A Step by Step Guide for E-commerce SEO Audit

SEO for e-commerce website owners is always a dilemma between what works and what does not.

Do you completely switch to paid online marketing, or continue to invest in organic search engine optimization and wait for the results?

At DO COMMUNICATION, we have helped brands like Apollo Tyres and ITC with year on year organic growth for existing and newly launched product lines. In our experience, the initial audit holds the key to successful e-commerce SEO implementation.

Moreover, search engine optimization is not a one time fix, it’s an ongoing process, and that is the reason why even the biggest e-commerce brands continue to invest in SEO. Don’t believe us, just scroll down through all those exciting offers and check out the footer side of Flipkart’s homepage.

Importance of E-commerce SEO

Search engine optimization makes your website easily discoverable on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. This is done through technical and content changes on your website and link building activities on third-party websites. Optimization activities done on your site are called on-page SEO and activities done on third-party sites are listed under off-page SEO.

In a highly competitive category like e-commerce, it is not possible to cover every keyword through paid advertising. The costs will be prohibitive and hence the means will defy the end. Therefore, optimizing your website for organic results becomes a logical choice.

Where to begin?

For e-commerce websites, the two most important pages are the product and category pages. Optimizing these pages should be a priority. Recently, we helped ITC launch their customized flour brand called the “Namma Chakki” in Bangalore with hyper local search engine optimization. Our focus was to ensure that the page titles, descriptions, and FAQ sections matched the product and category.

The newly launched www.aashirvaadchakki.com domain was able to register 10x growth within the first two quarters of operation.

Things to Remember

• Ensure a seamless user experience with navigational buttons, call to actions, and easy check-out procedures.
• Organize your category and product page urls correctly.
• Create relevant meta tags for all pages by including highly searched keywords.
• Optimize your images for quality and size and add image alt tags.
• Optimize your websites with mobile-first development to offer an app-like user experience.

Our Step-by-Step Guide for E-commerce Website Audits

Now, while the beginner’s steps mentioned above can help you get going, true success will require a more in-depth website analysis.

As one of the premier SEO agencies in Gurgaon, we have worked with a wide range of e-commerce brands. From byte sized startups like Buttchique and The Moms Co. to platform giants like Apollo Tyres and ITC, we have had our learnings. This guide is a culmination of our experience in doing SEO audits for e-commerce websites and also visits the impact of AI on the future of e-commerce SEO.

Technical SEO Audit for E-commerce Websites

Technical audits measure your website’s code and its compatibility with modern SEO standards. Here are the key parameters to identify and optimize.

• Core Web Vitals: A measure of your website’s load speed and user experience, the core web vitals are an important measure and a ranking factor. Improve your website speed by minifying code, optimizing images, and resolving errors displayed in Google Search Console and Page Speed Insights.

  

• Mobile Friendly Operation: With over 70% of website traffic coming from mobile devices, Google and other search engines have switched to mobile-first indexing of content. By optimizing your website with mobile app-like features, you will not only improve user experience but also rank better. Check your website for mobile performance with tools like GTMETRIX. If you are using an e-commerce platform like Shopify, your websites are automatically optimized for mobile. However, you will still need to contact a Shopify SEO Expert to optimize further.
• URL and Site Structure: Search engines love a properly organized website with correct url hierarchy and SEO optimized url slugs. It not only helps them categorize your website correctly but also enhances user experience as users too can easily understand the site structure by reading the text in the address bar. Check the site url structure for inconsistencies or scope for improvement.
• XML Sitemap and Meta Robots: For large websites, search engines rely on the xml sitemap to crawl and index the content. Having a properly configured xml sitemap and ‘robots.txt’ file ensures that all relevant pages on your website are getting crawled and indexed. You can check the status of sitemap and robots file using tools like Screaming Frog. For an in-depth understanding of sitemaps, you can read our detailed article on sitemaps hare. What are Sitemaps and their importance in SEO?
• Broken URLs: Identifying and removing non-functional pages and links is another key part of the SEO audit process. Since e-commerce websites can have hundreds or thousands of pages, a professional SEO tool is often required to check all the pages with 404 designations. Fixing these issues however will require a more in-depth approach, it may be done through a redirection or through alternate linking.
• Search Google Console Errors: Earlier known as the Google Webmasters Tool, the Search Console offers its own audit of your website, detailing indexing errors and other factors that may be affecting user experience and search engine performance. Pinpointing these issues and knowing what to do about them is another aspect of improving your website’s health score.
• Security Certification: Most browsers nowadays will not open websites lacking a security certificate, more commonly known as an SSL certificate. Domain hosting providers generally offer SSL certification as part of the package, but not always. Or it may be that your SSL certificate has expired, as it is usually issued for 1 year duration. Checking the validity and operability of SSL certificates is a part of any technical SEO audit worth its salt.

