Ecommerce SEO Audit: What it is & how to do it

Like a store in the mall, your eCommerce website needs traffic to generate revenue. Some traffic may be driven by word-of-mouth, some by advertisements but a major chunk is driven by organic web searches. About one-third of all traffic to an eCommerce website comes from organic searches. This means your SEO game must be on point for targeted keywords.

SEO is not only more important for eCommerce websites, it is also more complex. E-commerce websites have thousands of pages with content that’s ever-evolving. Every month sees new product pages being added and other pages being removed.

Then there are elements like ‘recommended products’, category setups and other navigational elements that change frequently. What’s more, you’re competing with Amazon, eBay and other online giants for a spot on the first page of search results with a significantly lower budget.

So, how do you figure out whether your SEO efforts are doing well or if something needs to be changed? You need an Ecommerce SEO audit.

What is an Ecommerce SEO Audit?

An Ecommerce SEO Audit gives you a snapshot view of your website’s SEO standing. It analyzes how the site performs across multiple ranking factors. The aim here is to take stock of the site’s organic visibility and identify factors that are limiting your website ranking. An eCommerce SEO audit can be split into:

  • Technical SEO audit: A technical SEO audit addresses elements such as XML sitemaps, response codes, pagination, redirections and so on.

  • Content audit: This refers to reviewing content such as meta titles, keyword targeting, broken links, the presence of duplicate content, etc.

  • Off-page SEO audit: This goes beyond the website itself to look into internal and external links that may interfere with the website’s SEO ranking.

Why is an Ecommerce SEO Audit important?

When it comes to marketing strategies, SEO offers enviable ROI. In an eCommerce website, product and category pages are the most important for SEO ranking. Auditing your website gives you an indication as to the efficacy of your SEO efforts.

You can get a better understanding of what’s working and what isn’t. It helps prioritize content and technical issues and offers ways to fix them. This creates an actionable roadmap to boost site visibility, drive traffic and, ultimately, boost revenue.

How to perform an ecommerce SEO audit

SEO is often considered synonymous with content and keyword usage. However, this isn’t the most important aspect. You might have all the right keywords in the right density but if your site has broken links or HTTP errors, it won’t do much to help your SEO ranking. Hence, always begin your eCommerce SEO audit with a close look at the technical side of things. Some of the key elements to be addressed are:

XML sitemaps

For your website to rank on search results, Google must be able to crawl and index the website. This is why you need a clear XML sitemap. An XML sitemap acts as a reference for all the directories, subdirectories and pages of a website.

To begin with, your SEO audit will check for a valid XML sitemap. This must contain only the key clean, canonical versions of all URLs without any URL parameters, make sure there are no ‘noindex’ meta tags and that the XML sitemap is set to automatically update itself whenever changes are made to any web pages. It should list only those URLs that you want to be indexed.

Robots.txt file

With each product and category getting its own page, it becomes difficult to keep track of the number of pages on an eCommerce website. A search engine may not be able to crawl through all of these pages in the time it needs to deliver results.

Checking the site’s ‘crawl stats’ on the Google Search Console will give you an indication of how much of your crawl budget is being used. A high discrepancy between the number of pages discovered and those crawled may hold your website back. To fix this, you need to look at the robots.txt file.

A robots.txt file tells search engines which pages of your site they are allowed to crawl. If you are going over your crawl budget, this file can be used to block access to irrelevant pages and prioritize access to more important pages. It is also often a good idea to add the sitemap location to this file.

HTTP errors/response codes

Ideally, most pages of your website should return a 200-response code. This indicates that the pages are present and visible to search engines. However, there may be response code issues if the pages are misspelled when creating links or if the pages no longer exist. HTTP errors can bring down your SEO score. Hence, the importance of validating response codes.

You can create temporary and permanent redirects to avoid HTTP errors. The good news is that you can do this even if you aren’t confident about your coding skills. With redirection.io, all you need to do is enter the source and destination URL to implement a redirect.

When pages are no longer relevant, all links pointing to these URLs must be removed. In addition, your SEO audit should be able to identify redirection loops and chains. Once identified, you can use redirection.io to implement cleaner redirects.

Crawlability

Having a clean navigational structure is essential for all eCommerce websites. This not only aids with crawlability but also influences the site visitor’s experience. Ideally, it should not take a visitor more than 4 clicks to reach a relevant category page from your homepage.

