How To Conduct An SEO Audit For Large E-Commerce Sites

Conducting an e-commerce SEO audit improves your site’s performance and profitability. Identifying and resolving technical issues enhances the user experience for increased organic traffic and conversions. For instance, 47% of consumers expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less, and a 1-second delay can reduce conversions by 7%.

An e-commerce SEO audit goes beyond optimizing your website for Google and helps you deliver a solid user experience for your shoppers. Let’s explore the five areas of an audit you should be familiar with.

5 Steps To Conduct An SEO Audit For Large E-Commerce Sites

As you follow these steps, ask yourself: which issues are the most critical for my e-commerce site and need immediate attention? What steps do I need to take to address these issues effectively?

1. Start with Improving Technical SEO

via Wordstream

Technical SEO is the backbone of your e-commerce SEO campaign. It involves optimizing your site’s infrastructure to ensure search engines can efficiently crawl, index, and rank your pages. Be sure you consider the technical SEO for all types of pages, including product detail pages, category pages, and evergreen content.

Check Site Speed

A 1-second delay decreases customer satisfaction by 16%, and 40% of users abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Slow loading times hurt sales and revenue because impatient customers will likely leave and purchase from competitors with a faster / better user experience.

Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix to measure your site’s loading times. Look for the following common issues:

• Reduce the number of elements on your pages. Instead of multiple image sliders and heavy widgets, use a single, high-quality hero image and essential widgets only.
• Compress and resize images for faster loading. Use tools like TinyPNG or ImageOptim to compress image files without losing quality.
• Store static files temporarily on users’ devices. For example, set your static resources to be cached for at least a week.
• Minify your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files using tools (plugins, applications) that work with your website platform. This process removes extra spaces, comments, and other unnecessary characters.

If manually optimizing site speed feels overwhelming or too technical, hire a professional web developer or agency specializing in website performance optimization.

Ensure Mobile-Friendliness

Mobile shopping is here to stay and 58% of global web traffic now comes from mobile devices. Google uses mobile-first indexing too, meaning it primarily uses the mobile version of your site for ranking and indexing. So, it’s imperative for your e-commerce website to provide a seamless mobile experience.

As a first step, you can verify your site’s mobile compatibility with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. You need to make sure yours has the following features:

• Your site should adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes (smartphones, tablets, and desktops).
• Ensure the font sizes are large enough to be easily read without zooming. Tiny text can frustrate users and make them leave your site.
• Menus and buttons should be easily tappable. To prevent accidental clicks, ensure there is at least 44×44 pixels of space around clickable elements.
• Simplify navigation for mobile users. Use clear, concise menus and avoid complex layouts that can confuse visitors, such as multi-level dropdowns, crowded menus, or excessive subcategories.

Identify & Fix Crawl Errors

Crawl errors can prevent search engines from accessing your site’s content if there is an issue with the HTTP header responses. Use Google Search Console to identify and resolve these issues:

• 404 errors occur when a page is not found. Fix them by redirecting to relevant content or creating a new page.
• Server errors (5xx) indicate problems with your server. Make sure your server is reliable and can handle traffic loads.
• Ensure your robots.txt file does not block essential resources like CSS and JavaScript.

Review Indexation

Make sure that important pages are indexed. If they’re not indexed, they become invisible to potential customers searching for your products. Start by using Google Search Console to check which pages are indexed. The Coverage report will show you the status of your pages and highlight any issues.

Look for pages that should be indexed but aren’t appearing in the search results. Pay special attention to key pages like product listings, category landing pages, and important content pages.

Optimize URL Structure

Make your URLs easy to read and remember like www.example.com/mens-shoes. It helps both users and search engines understand the content of your pages. Keep in mind the following with your site’s URLs:

• Be consistent; if you use hyphens to separate words in your URLs, use them consistently across all pages like www.example.com/category/product-name
• Use keywords in your URLs; this practice is important for search engines and improves customer experience.

For example, the online retailer Chisos uses keyword-rich URLs like https://chisos.com/collections/mens-boots/products/king-roper. This URL includes keywords like “men’s boots” and “king roper,” to improve search engine rankings and enhance user understanding. They’re also consistent about this type of URL structure all throughout their site, which benefits both SEO and users.

Ensure Secure Connection (HTTPS)

Search engines prioritize secure websites. This is especially true for an e-commerce website where a transaction takes place. Ensure your site uses HTTPS to protect users’ data and check for any mixed content issues where HTTPS and HTTP content are loaded on the same page.

If you are unfamiliar with SSL certificates and security protocols, ask your web hosting provider or e-commerce platform provider.

