Ecommerce SEO Audit: Essential Guide and Checklist
Chapter 4 of eCommerce SEO Tools
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of getting your website to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) so it gets more organic views, clicks, and sales. According to recent research, less than 1% of searchers go to the second page of Google results, while the number one result gets 27.6% of all clicks. A solid SEO strategy is a prerequisite for a successful eCommerce business.
An SEO audit allows you to identify ways to optimize your site for search engines. It informs you about any holes in your current SEO strategy and how to overcome them. An eCommerce SEO audit is similar to a regular website’s SEO audit but more focused on eCommerce components such as products, categories, etc.
In this article, we provide the most crucial audit tips, recommendations, and best practices for improving your SEO strategy, so you can drive more traffic organically and convert that growing traffic into an ever-increasing customer base.
Summary of key eCommerce SEO audit concepts
The table below summarizes the most vital techniques for an eCommerce website’s SEO audit:
Technique | Description |
---|---|
Keyword audit | Utilize tools like Ahrefs Site Explorer and Google Search Console to analyze the performance of your web pages and their respective target keywords and to identify any problem areas. |
On-page SEO audit | Check your HTML tags (meta, title, headings, etc.), make sure the images are optimized and have descriptive alt texts and file names, ensure schema markup implementation, analyze and improve internal linking, and focus on delivering original and helpful content. |
Technical SEO audit | Ensure proper use of the robots.txt file and XML sitemap, identify and manage broken links, analyze response codes for all pages to identify issues, identify and eliminate redirect chains and loops, and utilize tools like PhotonIQ Prerender to optimize your site’s crawl budget. |
Site speed audit | Audit your Core Web Vitals using Google PageSpeed Insights and implement the suggested improvements. Ensure you use a CDN, minify and compress your code files, optimize performance using PhotonIQ Performance Proxy, and manage any third-party scripts via PhotonIQ Mobile JS Offload. |
Site structure audit | Evaluate your sitemap to check if your site structure is shallow, simple, organized, and without any orphan pages. Perform user acceptance testing (UAT) to analyze whether you effectively use navigation elements and internal linking to simplify your site structure. |
Off-page SEO audit | Audit your backlink profile using tools like Semrush Backlink Audit, remove any toxic and suspicious backlinks, and try to garner more authoritative backlinks. If not already done, create and manage your social media handles, your Google Business Profile, and a blog section on your site. |
Keyword audit
A keyword audit involves analyzing the performance of the target keywords for each web page and then identifying the areas for improvement. You can also compare the performance of your keywords with those of your competitors to determine where you are lacking.
A typical keyword lifecycle
Analyze your keyword strategy
The first step is to utilize keyword and site audit tools to identify the performance of your site’s keywords, especially for the main pages, such as products, categories, etc.Recommended tools:
Site explorer tool (source)
Use these tools to answer the following questions:
- What pages get the most organic traffic, and for what target keywords?
- What pages are getting the least organic traffic, and for what target keywords?
- What keywords have a lower conversion rate?
- Are any two or more web pages competing for the same keyword/s?
Optimize your keyword strategy
Once you have the results of the keyword audit, it’s time to make the required improvements.
For the pages receiving less organic traffic:
- Ensure that the target keyword is integrated thoroughly on the web page, especially in the most critical instances, such as the meta tags, product descriptions, etc.
- Make sure that the target keyword is relevant to the web page.
- If you already follow the above recommendations, you must identify new target keywords for these web pages.
A low conversion rate for a keyword means that the traffic generated by that keyword might not convert into customers. There could be several reasons for this, such as the potential customers not needing your products/services. So, prioritize keywords with better conversion rates, even if the traffic they generate is less than those with lower conversion rates.
If any two web pages have the same target keywords, this will negatively impact the rankings of both web pages because they are trying to rank for the same keyword, thus becoming each other’s direct competition. This is known as “keyword cannibalization,” which you should avoid. Make sure you are using different target keywords for different web pages.
Pages generating high organic traffic indicate that your target keywords are working well, which helps those pages rank better and bring in more traffic. You can also use these target keywords in other content, such as blogs, FAQs, etc.