Page-level SEO Checks for E-commerce Websites

SEO requirements for every page are gonna be different, because every page caters to a different keyword set. Page-level analysis or audit helps in optimizing every product and category page in the best possible way.

• Title and Description Tags: Also called meta tags, these are essentially small snippets of text which get displayed on the search results page of search engines. Meta titles and descriptions are a primary marker for telling search engines about the contents of your page. However, in recent years, Google has started picking up custom meta tags from the page content itself to better serve search queries and identify misleading content practices. So, ensuring that your meta tags and the page content are in sync is a must have.
• Content Quality Checks: Content is king when it comes to SEO, or rather any form of digital marketing. If your content is copy pasted from another website or is simply a reproduction of the OEM descriptions, you may find it harder to stand out in a sea of competing websites. But if you are using high-quality, unique content for describing your products and services and offering more value to the customers, there is a high chance you will rank better. Even Amazon does that by encouraging business owners to improve their listings using the Amazon SEO tools.
• Keyword Density: Keywords are markers which tell search engines about the intent of the page and what all topics it covers about a certain keyword. For example, this blog covers the ‘basics of e-commerce SEO’, then it also talks about ‘how to do an SEO audit for e-commerce websites’, and also offers a ‘step-by-step guide to e-commerce SEO’. All of these keywords appear in the text and in a relevant format. Your content too should have keywords in the titles and descriptions, in the headings, and within the content, so a search engine knows how to index and rank your content.
• Rich Snippets Code: Google and other search engines have started displaying certain tidbits of information on the search engine results page itself. You often see a short answer or a step-by-step instruction, or answers to frequently asked questions on the search page itself, with links to the referring website. These results are fetched automatically, but you can increase the chance of appearing in these ‘rich results’ by adding schema codes to your website. For example, there are FAQ schema codes, which tell Google that a certain piece of information is part of frequently asked questions on that topic, or article schema codes, which tell Google that its a blog post.

Content Improvement Audit 

As mentioned above, content quality matters a lot when you are trying to rank organically in a highly competitive e-commerce segment. Here are some things to check for when performing a content audit:

1. Identify and remove low quality content from your website.
2. Do not use duplicate content for product descriptions, meta tags, and other sections like ‘how to use’ and ‘frequently asked questions’.
3. Maintain ideal keyword density of 1-2% per hundred words.
4. Add content to pages with thin content, i.e. pages with very less content on them.
5. Use tables and infographics in your content, especially when displaying product specifications, nutritional information, or other such customer facing information of importance.
6. Use product listing schemas to optimize your content for best visibility.
7. Use high-quality, optimized images in web friendly formats, such as webp.
8. Insert relevant internal links, and even some relevant external links if needed.
9. Refer to trusted sources of information whenever you can and give image credits if you are using images from a web source.
10. Ensure compliance with government rules and regulations when creating content for certain regulated categories of e-commerce, such as food and beverages, personal hygiene products, etc.

Off-page SEO for E-commerce Platforms 

Finally we have the off-page activities which help in improving your site authority by passing on link juice from high-authority domains. Off-page SEO mostly revolves around creating good backlinks. Here are some things to check during the audit:

• Quality and Quantity of Backlinks: Use third-party tools like SEMRUSH and AHREFS for checking the number and type of websites backlinking to your domain.
• Linking Website Authority Scores: Check the back-linking websites’ authority and spam scores. Different platforms will have different mechanisms to calculate these scores but they can still give you a fair idea of the site’s relevance for your domain.
• Remove Spam Links: Toxic backlinks can pull down your SEO ranking. Luckily, you can disavow toxic backlinks through Google Search Console.
• Improve Referring Domains: Backlinks refer to the number of links that your website has, referring domains refers to the number of domains those backlinks are coming from. In simple terms, there may be one person talking about you a hundred times, or there can be a hundred people talking about you once (in a positive sense that is), which one do you think is gonna be more beneficial? So, make efforts to improve the number of referring domains when doing SEO.

Also Read:- Create an Effective E-commerce SEO Strategy in 2024

Reporting and SEO Plan

Once your audit is done, it is time to create a comprehensive action plan based on the findings. Technical, On-page, and Off-page SEO walk hand-in-hand,  you cannot work these out in silos. So, it’s important that you,

• Understand your SEO status and the list of things that need to be done for improvement.
• Have a competent team or digital agency that can prioritize and execute the SEO strategy.
• Set a clear set of objectives and KPIs and work towards achieving them in short, mid, and long term.
• Regularly monitor the page performance by reviewing Google Analytics and Search Console reports and find new ways to drive growth.

Work with Us

For the past 10 years, we have worked with the biggest brands and the smallest businesses to deliver consistent goal-oriented SEO results. If you are looking for SEO advice, we offer a free consultation. You can even contact us for a professional SEO audit of your website for a small one-time payment, giving you the flexibility to try before you buy our SEO services.

For more details, write to us at info@digitalobsession.in.