Improve Site Architecture

Organize your content to reflect a clear hierarchy from general categories to specific products or information. This helps users and search engines understand the relationships between your site’s different sections. For example, your site should follow a structure like Home > Category > Subcategory > Product.

Next step: Aim for a flat architecture where important pages are no more than 3 clicks from the homepage: Home > Categories > Men’s Clothing > Jackets.

Lastly, be sure your main navigation menus are clear and logically organized so users can easily find what they’re looking for. Use dropdown menus to group related items under broad categories.

An excellent example is Vitamart, which uses categories and subcategories with dropdown menus on its site. The Vitamins and Supplements category includes subcategories like Multivitamins, Minerals, Letter Vitamins, Antioxidants, Herbs, and Collagen, each with further subcategories. They also offer filters for Brand, Flavor, Size, Availability, Product Type, and Characteristics. This clear organization and filtering system improves user navigation and overall experience.

Schema Markup

Schema markup helps search engines understand your content and can make your site stand out in search results with rich snippets. Use structured data to mark up products, reviews, breadcrumbs, and other relevant elements. With the right markup, your product detail pages will stand out in search results.

2. On-Page SEO Best Practices

With your technical SEO fine-tuned, it’s time to focus on your e-commerce site’s on-page SEO. On-page SEO involves optimizing individual templates, modules, and pages on your e-commerce site. This step involves focusing on the keywords used on your pages, your internal linking strategy, and image optimization.

Assess Keyword Optimization

Use Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush for your keyword research. Look for keywords with a search volume of at least 1,000 searches/month and moderate competition, which typically means they are not too easy or hard to rank. This balance helps you target popular but not overly competitive keywords.

For example, if you sell organic skincare products, you might find keywords like “organic face cream” or “natural moisturizer.”

Once you have your primary keywords (the main terms you want to rank for), add them naturally into key areas of your pages including:

• Titles
• Content
• Headers
• Meta Descriptions

To attract targeted traffic, use long-tail, more specific, and often less competitive keywords. For example, instead of targeting a broad term like “shoes,” use more specific phrases like “waterproof hiking boots for men” or “affordable running shoes for women.” These long-tail keywords usually have search volumes under 500 searches/month but tend to have higher conversion rates because they match the search intent more closely.

Internal Linking

Effective internal linking helps distribute page equity and guides users through your e-commerce website. A few things to remember with your internal linking strategy:

• Internal links are important for any type of content; for example, if you have a blog post about “Winter Skincare Tips,” link it to your “Winter Skincare Products” category page.
• Review your links quarterly; because products go out of stock, manufacturer partnerships change, and links can break, you want to be sure your links are in good shape.
• Use descriptive anchor text for internal links; Instead of generic text like “click here,” use specific phrases, category page names or product titles. This helps users understand what they will find and signals the relevance of the linked page to search engines.

Optimize Images

Follow these steps to optimize images for improving page load times and SEO:

• Provide descriptive alt text for all images, including relevant keywords; this helps search engines understand the image content and improves accessibility.
• Use descriptive image file names with relevant keywords like “red-leather-biker-boots.jpg” instead of “IMG_1234.jpg”.
• Compress images to reduce file size, ideally to 100 KB or less, without compromising quality.

There are several tools for image optimization, but it’s also important to have a process in place for image uploads.

3. Review Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO involves activities outside your website that impact your search engine rankings. These efforts focus on building your website’s reputation, authority, and trustworthiness through external signals like backlinks, social media presence, and online reputation signals.

For an e-commerce site audit, you’ll want to start by examining your current link profile and then develop a strategy for acquiring new links.

Evaluate Your Link Profile

Backlinks, or inbound links, are links from other websites to your site. They are a significant ranking factor because they signal to search engines that your content is valuable and trustworthy.

Evaluate your backlink profile using Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz to analyze the number and quality of backlinks and the domains linking to your site. Focus on acquiring quality backlinks from authoritative and relevant sites, as these are more valuable than numerous low-quality ones.

You can identify authoritative sites by looking for those with high domain authority scores, which can be found using the tools.

Make sure you aim for a diverse range of backlinks from different types of websites to create a natural backlink profile like:

• Blogs
• News sites
• Journalist quotes
• Educational sites
• Government sites
• Industry-specific sites

Develop a Plan to Earn Quality Backlinks

Acquire new quality backlinks through these techniques:

• Create high-quality, shareable content that others want to link to like blog posts, infographics, videos, and original research.
• Write content for reputable sites in your industry. Ensure the content is valuable and includes a link to your site.
• Contact influencers, bloggers, and industry experts to promote your business and request links.
• Join a journalist pitch network like Connectively (formerly HARO) to submit content to valuable publications.
• Find broken links on other websites and offer your content as a replacement. This provides value to the site owner and earns you a link.