Automated eCommerce SEO Optimization
- Prerender your website pages automatically for faster crawl time
- Customize waiting room journeys based on priorities
- Improve Core Web Vitals using a performance proxy
On-page SEO audit
On-page SEO includes SEO-related improvements directly applicable to the web page. This section evaluates whether all crucial on-page elements are optimized for SEO.
Check HTML tags
HTML tags are the markings in your code that describe the contents of your web page in a clear and structured way. Search engines use this information to understand your site more clearly and then display that information to the user optimally.
The following HTML tags are most vital for a site’s SEO. Ensure that you are utilizing all of these tags in the intended way and following the related best practices, as mentioned below:
Title tag:
- Mention the title/subject of your web page in the title tag.
- Do not load your title tag with keywords—only use relevant keywords, and make them clear and informative about the page contents.
- Keep the title length under about 60 characters to display the entire title.
- If you have a well-recognized brand, include its name in the title.
How a title tag is displayed in the search results. (Google Search Results)
Description tag:
- Include a brief description of your webpage in the meta tag.
- Any target keywords that were not relevant to the title can be used here.
- The meta description can be lengthy but should include the relevant keywords and your value proposition within the first 160 characters.
- Try not to include any alphanumeric characters in this description.
How a description tag is displayed in the search results. (Google Search Results)
Heading tags:
- Make sure you are using heading tags to structure your page by dividing it into sections.
- There are 6 heading tags (H1 to H6). The H1 tag is for the main heading, H2 is for the secondary heading, and so on.
- Use only one H1 tag per page.
- Make sure that each heading tag tells the search engine about the content it covers.
- Use more focused and longer-tailed keywords in these tags.
- Since 2021, Google has started passage indexing, which indexes even passages/sections within websites. If your headings are optimized, each heading can become a different search result, increasing your site’s probability of appearing in the search results.
Alt text:
- The alt text is designed to display when an image does not load.
<img alt="Example of alt text" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dxnufruex/image/upload/c_limit,q_auto,w_1200/v1716804031/photoniq-prerender-hero-img.png">
- The image tag also has a title text attribute that describes the image. This description is displayed when a user hovers over the image.
<img alt="Example of alt text" title="Example of title text" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dxnufruex/image/upload/c_limit,q_auto,w_1200/v1716804031/photoniq-prerender-hero-img.png">
- Provide at least an alt text description for all of your images, especially the product images. You can also use your target keywords here.
Robots tag:
- Effectively utilize the robots tag to inform the crawler about what pages and links should not be crawled and indexed, and vice versa, to optimize the crawl budget.
- For a more detailed guide by Google on how to use robots tag rules, see this article.
- The table below lists some of the more important robots tag rules:
Rule | Description |
---|---|
all | Search engines have no restrictions on this web page and can index or serve it. If no rule is mentioned, it is the default rule, so you do not need to mention it separately. <br> Use Case: The web pages you want the search engine to index, follow the links, and display in the SERPs. Hence, all the core web pages include product and category pages. |
noindex | Search engines cannot index this web page. <br> Use Case: The web pages you don't want to index and display in the search results, such as checkout, privacy policy, and thank you pages. You can also use it for the pages you don’t want to serve everyone, such as the members-only pages or the staging web pages. |
nofollow | Search engines can index this web page but cannot follow the links on it to discover linked pages. <br> Use Case: Web pages that might have links you don’t want the crawler to follow, such as the product review pages. Usually, web pages with user-generated content should have a nofollow rule. |
noarchive | Search engines cannot generate and display a cached version of this webpage in the search results. <br> Use Case: The web pages that you don’t want the search engine to cache and save their copy. These pages could be advertisement pages, PPC web pages, and any internal or sensitive documentation. Or any time-sensitive web pages that are often changed/updated. |
noimageindex | Search engines cannot index the images on this web page. <br> Use Case: The web pages that might have any images that you don’t want the search engine to save. Web pages with user-generated content (comments, reviews, discussions, etc.) can have a lot of images that are not controlled by you, and hence, you don't want them to be indexed. |
none | Equivalent to using both noindex and nofollow. <br> Use Case: The web pages that you don’t want the search engine to index and neither follow any links on them. These could be really sensitive and confidential web pages, such as the admin pages, etc. |
Use schema markup
Schema markup is code that helps structure specific parts of your website’s content so that Google can interpret it more accurately. This structuring allows Google to represent that data more effectively with users via rich results, like in the examples below.
