eCommerce SEO audit and eCommerce SEO Audit Checklist are two of the most debated topics in the digital world. The reason for the same is quite interesting. Every eCommerce company wants to show their product links on the top of the search engine results so that they get the visitor to click on the link and land on their website.
Here we are talking about the organic search results. Doing Google Ads can show your site links on the top of the search results. But that’s not a long-term strategy. As it is quite expensive to show your ads and links on the top of the search engine results.
Now coming to the reality that is unbelievable, but you can’t deny that. The reality of the fact is that over 80% of eCommerce companies don’t make it to the top three search results. It simply means that they have issues with their SEO.
If that is fixed correctly it can solve the issue pretty much. But to do that you need to audit your SEO thoroughly. Let’s get into examining the problems of eCommerce SEO. Also, we will discuss how a correct eCommerce SEO Audit Checklist can help you fix your eCommerce SEO Problems.
How an SEO Audit Checklist Can Help You Fix Your eCommerce SEO Problems?
If you run an eCommerce business, you would surely admit that running it is not easy and does pose many challenges. The most challenging problem is getting organic traffic. To get organic traffic you need to be on the top of the Google searches.
The problem with the organic search traffic is that people don’t usually go past the first page. Mostly end up on the top three search results on the first page. Though, some people may go to the second page if they can’t find what they are looking for on the first page.
But, that’s all, 90% of the people don’t go past the second page. So, this means that to get organic traffic your website pages need to appear on the first two pages of the search results.
Now that it is evident that ranking high on the search engine results pages is not an easy task. It needs lots of dedication, work, SEO strategies, and time. Here is when SEO comes into play.
The SEO Strategies for Success
Without a good SEO strategy, eCommerce marketing may not get the result it should have. A good SEO strategy can help you maximize your organic traffic and earnings for sure. SEO is no more an option in the eCommerce industry rather it is mandatory to have in place.
If your website doesn’t show up in the searches on the search engines then it is likely that you will not get the traffic and won’t be able to reach your goals in sales. Hence, it is necessary to plan out your SEO strategies for success and not for the sake of doing it.
Let’s see what it takes to make an SEO strategy for Success.
Get Started with Analyzing Your Website
To start with the SEO checklist first of all you need to analyze your website. Search engines and their algorithms keep changing all the time. Hence, the strategies that work two months back may not work now. Since, on an eCommerce website, it is really crucial to have the best and latest SEO strategies in place so your site keeps selling by attracting customers. The idea is to keep improving your search engine ranks through the right SEO strategy.
SEO mainly consists of on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. It’s best to have a comprehensive SEO Audit Checklist so that you don’t miss out on anything important. However, you can have separate checklists for On-Page and Off-page SEO if that’s convenient for you. In this post, we will go through everything and all steps you need to look upon to fix any SEO issues you have.
1. Fix Any Broken Links on Your Website
Fixing the broken links on your website is crucial. It is not only bad when search engine bots crawl your website for indexing but are also bad for the visitors on your website as they end up on the non-existent pages and quit your website.
Broken links on the website indicate that the administrators of the website are not giving due attention to it and shows unprofessionalism. Despite having great content on your website if there are broken links it means your visitors will not be able to find what they are looking for and so do the search engine bots. It not only hampers your search engine rankings but also lose your customers.
Fixing the broken links is not a big issue and you can do it very easily. You can take the help of the free online tool to find out and fix the broken links. This tool will crawl your site and show you which links on your website are broken, and then you can go to your website and fix those links that are broken.
The links which you don’t need on the site can be removed from the website and the sitemap.xml file so that Google bots don’t crawl them. If you have some external links broken you can find out the best alternative sites to link them to, so that your visitors find it really useful to follow those links. If you can’t find anything to link there then just remove the hyperlink so that your visitors and Google bots read them as text and not as a broken link.
2. Improve Your Content
Content is always king in the world of online marketing. Content marketing is undoubtedly the best strategy of all. Having good, informative, and relevant content helps any website rank faster on the search engines. Good content is loved by your audience and when your audience likes your content Google also loves it and ranks it higher in the search engine result pages.
Invest your time and energy in creating good quality content for your audience. It is also important to keep your content updated. Take a relook at all your content and update it as and when required. If you keep your content updated it would be relevant for your audience.
Keep adding fresh and new content to your website regularly, so that your audience comes back again and again on your website to read it.
3. Check & Speed Up Your Website
Having a website that loads up faster is really important for ranking better in the search engines. Also, your visitors might not like to wait for your website to load up slowly. You can take the help of the Google Page Speed Insights tool. Check for both the desktop and mobile versions of your website and try to fix both.
4. Check Navigation of Your Website
Having your navigation of the site clear, accessible, and user friendly is very important. Without having simple and accessible navigation your visitors will find it difficult to find what they want. Take a look at your website navigation and make it clear, accessible, and user friendly. Especially make it really accessible for mobile users.
5. Make Sure Your Website is Mobile Friendly
Around 65% of all global searches happen on mobile phones. That means you can’t afford to have a website that is not mobile-friendly. If you do that you are clearly losing 65% of your traffic. Make sure your website is optimized for all devices from where people access your website.
You can check your website’s mobile-friendliness through the PageSpeed insights tool. Here you can check your website speed and mobile-friendliness status. If you find that it is not optimized for mobile devices, then consider making it optimized for mobile viewing.
6. Fix Indexing and Technical Errors
You write content on your website and you want that all to be indexed and shown in the search engines. But the reality of the fact is that Google doesn’t crawl everything on your website. Reasons for this are so many. Search engines crawl your website for a very short period of time.
