Setting up an e-commerce business is one of the best ways to make money online in a steady way. Internet traffic is the key to its success, and eCommerce SEO is one of the best long-term ways to get that traffic.
Did you know how to do your SEO audit for eCommerce? If not, you should read this article.
What is an SEO audit for online stores?
In an eCommerce SEO audit, your site’s organic visibility is looked at and problems that need to be fixed are found. A standard audit will look at your current SEO and see how well your site does in terms of different ranking factors. The result is a report with a top-level score and a list of SEO fixes in order of how important they are.
Why it’s important for eCommerce sites to have a good SEO audit?
Search engines are in charge of organic traffic. There are many kinds of traffic, but organic traffic should always be a part of your plan, no matter how much money you have, how big your business is, or how much you know.
Here are some numbers that show why you need to do a good SEO audit for your eCommerce business:
- By 2023, it is expected that eCommerce will bring in 54 trillion US dollars.
- 81% of people look for goods or services on the internet. Every day, people use search engines.
- 33% of website revenue comes from organic visitors, which is a 21% increase from last year. Organic traffic has the best conversion rates after referral traffic and paid traffic.
- Organic traffic is an investment for the long term. Paid traffic only lasts as long as you pay for it, but organic traffic takes longer to gain traction but lasts much longer (and is easier on the budget).
- When you look at all the stats, you’ll see that organic traffic is still one of the best ways for eCommerce sites to convert visitors into customers and make money. As a result, SEO isn’t going away anytime soon. Now that you know why you need an eCommerce SEO audit, let’s get started on the basics of your eCommerce SEO audit!
How to do a perfect SEO audit for an online store
To get the most out of SEO best practices for an eCommerce business, it is important to understand how the site works. As shown below, this can be done with the help of an e-commerce SEO assessment.
Audit of technical SEO
- Indexing: The Indexability tab in Google Search Console gives you a quick overview of indexability. The dashboard shows a list of URLs that Google has crawled and their status (Valid, Excluded, or Erroring). Then, you can look into why each URL’s status is the way it is and do what needs to be done to fix any problems.
- Crawler control: If you want your site to be crawled efficiently, it’s important to control how search engine bots crawl it. Also, you need to be careful about content cannibalization. This can be done in the robots.txt file of a website.
- Mobile-friendliness: Since customers are more likely to browse on their phones than on their computers, mobile-friendliness is a big part of eCommerce SEO audits. Google even uses mobile-first indexing, which looks at how well a site works on a mobile device when deciding how to rank it.
- Page speed: The speed at which a site loads is a part of Google’s ranking algorithm, so there are tools to check a site’s speed, such as PageSpeed Insights. The tool gives you a score for how fast your site is on mobile and desktop, as well as ways to make it faster.
- Setting up the world: International eCommerce sites often have technical SEO problems like broken hreflang tags, bad canonicalization, and slow server response times. You can also use subdomains, ccTLDs, and subfolders on the X.com domain.
- Set up structured data: Schema markup helps search engines figure out what a website is about and can even help your content-rich search results rank higher in Google. Product schema is one of the best types of schema to use because it tells you more about your products’ prices, availability, and how customers rate them.
- Core Web Vitals: The Core Web Vitals (CVW) became a part of the ranking in June 2022. This set of page experience metrics, which includes LCP, CLS, and FID, measures things like LCP, CLS, and FID.
Content Audit
- Keyword targeting map: Do keyword research to find out how the people you want to buy your products or services search for them, and put the questions that get the most searches at the top. Then, using a keyword targeting map, match the possible keywords to current and future sites based on what people are looking for. From here, the rest of your content strategy will be built.
- Metadata: The title tag of a page is one of the most important things that search engines use to rank pages. So, it is possible to use the target keyword(s). Even though the meta description is not a ranking factor, it should be optimized because people are more likely to click on a page if it has an interesting description.