Google rich results for products. (Google Search Results)
Google rich results for hotels. (Google Search Results)
Google provides structured data (schema markup) formats for numerous elements, such as books, articles, recipes, products, discounts, movies, etc. So make sure you utilize them. According to Google, Nestlé measured that pages that show as rich results in search have an 82% higher click-through rate than non-rich result pages.
For its implementation, Google provides this Structured Data Markup Helper tool, where you can get schema markup (HTML) code for any available web page elements.
Using Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper tool to generate the schema markup code for several elements on the given webpage. (Amazon, Google)
If you are an eCommerce business, here’s a list of the relevant structured data types you may utilize on your site. Ensure that you use the structured data wherever possible to enhance your site’s SEO.
Optimize images
Image optimization for desktop and mobile is integral to on-page SEO, so check that all images are in their most optimized forms. Here are some essential checks to follow for images:
- Use the alt text attribute for all images, as described above.
- Ensure your images have custom filenames instead of generic ones like “IMG_1011.” Like alt texts, Google uses filenames to index images.
- Ensure that the images are responsive, and adjust their sizes based on the screen size, whether the user is on a mobile, tablet, or desktop device.
- Ensure that the images are in modern and web-friendly formats, like WebP. This reduces the image’s size while not affecting the image quality much.
In addition to the tips mentioned above, it is important to ensure the images are relevant to the subject and portray something helpful or attractive to the user.
Effective links
Providing links within your web pages gives the user a way to travel from one page to another. Linking is an immensely important part of your SEO strategy, so you need to implement it properly on your site.
Note that inbound links, also called backlinks, are discussed in more detail in the “Off-Page SEO audit” section below.
Internal links
Internal links direct the user to another page on the same site. They allow the user to view more pages on your site, increasing user engagement. Internal links also improve your site’s search engine visibility, as the crawlers can easily access and crawl all the linked pages. However, if a page on your site has no internal links pointing towards it, the crawler won’t be able to crawl it, and it might not be indexed. As a result, it might not appear in SERPs.To use internal links strategically, consider the following:
- Mention the most important pages in the main menu.
- Make all menus easy to comprehend and follow, even on mobile devices.
- Provide internal links to your site’s deep pages. Users might miss the deep pages otherwise because they are several clicks away from the homepage.
- Use internal linking in your blogs and articles to guide users to relevant content. This allows users to get more information on their topic of interest while still staying on your site.
- Use internal linking on your product pages to guide users to related products. This way, users find something else to buy while also becoming aware of your product line in detail.
External links
External or outbound links redirect users to another website on a different domain. If a topic is relevant to your niche but your site lacks content on it, you may redirect users to a trustworthy external site. Adding external links pointing toward trustworthy and popular sites increases your credibility. It improves your site’s authority for users by providing credible references and sources.
Evaluate content quality
Having unique and helpful content on your site makes it useful for readers and is also highly beneficial for SEO.
Avoiding thin content
Google actively looks for sites with unique and helpful content that is valuable for users and ranks them higher. If your web page has poorly written content that lacks unique information, it will rank poorly and might not even be indexed. This type of poorly written material is called “thin content” and should be avoided at all costs. Remember that content with many grammatical mistakes is also counted as thin content.
Include original, helpful, and grammatically accurate content. Keep publishing new and valuable content based on the latest trends. An excellent tool for identifying current search trends is Google Trends.
Searching Google Trends to identify the latest keyword and other related trends. (Google Trends)
Duplicate content
A page is considered a duplicate if its content is more than 80% similar to another webpage’s content. Duplicate pages are sometimes necessary, such as different versions of the same product or subpages of the main page. Sometimes, they are not, such as outdated pages that are not required because an updated page has already taken their spot. Regardless of the reason for their existence, duplicate pages confuse crawlers, which must decide which pages to index out of the many copies because Google usually indexes only one page when it finds many that are the same.
Google might avoid indexing a significant duplicate page and instead index a less important one, so it’s always a good idea to tell the crawler which web pages to index for the duplicates. You can use a canonical tag or URL for this purpose. Canonical URLs allow you to inform the crawler which pages to index when several duplicates are available. Here’s a complete guide on how and when to use a canonical URL and its benefits.