And usually, if your website has large pictures, slow loading pages, duplicate content, then the crawlers would skip them. These issues will negatively impact your website’s crawling and ranking. Hence, in such a situation you need to relook at the content of your website and make it easy for the search engine bots to crawl and index them.
To fix this issue the best way is to take a look at your Google Search Console. It shows you how many pages of your website are indexed and which ones are not indexed. You can also check the pages that are not crawled by comparing the indexed pages from your sitemap.
Once you find the pages that are not yet indexed you can go and find out if there are any heavy images that are slowing the page speed, replace that image with a lighter image. Once you have done the changes then you can go back to the Google Search Console and request Google for indexing those pages.
7. Analyze and Improve the User Experience on Your Website
Having a website with a lot of products and good content is not enough if your user experience is not good. User experience means what people do on your website and how they experience the whole process. It starts from the home page, menu, product pages, cart pages, and checkout pages, and until they end up buying from your website.
So, technically, you need to look at everything, navigation, how your website looks, fonts, spacing, click buttons, mobile optimization, search bars, the responsiveness of your website on all those actions your visitors take on your website.
Creating the right user experience for your audience will surely help boost your conversion rate and grow sales faster. For this, you can take the help of some really good UX designers to design the best user experience for your audience.
8. Analyze and Improve Your Keywords
Keywords are very important to think through and hence you need a real good and well-developed strategy for it. Without having a good keyword strategy you may not get the best results from your SEO efforts. Keyword and SEO are intertwined. With the right keyword strategy, you will be able to attract the right audience to your website. It also helps give a boost to your SEO performance.
Your keywords should be relevant to the search intent. Hence, it is important you analyze your keywords and also analyze the keywords of your competitors. Based on your analysis you can refine your content and keywords to attract the right audience to your website. Also, it can help you rank your keywords better than your competitors.
You can take the help of Google’s Keyword Planner tool. It’s free and it really helps. You can check out this Definitive Guide to keyword selection for more information on choosing right keywords.
9. Analyze Competition
One of the best things to succeed in the market is to know your competition – in and out. The best way is to analyze their website, social media, communication techniques, and marketing strategy. Technically, you need to do a competitor audit. It helps you understand what makes them rank better than you in the search engine result pages.
Once you analyze them you will get to know what makes them get ahead of you and based on your findings you can make your own strategies and move ahead of them.
You can take help of the tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Alexa, or others to find out about your competitors.
10. Improve Your Link-building Strategies
Backlinks are one of the most essential ranking factors that search engines take into consideration. Backlinks are the links that other place on their website that direct people to your website.
However, it is very important to have good and high-quality backlinks for your website. The low-quality backlinks may harm the reputation of your website and won’t help you rank better in the search engines. Also, do not let the spammy backlinks harm your website’s reputation and search engine ranks.
So, you should really do an audit of your backlinks and remove all those low-quality backlinks. With tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs you can also review the backlinks of your competitors. With that you can analyze where are you lacking in getting backlinks.
Once you have analyzed that all, you can develop your backlink strategy to get ahead of your competition and get better ranks in the search engines. The eCommerce SEO audit tools can help you develop a good backlink strategy.
11. Review Your Meta Tags and Meta Descriptions
Meta tags and meta descriptions are also very important as they contain your targeted keywords. But, the meta descriptions and meta tags whether it is the title, tags, keywords, descriptions, alt image tags, are all very important and all contribute to the search engine rankings of your website and web pages.
The meta tags, meta titles, and meta descriptions should have optimal length and format. With the eCommerce SEO audit tool, you can check your meta tags and meta descriptions. Well-written meta tags with relevant keywords drive the right type of traffic to your website.
Meta titles give your audience an idea about your website and web page even before they click and land on your page. Hence, write your meta tags that correspond to the queries of your audience. It helps you get better search engine ranks and more visibility.
12. Make SEO an Integral Part of Your Marketing Strategy
Irrespective of what you sell on your eCommerce website the goal of every other eCommerce website remains the same – creating massing brand awareness, boosting up search engine ranking, driving more traffic, and increasing conversions.
Having said that it is important to have the best SEO practices in place to achieve your targets.
You need to take a relook at your marketing strategy and SEO strategy. You need not follow in the steps of your competitors, rather you should be making a better strategy than them and execute it. Make sure your SEO and marketing strategy is in line with the current marketing trend. This point should be the main focus of your eCommerce SEO Audit checklist, it will surely help you get ahead of your competition.
Conclusion
Finding out and fixing the issues that hamper your search engine ranks with the help of the eCommerce SEO Audit checklist helps you avoid the errors, save time experimenting and wondering what to do as well as keep your site ready for going good with the Google Algorithm updates. It is clearly evident that having a good user experience and a good search engine performance can lead to the success of your eCommerce business.
You can do a thorough analysis of a lot of factors that are significant for your eCommerce website with the help of an eCommerce SEO Audit Checklist. It is important to note that SEO is an ongoing process and it takes time to see results. So, give it enough time to give you a result, don’t rush it, and don’t give it up.
Right SEO keeps you ahead of your competitors. People do many things that are not by the rule books of Google to rank better in search engines. But, you should know that such websites are more likely to get penalties from Google. Hence, it always good to go with the SEO best practices that will help your website grow faster.
Having your site checked with the eCommerce SEO Audit Checklist and made everything right you are sure to get your website ranked better and drive organic traffic and good sales.
PS: If you want professional help in auditing your website and get your website rank better than all your competitors do get in touch with our team.