- HTML heading structure: Search engines like well-structured pages because they help them figure out how relevant the page is as a whole. Make sure that every page on your website has the right HTML heading structure, especially the H1 element. To help search engines figure out how relevant a page is, the page’s main target term should be in the H1 tag.
- Content on category and product pages: Well-written content makes it easier for category and product pages to rank for keywords. Make sure each page in a category has its own content that tells the customer what kinds of products they can find there.
- Cannibalization: On eCommerce sites, when two or more pages compete for the same search query, this is often called “keyword cannibalization.” This happens a lot on product pages with features and measurements that are similar to other products. An eCommerce SEO audit will find the best way to stop cannibalization so that the pages have the best chance of ranking.
- Informational content: Not only should eCommerce companies try to be seen for transactional keywords, but they should also try to be seen along the conversion funnel. At the “considering” stage of a customer’s journey, informational content can help build brand awareness and provide relevant solutions.
On-page Audit: User Experience (UX)
- Internal site search: This data can be used to find possible roadblocks in the user journey and decide which products to highlight on category pages and cross-sell modules.
- Products that are out of stock: Managing products that are out of stock is important for SEO and User Experience (UX). Getting rid of these products could hurt your organic traffic by taking away valuable backlinks and the chance to sell more related products. An eCommerce audit will show you how to manage stock availability on a large scale to increase conversions.
On-Page Search Engine Optimization for Your Dropshipping Store
Audit outside of the page
Backlinks are still one of the most important ranking factors in Google’s algorithm, so eCommerce sites need to make sure they have a strong backlink profile to stay competitive in the SERPs. Backlink health checks should be done regularly to find backlinks to the site that could be harmful and “disavow” them so that search engines don’t count them.
Building backlinks: An eCommerce SEO audit will also outline a tiered link-building strategy, including unlinked mentions, broken backlink recovery, and reactive comment opportunities, as well as high-level advice on link-building.
Advantages of an SEO audit for eCommerce
eCommerce SEO audits help build a good website and marketing plan, and they also help fine-tune the website. It also lets us know what our competitors are up to. Even a small call to action (CTA) could bring more people to your website, so it’s important to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing.
Search engines use ranking signals to figure out how to rank a website. Here are the top 7 ways an SEO audit can help an eCommerce business.
- Improves Your SEO Strategy: An eCommerce SEO audit shows you how the algorithm has changed and helps you improve the SEO strategy for your online store. So, auditing on time is important because it lets you evaluate your plan for building your eCommerce website.
- Improves Conversion Rate: An eCommerce SEO audit is a good way to look at the top landing pages and their content, design, and calls-to-action (CTAs), all of which help to improve conversion rates.
- Finds Offsite and Onsite Problems: A website audit finds the mistakes that make people leave your eCommerce site. Spam, dangerous URLs, and backlinks that don’t work are just some examples.
- Improves the Content: A technical SEO audit can help you figure out which content on your eCommerce site works and which doesn’t. If the content is better, people might interact with it more and Google might rank it higher.
- Improves Keyword Strategy: A successful keyword strategy requires a lot of research and an eCommerce SEO audit. An eCommerce SEO audit helps come up with better keywords, which makes it more likely that your site will show up in organic search results.
- Finds New Revenue Sources: If your eCommerce company’s influencers work together, you may be able to reach millions of customers at once. You can also use keyword research to find these possible influencers. An audit of your eCommerce site can help with this because it will give you a list of the top influencers and bloggers who use similar keywords.
- Improves Usability: A website’s usefulness isn’t just based on how it looks, but also on how well it’s put together and laid out. A website audit can show not only which web pages are working well, but also which ones have high drop rates that can be changed for better results.
Last Words
A regular eCommerce SEO audit should be done to learn more about the website and stay ahead of the competition. We hope this article has helped you see why SEO auditing is so important for the success of your eCommerce store. At dropship-empire Blog, you can learn more about how to use eCommerce strategies.