You can use site audit tools like Google Search Console and Ahrefs Site Explorer to identify places where you have duplicate web pages. Then use the canonical tags to resolve the issue.
Technical SEO audit
This area concerns the more technical aspects of your site. Technical SEO’s primary objective is to make it effortless for the search engine to find, crawl, render, and index web pages. Search engines use web crawlers for this purpose: bots deployed by search engines to crawl web pages, render them, and then index them.
Search engines maintain a huge index (database) of all the indexed sites and their web pages. When users search for a query, they match it with the indexed web pages and display the most relevant results.
There are two characteristics to keep in mind here:
- Crawlability is how easily the search engine can discover, crawl, and render the web pages on your site.
- Indexability is how easily the search engine can add your web pages to its index, making them searchable.
If the web crawler quickly understands the content on your website and the web pages are easily accessible, then its indexing will be more accurate and detailed. As a result, there is a higher chance that user searches match your indexed web pages, helping your site rank higher on the SERPs. If Google cannot crawl and index your site, your site won’t appear in the SERPs, no matter how good the rest of the SEO is!
Let’s see how to improve the crawlability and indexability of websites.
Use a robots.txt file
If your site does not contain a robots.txt file, the crawler will try to crawl the entire website, even irrelevant pages. This wastes your site’s crawl budget, which is how much time a crawler can spend on your site based on how much Google wants to crawl and how much your site allows.
To ensure that the web crawler does not waste your site’s crawl budget, you can provide rules for the crawler to follow in the robots.txt file. These rules tell the crawlers what pages not to crawl.
For example, there’s no point in saving shopping cart pages, thank-you pages, or testing pages in Google’s directories. If you do not allow the search engine to crawl these pages in your robots.txt file, the search engine will prioritize other, more relevant pages, and your crawl budget will be better spent.
Submit your XML sitemap to Google
A sitemap is like a roadmap of your site, describing all the web pages and the different routes (links) between them. An XML sitemap is the best information for helping a crawler identify and crawl your web pages by providing links for all the web pages within a single file.
If there’s no sitemap, the crawler would have to manually follow the link structure on your website to identify and crawl each webpage, utilizing more time and crawl budget. So, create an XML sitemap, add it to the root directory, and submit it to Google via the Google Search Console.
Also remember to submit your updated XML sitemaps to Google after any updates to your site.
Deal with broken links
It’s normal to have broken links for several reasons, such as deleting or updating pages. However, it’s important to remember that these broken links can compromise your SEO strategy by frustrating users and wasting your crawl budget.
You can use any of the above-mentioned site audit tools to identify the broken links on your site. Once identified, replace them with the new links that:
- Point to the updated page.
- Point to an alternative page with similar content.
- Point to a custom 404 page, letting the user know about the issue and where they can navigate instead.
If none of the options above apply, simply remove the broken link.
Check for redirect issues
There are two types of redirection problems:
- Redirect chains: Normally, redirection occurs when a user is directed from one web page to another. The problem begins when users require more than two redirects to reach their destination, which confuses both users and the crawlers.
- Redirect loops: A loop occurs when a user goes through one or more redirects and lands on the same page where they started.
It’s important to check if your site contains any redirect loops or chains and eliminate them. Several site audit tools can identify these issues, such as Semrush Site Audit and Screaming Frog:
Site audit report using the Semrush site audit tool (source)
PhotonIQ Prerender: A tool to further improve your site’s crawlability and indexing
PhotonIQ Prerender is an excellent tool for optimizing your site’s crawl budget and enabling faster web page indexing. It’s designed specifically for enterprise-level sites with hundreds of web pages, such as eCommerce marketplaces. It prerenders dynamic web pages on the server side, providing a static HTML copy of that webpage to web crawlers so that the crawlers can view the content of the webpages for indexing purposes without having to render the web page itself.
How on-demand prerender works with PhotonIQ Prerender (source)
PhotonIQ prerender saves the web crawler a lot of time, which it can utilize on other web pages on your site, thus optimizing your crawl budget.
An additional prefetching option allows you to prerender all web pages even before a crawler requests them. Thus, when the crawler requests a page, it’s served immediately without having to first render it.
