Last Updated on May 7, 2025 by Admin
Is your online store struggling to attract organic traffic?
You are not the only one! The solution lies in improving your site’s visibility in search engines.
No matter how visually appealing your e-commerce site looks, it won’t be able to reach its maximum potential unless it ranks well on search engines. Without a clear visibility, many big brands can remain undiscovered.
While implementing an e-commerce SEO strategy is an important step, the real work lies in its continuous evaluation. It involves regularly auditing the SEO performance to identify weaknesses and work on them.
That’s where conducting an SEO audit for your e-commerce site becomes pivotal. It acts as a diagnostic tool that pinpoints which areas need improvement and offers a roadmap to enhance your search engine rankings.
This blog serves as a detailed guide to e-commerce SEO audits, covering why they are important and how to perform one using a step-by-step e-commerce SEO checklist.
What is an eCommerce SEO Audit?
An e-commerce SEO audit is a detailed evaluation of your online store’s performance on search results. Consider it as a comprehensive check-up that analyses your site’s technical infrastructure, on-page functionality, and content quality.
Performing an e-commerce SEO audit involves evaluating various components such as:
- Page loading speed
- Mobile responsiveness
- Site navigation & user experience
- Organic keyword rankings
- On-page keyword optimization
- Content quality & relevance
- Internal linking
- Website security
- User accessibility
By reviewing all these factors, you can detect problems and pinpoint areas for enhancements. Additionally, regular audits ensures your e-commerce site remains competitive.
Why is it Essential to Perform an eCommerce SEO Audit?
Conducting an e-commerce SEO audit helps you in maintaining and improving your website’s visibility, functionality and overall performance. It allows you to identify and resolve technical issues that may be limiting your rankings.
Here are some additional benefits off performing an e-commerce SEO audit:
- Boost Conversion Rates: According to a 2022 survey, 37% of shoppers leave a poorly designed site while 33% abandon a site that loads slowly. Regular audits help fix these issues and improve user experience that increases sales.
- Gain a Competitive Edge: Strong e-commerce SEO gives you a significant advantage over competitors in terms of rankings, traffic and sales.
- Reduce Ad Spends: Strong SEO practices can boost organic reach without depending on paid advertising. It’s especially beneficial if you’re on a tight budget.
- Improve Security: Top SEO audit tools can find security risks and detect issues like outdated plugins, malicious code, weak passwords, and old security protocols, keeping your website and customers safe.
How to Perform an eCommerce SEO Audit?
SEO audits for e-commerce sites can be daunting for some businesses since there is some complexity involved. To simplify the process, it is better to break it down different sections to ensure no important areas are overlooked.
To make your audits more structured, we’ve divided into 3 key segments:
- Technical SEO audit
- On-page SEO audit
- Off-page SEO audit
This structured approach ensures a thorough review of all critical aspects, each of which is explained in detail below.
Technical SEO Audit
E-commerce sites have a dynamic and complex structure, making technical SEO a necessity as it makes your website easily crawlable, indexable and secure.
While doing a technical SEO audit for your e-commerce website, pay attention to the following:
Review XML Sitemaps and Robots.txt Files
XML Sitemaps guide search engines to find and index important pages like product and category listings. While the robots.txt files controls which parts of you site search engines can access. It prevents indexing of non-essential pages such as shopping carts or login pages.
Both these files are necessary for efficient indexing and crawling, so you must begin creating the file. For site-verification settings, look for Google Search Console in the application store.
Check Page Loading Speed
Slow-loading pages can drop your organic search rankings and reduce conversions, especially on e-commerce sites where user attention is minimal. Improving page speed will enhance the user experience and bring it more sales. As part of your e-commerce SEO audit:
- Evaluate the load time for key pages such as homepage, product pages, and category pages
- Since sites often have multiple images per product, optimizing them using compression, caching and lazy loading is important for boosting page speed.
Evaluate Indexability and Crawlability
The next step in to ensure your e-commerce site is crawlable and indexable for search visibility.
- Use Google Search Console to check which pages Google can index.
- Examine your robots.txt file to check for crawl errors and fix blocked or restricted URLs.
- Make sure all important pages are internally linked and accessible.
