an audit of all the links to see which ones are working and which ones are dead. The SEO team then starts the process of identifying the broken links and improving or replacing them. Effective linking and off-page SEO increase the chance of ranking highly in the SERPs as it maintain the credibility of the e-commerce website. 

Content Review 

If you want your business website to rank highly on the internet search results, you should ensure that the content on the website is very high quality. The content displayed on the website should be accurate, relevant, and original. Plagiarized and AI-generated content brings down the quality and credibility of your website. This can also lead to a low ranking as the search engine crawler becomes confused and flags it as spam content. The SEO audit team has to find duplicate content and remove it from the site.

It is important to use relevant keywords and publish fresh content on the website. It is also important to check for thin content. Thin content includes blogs and articles that do not have enough words or substance to explain a topic. Thin content needs removal or refreshing with more relevant content. Therefore, after the SEO audit, the team can share their observations with content writers and creators. Original and fresh content maintains the relevance and authority of your e-commerce brand in the market. 

Local SEO

Maintaining a Google Business Profiles for your physical stores is beneficial for eCommerce businesses. This local seo practices includes optimizing Google Business Profile, ensuring informative business description, consistent contact details and other details across directories.

Backlink Audit

You all might know that backlinks are important in SEO. Conduct an audit of your website's backlink profile to understand the quality and relevance of inbound links. This helps in identifying spammy links that may need to be disavowed and opportunities to build quality backlinks from third-party websites. 

Social Media Integration

Social media integration also plays an important role in eCommerce SEO to drive more organic visitors. Evaluate how well your eCommerce site is integrated with social media platforms. Make sure that the OG tags and Twitter cards are properly integrated on the site. Sharing the products on social media with proper website details can drive traffic and improve SEO through social signals.

Conclusion

SEO audits take time, but the process is necessary to maintain the quality and ranking of a website. In my opinion, SEO is an essential factor in creating more visibility and needs proper attention. Otherwise, your e-commerce website will be lost in the midst of millions of e-commerce web pages. To make the e-commerce website profitable, your team has to audit and improve the site's SEO performance. 

If you do not have an in-house SEO team, Spiderworks provides SEO services in Dubai as an outsourced digital marketing agency. Hire SEO services in Dubai to evaluate and improve your site's SEO score and SERP rank. A simple step towards an SEO audit can increase the site traffic and lead conversions for your e-commerce business.

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