How prefetching prerender works with PhotonIQ Prerender (source)
When prerendering a webpage for crawlers, PhotonIQ Prerender synthetically expands all the collapsed sections. It mimics human interactions like clicking, hovering, and scrolling to access all the collapsed content and links, ensuring its visibility on the prerendered page. This visibility ensures the crawler’s accessibility to essential web page content that it would have missed otherwise.
PhotonIQ Prerender also allows you to set up your crawls, block pages from being indexed, schedule prerendering, and whitelist your IP for greater security. Best of all, this all-in-one SEO solution can be set up without changing anything in your code!
Is your website ready for holiday shoppers? Find out.
Site speed audit
Slow loading could be the most significant factor in causing users to leave your site and not revisit it. A study done by ThinkWithGoogle suggests that the chances of a user leaving a web page rise by 32% when the site loading time extends from 1 to 3 seconds. Even if you have done great SEO for your site, users will not stay on it long enough if it is slow. Slow site speed also hampers crawling because crawlers have to wait longer for the pages to render, wasting the crawl budget.
Here are some suggestions to improve site speed.
Evaluate and improve core web vitals
Core Web Vitals are three crucial metrics that provide a complete overview of your site’s performance and loading times:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The time required for the largest piece of content (image/video/text) on your web page to fully render. Typically, a good LCP value is 2.5 seconds or less.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): The time taken for the longest user interaction (tap, click, etc.) on a web page. A good INP value is usually 200 milliseconds or less.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This value measures the unexpected movement of the visual elements on your web page. A score of 0.1 or less is considered good.
You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights or Chrome’s Lighthouse extension to identify these and other site performance-related metrics.
A site audit on Google PageSpeed Insights (source)
You get different metrics for mobile and desktop versions, so remember to use the mobile version in addition to the desktop one because mobile is usually more important these days.
Pagespeed Insights also provides a diagnostics report with a list of fixes to improve each metric it provides:
Diagnostic report from Google PageSpeed Insights (source)
You might need a developer to implement most of the fixes recommended here. Once you have fixed the mentioned issues, analyze your site again using PageSpeed and see if the metrics have improved.
Although this process is relatively straightforward, it requires time and skill. An alternative that will save you time and resources is an automated tool such as PhotonIQ Performance Proxy (P3). Once integrated with your website, P3 automatically enhances your Core Web Vitals. It optimizes HTML, CSS, and Javascript code to achieve faster load times, lower bounce rates, and a seamless user experience. PhotonIQ Performance Proxy improves site speed for both mobile and desktop, offering a high-quality and consistent user experience across different devices.
Use caching and a content delivery network
Caching systems store frequently accessed content for quick retrieval next time. Browsers, devices, and servers usually have this cache feature built in, saving frequently accessed content automatically for faster retrieval in the future.
A content delivery network (CDN) uses caching to store frequently accessed data for a specific user on a server closest to that user. Whenever that user wants to access that data again, it can be quickly retrieved from the nearest server instead of the potentially distant origin server. CDNs can also deliver dynamic content, which is not cacheable, significantly reducing the load on the origin servers.
CDNs have become an essential part of modern-day applications. They improve user experience and site performance, reduce server load, enable global reach and scalability, and provide obvious SEO benefits. Some of the best CDNs on the market are Amazon CloudFront, Akamai (one of our own partners), and CloudFlare.
Macrometa’s PhotonIQ Edge Services also include AI-powered CDN capabilities, which help enterprises achieve ultra-low-latency performance and harness real-time results.
Manage third-party scripts
Third-party scripts, such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, and social media sharing buttons, are code snippets that execute every time a user visits your site. These scripts serve several purposes, such as tracking users’ activity on your site.
Third-party scripts are executed on the user’s browser, and the longer they take to run, the slower your site will be. Sometimes, these scripts also have security-related vulnerabilities within their code, compromising the user’s privacy on your site.
There are two possible solutions to optimize this aspect of your site.
The first solution is to ensure that you have integrated only the most essential third-party scripts into your site. You should avoid adding third-party scripts just for the minor features they provide.
The second solution is to use PhotonIQ Mobile JS Offload. Mobile JS Offload reduces the load on the user’s device by moving all third-party scripts from the mobile browser to the network edge, enhancing site performance and the user experience. It also provides improved data security and accuracy, advanced customizations, and it is very easy to integrate with your site.