- Build quality backlinks to help search engines find and crawl your pages.
Optimize Pagination
Pagination breaks down large category pages into manageable sections, usually displaying around 100 products per page.
For instance, your category page might begin with “yoursite/category” to display the first 100 products. The next set would be shown under “yoursite/category?page=2” for another 100 products, and this pattern continues for subsequent pages.
Proper pagination ensures that search engine bots can find and crawl all product listings.
- Avoid using “noindex” tags on paginated pages.
- Ensure canonical tags are not pointing to the main category page, as this can devalue paginated content.
- Incorrect settings may prevent search engines from indexing deeper pages, reducing visibility for a large portion of your product catalog.
Check for Mobile-Friendliness
With most shoppers browsing on smartphones, your e-commerce site must perform smoothly on mobile phones. A poor mobile experience can lead to high bounce rate and lower search rankings.
- Google uses mobile-first indexing that means it prioritizes your mobile site version. It your mobile experience is weak, your SEO performance will suffer.
- Ensure responsive design, fast-loading speed and easy navigation for all screen sizes.
Secure Your Website with HTTPS
Security is non-negotiable for any e-commerce site. Customers share sensitive details like payments details and addresses during transactions and any hint of insecurity can drive them away.
Google also prefers secure websites in its rankings, making Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate a key factor in maintaining trust.
To check your site’s secure:
- Look for a closed padlock icon in the address bar
- Ensure your URL starts with “https” instead of “http”
On-Page SEO Audit
You must examine your on-page SEO since it directly impacts your site ranking and optimize individual pages. These key areas will maximize your SEO campaign’s effectiveness:
Review Keyword Usage
Begin by evaluating keyword usage across your website. Keywords help your pages appear in relevant search results, attract more visitors, and increase sales.
- Ensure primary keywords appear naturally in page titles, headings, product descriptions and URLs.
- Use Google Search Console to identify underperforming pages and improve their keyword implementation.
- Avoid keyword stuffing and focus on readable and user-friendly content.
Evaluate Meta Titles and Description
Meta tags are the first thing users notice in search results. A compelling tag can encourage clicks and increase click-through-rates (CTR). Pages on the first page of search results usually get higher CTRs than those on the second page.
- Write click-worthy title tags and meta descriptions and include your primary keywords to make it relevant to the user’s intent.
- Optimize descriptions by highlighting USPs to generate engagement.
- If CTR is low, you need to revise your meta tags. If CTR is high but conversions are low, ensure your tag matches with your product page content.
Evaluate Content Quality and Strategy
The final step is to assess your on-page content to check its relevance and uniqueness. Well-crafted content can provide valuable information to your audience, improving your rankings.
- Review each page to ensure it offers informative and keyword-rich content.
- Evaluate your current content strategy to identify gaps and areas for improvement. Compare your content with your competitors to see what they offer that you haven’t yet created.
- Outdated content can impact your rankings, so ensure to update it regularly.
Off-Page SEO Audit
Off-page SEO includes all external factors that influence your site’s ranking. While you can’t change them directly, they are immensely vital to include in your e-commerce SEO audit.
Evaluate Backlinks
Having reliable external domains linking to your site can boost your website’s authority and improve its ranking.
- Prioritize links from reputable and relevant websites.
- Fix broken links and update to relevant URLs using 301 redirects.
- Strengthen your internal linking by adding links from important pages.
Review Social Media Activity
While social media doesn’t directly impact rankings, they do contribute to brand awareness, traffic and potential backlinks.
- Consistently share product pages, blog posts and promotions across your social platforms.
- Review your profile’s analytics to determine which posts are generating clicks and conversions.
- Focus on formats that perform the best for your e-commerce brand.
Wrapping Up!
Conducting a detailed e-commerce SEO audit is important since it gives you a clear understanding of your current strategy and highlights areas for improvement. This checklist will guide you to identify critical gaps, fix performance issues and improve your SEO strategy.
If the audit process feels overwhelming or time-consuming, AlgoSaga is here to assist. Our SEO team specializes in optimizing e-commerce SEO to boost visibility and traffic. We ensure your strategy is effective and aligned with the latest standards.