eCommerce SEO Audit Guide

Let’s set the scene: you’re an ecommerce business struggling to rank against the top dogs of retail. Where do you begin to be in with a fighting chance? 

You need to start with an SEO audit.

What Is an SEO Audit?

An audit doesn’t sound particularly fun, but they don’t have to be hundreds of pages full of technical insights no one really understands. An SEO audit should provide you with valuable and actionable insights in order to improve your SEO and boost your rankings. 

Conducting an audit often involves consulting an SEO expert who can identify any issues relating to your website and then outline the relevant steps that need to be taken in order to improve performance.

It should be comprehensive and assess the structure of your website as well as all content. 

Do I Need an Audit?

No website is perfect. There are many reasons why your organic search performance might not be up to scratch. Your website content could be lacking in many ways or there’s something preventing your website being crawled properly. 

If you want to increase your organic traffic or if you’re seeing a sudden drop in visitors to your website, an SEO audit is a great first step to understanding what could be hindering your search performance.

What Does an SEO Audit Look Like?

We chatted to our in-house SEO and PPC expert, Sabrina Bassi, on the steps she takes to perform an SEO audit. 

First things first, we start a website crawl – this will identify any big issues that will be setting your site back. We’ll make a note of any redirects/404/missing meta titles and understand where the issues are. We’ll also conduct a backlink analysis to make sure they’re not harming your site’s performance.

Once we’ve made the easy fixes, it’s on to the research. We take a look at your competitors and conduct a thorough keyword research process so that we can put forth suggestions for change. Using this information, we’ll change meta titles and descriptions, which we can then monitor and report back on. 

The next step is to conduct an audit on your content. The structure of your site might be fixed, but the content is what really drives you up the rankings. We’ll assess for gaps based on our keyword research and provide you with recommendations that should give your organic traffic a boost. Our content specialists can also help with creating copy that is optimised for SEO.

And there we have it! It’s a very simplified guide, but a guide nonetheless. Of course, if you’re thinking of conducting an SEO audit on your site, we highly recommend you obtain a specialist. Our team has a wealth of experience in helping clients bring their websites to that sweet number one spot on Google. Get in touch for your audit today!