Easily add, configure, and manage third-party tags on your site from the PhotonIQ Mobile JS Offload interface (source)
Minify and compres
Minifying your code eliminates unnecessary characters from your site’s code and makes the code files as small as possible. These unnecessary elements can include white space, line breaks, and comments.
PhotonIQ Performance Proxy (P3) not only minifies the code but also reorganizes it for improved load times. It also has a predefined set of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code optimizations, further enhancing site speed.
Another good technique for improving site speed is compressing the code files to use less memory. P3 also has this feature built-in.
Several other tools, such as HTML Minifier, provide code minification services. Just paste your current code to get its minified version.
Site structure audit
Site structure refers to how you organize and link web pages together, which can be visualized via a sitemap. An easy-to-understand and less complex site structure is always recommended over a complex and messy one. According to a survey of 612 individuals by Clutch, almost everyone (94%) said that easy navigation is the most important website feature.
A less complex site structure also helps crawlers navigate all web pages easily. For instance, it is harder for a crawler to crawl a web page 3-4 clicks away from the landing page than one 1-2 clicks away.
Example of a complex site structure (source)
Example of a simple site structure
Use a shallow structure rather than a deep one
Here’s a list of the most vital best practices that you can follow to get an optimized site structure:
- Organize the site so that all essential web pages are at most two or three clicks away from the homepage and no webpage is more than four clicks away.
- Create categories to organize web pages.
- Make the site structure shallow rather than deep.
Example of a shallow site structure (source)
Example of a deep site structure (source)
Check and remove orphan pages
An orphan web page is one that exists on your site but cannot be accessed via links from any other page. This means a user cannot access that web page except by entering its exact URL.
Orphan web pages are undiscoverable to crawlers and users, so they are not automatically indexed and cannot appear in SERPs. Obviously, it makes sense to ensure that there are no orphan pages on your site.
Example of orphan pages in a website (source)
Navigation elements
Use the navigation elements—CTAs, header menu, footer menu, breadcrumbs, etc.—efficiently so that it’s easier for the users to find and access what they are looking for. The user should not have to ponder where to go next; instead, the next step should be self-explanatory.
If you have a large site with thousands of pages and a lot of content, breadcrumb navigation is essential. It is a type of secondary navigation used to inform users about their current location on the site and the route they took. Breadcrumb navigation is also SEO-friendly because it becomes another instance of internal linking, which is helpful for crawlers. Breadcrumbs also enhance the user experience for large sites, helping the user avoid getting lost.
Example of breadcrumb navigation (source)
Off-page SEO audit
Off-page SEO refers to measures taken outside your website to improve its rankings on the SERPs. For example, someone may publish a detailed review about your eCommerce business and product quality and provide a link to your site.
Google heavily relies on its Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) algorithm to rank websites. It tries to identify the sites that possess the highest expertise, experience, trust, and authority and then promotes them higher so that users get access to genuine and helpful content.
The core purpose of off-page SEO is to improve your site’s performance based on Google’s E-E-A-T algorithm. Here are some key measures to help you achieve this.
Evaluate and improve your backlink profile
Backlinks refer to instances when external sources link to your web pages. Your content looks more authoritative when someone refers to it, so Google considers good backlinks one of the most valuable factors for ranking websites. And if those backlinks are from an already authoritative site, that’s even better.
The first step is to analyze your backlink profile using tools like Semrush backlink audit.
Semrush backlink audit tool (source)
This tool tells you how strong your backlink profile is. It informs you about the sites that link to your site, their authority scores, and the overall toxicity score of your backlinks. The toxicity score informs you about what percentage of your backlinks are from toxic sites—those that are unreliable and suspicious. A lot of backlinks from toxic sites can hurt your site’s rankings.
The best way to generate backlinks is to continue providing unique and helpful content because people tend to refer to valuable and accurate content. This usually takes some time, though, especially if you are new.
Faster ways to get the backlinks include adding your site’s link manually on websites like social media sites, business directories, review sites, forums and communities, and Q&A sites. You can also ask website owners directly to link to your site.
Remember that quality matters more than quantity when it comes to backlinks. Backlinks from sites having bad reputations can even downgrade your rating rather than improve it, so it’s vital to check the quality of your existing backlinks before trying to add more.
