Everything you need to know about SEO audit for your online store

Audit - what exactly is it about?

A SEO audit is a full analysis of your site, examining how well it stacks up in terms of search engine optimization. An audit analyzes all aspects of your online presence, from content and code, to social media accounts and backlinks. The purpose is to give you a complete picture of how search engines view your website so that you can make adjustments as needed to reach maximum success.

What is an online store audit?

An online store audit is a detailed analysis of individual website elements. It allows you to diagnose both the good and weak points of the website, as well as determine how the store compares to the competition and indicate what actions should be taken to be able to increase sales.

The audit allows you to answer a number of important questions from the point of view of the e-shop’s functioning, e.g. what level of sales is and what to do to improve the results, how do customers get to the store, is the website visible in search results, how the question of conversion is the issue (do people visiting the store become customers and make purchases, if not – at what stage do they abandon the cart), whether the website loads quickly, whether it also displays well on mobile devices, which can be improved, what is the issue of security.

When and why is it worth performing an audit?

If you’re running an ecommerce site, it’s worth looking into performing an audit of your technical and on-page SEO at least once a year. This audit is essentially going through every aspect of your business, including your product pages, category pages, and landing pages; doing so will ensure that every aspect of your store is up to par with modern standards of search engine optimization.

When launching a new website or updating an existing one, it’s always important to do an audit of your site’s technical SEO. It can be time-consuming and tedious, but there are some clear benefits that come with taking a closer look at how search engines crawl and index your content. An SEO audit is especially helpful if you’re planning on making any changes to your site structure or if you want to make sure everything is up-to-date before launching a marketing campaign that hinges on organic traffic.

Audit effectiveness

A search engine optimization audit is a great way to figure out where your online store stands in terms of search engine optimization. This will allow you to identify issues and determine where you can make improvements. No matter how successful an online store might be, there’s always room for improvement. A good technical SEO audit can help you identify these problems and fix them so that your site performs better in search results.

What areas does the online store audit examine?

From an SEO perspective, there are three critical areas every online store should pay attention to: site architecture, page titles and descriptions, and URL structure. If these three points aren’t nailed down, it could have a huge impact on your rankings – which means a huge impact on sales.

However, there are a few areas that need to be looked at in more detail.

Technical audit

This is your comprehensive checklist of every technical detail that could impact your search rankings. Look at internal and external elements like mobile friendliness, security, crawlability and site structure, duplicate content, canonicalization, redirects, crawl issues and more. Once you understand all these factors in detail—and how they affect your specific business—you can fix anything that’s causing problems. If any potential problems are particularly complex or difficult to resolve on their own, enlist help from an expert with experience in ecommerce technical SEO.

UX audit

The website of the online store must be user-friendly. Therefore, easy navigation, ease of use, clear design, consistency and aesthetics count. The page should display properly and load quickly on both desktop computers and mobile devices. The ordering process should be as simple as possible.

Security audit

How well are you protecting your customers’ data? Websites that don’t have any security measures in place can be a major source of worry. Customers are always worried about their personal information being stolen and exposed on various forums or even sold off to third parties. And you can’t blame them: thousands of websites are breached every day. A good first step towards securing your site is performing an audit. Take care of the https protocol and an SSL certificate to get you started.

Competition audit

Competitor research is one of those topics that gets a lot of coverage, but many companies still don’t do it well. The good news is that it can be simple to implement and useful in so many areas. Taking a look at what your competitors are doing can provide insight into everything from content marketing to site architecture, customer service, design and more. So really, what’s not to love?

To sum up - audit is all you need!

If you need help with your store’s optimization, there are a few great places to start. Start with a Google audit, check your on-page elements and pay attention to both technical and content issues. If you haven’t already made an effort with keyword research and structure, now is probably a good time to take a step back and see what could be done better. While an audit won’t solve your problems, it can certainly help you name them.