4. Audit Your Product Content To Rank Higher

A content audit is vital to your e-commerce SEO strategy, especially for large shopping sites. This process involves evaluating your existing content to ensure it is relevant, high-quality, and optimized for search engines to discover. A thorough content audit of products, category pages and evergreen pages can help you identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement.

Review Existing Content

Start by taking stock of all the content on your website. This includes product and category pages, blog posts, landing pages, and any other relevant content.

• Use Screaming Frog, SEMrush, or ContentKing to crawl your site and create a detailed list of all your pages. Export this data into a spreadsheet to organize and analyze it easily.
• Organize your content into categories based on type (e.g., product pages, blog posts) and purpose (e.g., informational, transactional). This will help you see how well-balanced your content strategy is and where gaps might be.

Assess Content Relevance & Quality

Ensure your content aligns with your target audience’s needs and interests. For each content piece, ask whether it addresses a specific audience need or query. You can hire an SEO consultant to help with keyword research, keyword ideas, audience analysis, and initial drafts while focusing on more strategic aspects of your business like planning marketing campaigns.

Make sure your content is well-written, informative, and engaging. Use tools like Grammarly for grammar and readability checks and the Hemingway App to ensure your content is easy to read.

Check For Optimization Opportunities

Make sure your content marketing strategy is optimized for search engines with these key steps:

• Verify that each piece of content targets relevant keywords. Use Ahrefs or SEMrush to ensure you use the right target keywords and place them naturally in titles, headers, and body text.
• Ensure each page has unique, compelling meta titles and descriptions with relevant keywords. Use a character counter to ensure they are within the optimal length (50-60 characters for title tags, 150-160 characters for descriptions).
• Use header tags (H1, H2, H3) to structure your content. Ensure that each page has one H1 tag that includes the primary keyword, and use H2 and H3 tags for subheadings to improve readability and SEO.
• Ensure all images have descriptive alt text that includes relevant keywords. This not only helps with SEO but also makes your site more accessible.

Analyze Content Performance

Evaluate how well your content performs regarding SEO metrics and user engagement.

• Use Google Analytics to track the amount of traffic each page receives. Focus on pages that receive over 100 visits/month to identify high-performing content. Analyze what makes these pages successful like their topics, formats, or keywords to replicate their success across other types of content. For low-performing pages, those receiving fewer than 100 visits/month, investigate reasons for their poor performance and consider improvements and / or rewrites.
• Measure user engagement metrics like time on page, engagement rate, and conversion rate using Google Analytics and heatmap tools like CrazyEgg. High engagement like an average session duration of over 2 minutes, an engagement rate of 60%+, or a high number of social shares, indicates that your content is valuable to your customers.
• Spend time evaluating the performance of product detail pages. Since these pages drive purchases on the site, you’ll want to ensure that this type of content is as engaging as possible.

SEO Metrics

Use Ahrefs or SEMrush to analyze your content’s target keyword rankings, backlinks, and other SEO KPIs. Track rankings and create reports using any of the reporting tools in this curated list by Attrock chosen best for various keywords and themes to identify which pages rank well and which need improvement.

5. Competitor Insights

Competitor analysis is necessary to understand your market landscape, identify best practices, and uncover growth opportunities. By studying your competitors, you can learn what works well in your industry and adapt those strategies to improve your SEO for e-commerce.

Start by identifying your direct and indirect key competitors using tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush.

• Use their successful tactics to improve your SEO.
• Check their top keywords for high-traffic opportunities.
• Track changes in their SEO strategies and performance.
• Spot content gaps by comparing their content with yours.
• Look at their content types, topics, and posting frequency.
• Review their backlink profiles to spot good link opportunities.
• Note their user experience and site design for improvements.
• Check their social media activity and engagement with 3rd party tools.
• Compare your traffic, engagement, and conversion rates with other SEO tools.

Lastly, spot content gaps by comparing their content with yours, note their user experience, and site design for improvements. Also, track changes in their SEO strategies and performance to adapt to new trends and strategies.

Mastering E-Commerce SEO

As you can see, an e-commerce SEO strategy involves a lot, spanning technical SEO, on-page SEO, a well-developed content strategy, link analysis and acquisition, and keeping a close eye on competitors. As you audit these different areas of SEO, ask yourself: which strategy will improve my site’s visibility and the customer shopping experience to land more sales? Then, double down and continue growing your site’s traffic.

Do you have questions about the tactics mentioned here? Feel free to schedule a consult anytime. We’ll review your e-commerce store’s SEO performance and see where we can help you sell more products.