Another great way to get backlinks is to analyze your competitor’s backlink profile and then contact the owners of websites that link to your competitor’s site and ask them to also link to yours. If you are better than your competitor in any way, tell them that, too.
Social media engagement
“Two-thirds of people (67%) think websites with links to the company’s social media account are extremely or somewhat useful.” — Clutch
Creating and managing your social media profiles is essential to marketing and SEO. Social media can help improve your site’s and product’s visibility.
You can market your products and offers on social media if you have an eCommerce store. This helps with off-page SEO and encourages users to interact with your products.
You can also utilize open graph tags to optimize your social media activity. Open graph tags let you customize how you want to show a specific webpage on social media platforms. They turn your web page into rich objects with a custom image, title, and description.
Microsoft uses an open graph tag for enhanced visibility and user engagement (source)
You can easily set up these open graph tags using PhotonIQ Prerendering’s Link Preview feature. Provide a web page’s image, title, type, and description, and you’re good to go. You can also manually add these tags to your web page’s header.
Active social media handles linked with your site also help increase the authority and trustworthiness of your site, allowing Google to rank it higher.
Content marketing (blogs)
Content marketing is the more traditional form of SEO, and it is still very valid today. Content tools such as blogs provide the user with information on a topic and try to convey how your product/service is relevant to them.
It’s a good practice to have a blog section on your site that regularly publishes unique and helpful content. As explained earlier, Google actively looks for sites that are helpful, trustworthy, and authoritative and then ranks those sites higher. An active blog section on your site increases your site’s trust and authority, hence, increasing its chance of getting ranked higher by Google.
Local SEO
Local SEO is extremely valuable for businesses with physical storefronts. It helps your physical business appear prominently in location-based searches.
The foremost step is to create and actively maintain your Google Business Profile. It lists your business on Google with all the relevant details, such as reviews, location, hours, address, pricing, social media profiles, etc.
Last thoughts on eCommerce SEO audit
Search engine optimization is an evolving process. You can never say you have a site 100% optimized for SEO. If you stop improving, you never know when your rankings might drop. Think of this as a race with tough competition: everyone is trying to achieve the top spot on the SERPs, and you know that if you lose some momentum, your competition will take the lead.
Search engines frequently update their algorithms and various requirements to enhance the quality of their searches. So, you must stay updated on the current Google search, ranking, and indexing algorithms and adapt your site accordingly.
Continuous improvements are important as they give you an edge over your competitors in the rankings. So consider using SEO tools like PhotonIQ Prerender, Performance Proxy, and Mobile JS Offload to provide that edge, even if you think you have perfected your site’s SEO.
Ecommerce SEO audit checklist
- Analyze which keywords are not helping with generating traffic and replace them with better keywords.
- Analyze which pages are not being ranked and resolve any possible issues.
- Make sure that you are using all of the HTML tags (meta description tag, title tag, headings tag, robots tag) in their optimized forms.
- Use schema markup / structured data for each possible instance on your site., such as products, reviews, FAQs, discounts, etc.
- Check that all images are responsive and in their optimized forms.
- Check that all web pages are fully mobile responsive.
- Be sure that you are using internal linking effectively.
- Evaluate content quality and remove any instances of thin content.
- Make sure to use the correct canonical tags for any duplicate pages, such as variations of the same product.
- Are you utilizing the robots.txt file? If so, are there any updates required to it?
- Add the latest XML sitemap and submit it to Google.
- Identify and fix broken links and pages.
- Identify and eliminate any redirect issues like redirect chains or loops.
- Perform a site speed audit and analyze your site’s Core Web Vitals. Identify what is slowing your site down and fix it because speed = revenue.
- Implement CDN and caching, if not already done.
- Are code files minified and compressed?
- Are there any third-party scripts slowing down your site?
- Make sure your site structure is as shallow and simple as possible.
- Identify and remove any orphan pages.
- Evaluate and improve your site’s navigation. Are you using various navigation elements effectively?
- Evaluate and improve your backlink profile. Add more authoritative backlinks and remove any suspicious or toxic backlinks.
- Does your business have its own active social media profiles? If so, are you actively engaging with users?
- Does your eCommerce site have a blog section? If so, are blogs with helpful content published regularly?
- Do you have a local storefront? Does your business have a Google Business Profile and a local presence?
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