To ensure this, your SEO audit must ensure that the site navigation menu lists all the important indexable categories and pages.

You can also take a closer look at the Page Indexing Report available from the Google Search Console. This will indicate the indexing status of all website URLs. The Index Coverage Report will also highlight indexing errors Google may run into while crawling through your website.

Canonical tags

An eCommerce website may have the same product in multiple categories. Thus, it may exist in more than 1 URL. Your website may also use sorting options to generate multiple copies of the same URL with varying parameters.

While this may seem like it makes searching for products easier, it can lead to content duplication. In turn, this makes it difficult for search engines to find the ‘master page’. Using canonical tags can help avoid this issue.

Some of the aspects of canonical tags to look into with an SEO audit are:

  • All original page versions must have a self-referencing canonical tag. This identifies these pages as the ones to be indexed.

  • Alternate versions of these pages must contain canonical tags directed to the original page version.

  • All canonical tags must point only to URLs that can be indexed.

  • A page must not have more than 1 canonical tag.

Domain redirections

Handling domain redirections properly is vital to ranking your website in Google search results. Domain redirection analysis inspects how different domain variations are handled. The aim here is to guarantee that all domain options lead to a unified, canonical version of your website without any duplicate content.

For example, people typing in Wikipedia.com are automatically redirected to Wikipedia.org. Redirects may be used for sub-domains as well as individual pages too.

Done right, domain redirections enhance the site visitor’s experience and help search engines index pages more effectively. However, improper domain redirection can have the opposite effect. Hence, it is important to be careful when creating redirects.

You need an easy way to implement redirects without getting into code and a way to test the redirects before implementing them. This is where redirection.io comes in. This allows you to create as many redirects as required and test each one before taking it live.

Pagination

Pagination is an important step towards boosting search engine visibility. This helps split long category pages into shorter, more manageable chunks. For example, you may create category pages such as website/category for the first 100 products, website/category?page=2 for the next 100 products and so on. An SEO audit looks into your paginated pages to ensure that they are issue-free and don’t have any ‘noindex’ tags.

Content audit

Once you’ve taken care of the technical aspects of your SEO audit, it’s time to address your content. Firstly, make sure there is no duplicate content and you’re using the right keywords in the right density. Using unique product descriptions, FAQ sections, reviews, etc. can help differentiate canonical pages.

Next, audit the meta titles and tags as this is what appears in search engine result listings. Each page must have unique meta tags and stay within the prescribed character limit. Your audit should also flag any content that does not add value and content with grammatical or typographic errors.

Selecting the best tool for an Ecommerce SEO audit

Investing in SEO can increase traffic to your website and result in higher sales. As compared to other methods of driving traffic to your website, it is the most reliable, easy to achieve and offers the highest ROI. However, measuring the impact of your SEO efforts isn’t as straightforward as calculating the ROI of pay-per-click advertisements.

Assessing the effects of SEO takes considerably more time and resources and demands attention to detail. Thankfully, there are a number of tools to help you available in the market today. Some are browser extensions while others function as downloadable programs.

While there are free audit tools available, paid subscriptions offer more reliable results and access to more features. Some of the points to consider when picking the best tool for your SEO audit include:

  • Ability to track and report traffic statistics to your website

  • Ability to record details of visitor behavior, conversions and so on

  • Ease of use

  • Number of technical issues that can be identified

  • Ability to provide actionable insights

  • 24/7 monitoring

  • Real-time alerts to issues that impact SEO ranking

The Redirection.io Ecommerce SEO Audit Tool

Redirection.io is an easy way to manage a website’s technical SEO aspects. The Redirection.io Ecommerce SEO Audit Tool is easy to use for anyone irrespective of their developer capabilities. It logs all web traffic to a website in real-time to create insightful reports on website performance.

These can be filtered by status code, HTTP method, URL, redirection, content type, user agent, referrer, etc. or a combination of filters. This makes it easy to spot SEO errors and issues that may be limiting site visibility on search engines.

It doesn’t stop at identifying the issues, Redirection.io also provides easy solutions to fixing errors and taking proactive steps to improve SEO ranking. Subscribers can create redirects as required and configure general settings to support search engine indexation. In addition, redirection.io lets you edit HTTP headers and HTML meta tags and change robots.txt content.

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