15 Feb
These days you can’t just build a website and expect people to find you. There are literally billions of webpages on the internet and competition is fierce. If you’re to stand any chance of attracting organic traffic you need to be constantly evaluating and improving your site.
If you own a site for the purpose of selling your products then you have the added stress of converting your audience. But did you know that an ecommerce SEO audit can help with both?
Today we’re going to show you how to audit your ecommerce site to improve not only organic traffic and rankings but also conversions.
What Is an SEO Audit?
An SEO ecommerce audit involves evaluating the current performance and health of your entire ecommerce website, and accomplishes the following:
- Identifies SEO issues that are currently impacting the performance of your website
- Suggests optimizations for improved performance.
- Contributes directly to the overall increase in website performance, visibility, and organic traffic.
In the end, an SEO ecommerce audit provides guidance for your SEO strategy by illuminating areas you need to improve and how to do so.
Additionally, if SEO is already part of your online marketing strategy, a website audit can help you compare results of your current optimization campaign to past ones. This enables you to better evaluate whether and by how much your SEO efforts are paying off.
1. Canonical tags for filtered pageviews
Most of the ecommerce websites have filter product types based on different categories, such as color, fit, and size. If your ecommerce site has many filtered pages, you want to use canonical tags in your filtered pages to avoid duplicate content.
Having duplicate content on your site can make it difficult for Google to rank your page since your duplicate page will compete for the top spots in search results.
The image below shows filters on the Underarmour website. You can also see that the URL comes with the “/shoes” text at the end when you filter based on shoes. By placing the canonical tags on your filtered pages, you tell a Google crawler which page is the main page you want to rank.
In this case, the canonical tag on “underarmour.ca/en-ca/d/mens/shoes” points to the “underarmour.ca/en-ca/d/mens” URL. This lets Google know that the latter URL is the primary URL you want to rank. You will also prevent your site from potentially receiving a duplicate penalty from Google.
2. Optimize a meta description for each page
Meta description plays an important role. Writing a relevant and unique meta description for each page increases the number of people clicking your link.
Since click-through-rate (CTR) is an important ranking factor in Google search results, you will be jeopardizing your search ranking if you fail to optimize a meta description for your page.
That said, you may find it difficult to implement this in practice if you have hundreds and thousands of pages on your ecommerce site.
In such a case, I recommend you start optimizing meta descriptions for pages currently making you the most revenue and moving down in the order.
3. Keyword placement
Keyword research is a foundational step of on page SEO. If your goal is to rank highly in search results, you need to know what your potential customers are looking for and then build your site to include those keywords. For ecommerce sites, your keyword research will also influence how you build your site architecture and URLs.
Moreover, for keyword research there are lots of tools that can be used to find keywords that more accurately reflect what your potential customers are searching for.
Don’t just overload your page with keywords instead strategically include them throughout your page to let Google know what keywords you are targeting. Also, include a few keywords in your URL, title, description, and alt image text to ensure your page is relevant for your target keywords.
4. Breadcrumb trails
A breadcrumb trail is a graphical control element frequently used as a navigational aid in user interfaces and on web pages. It helps website visitors navigate through your website and helps organize your site in a well-structured manner.
Additionally, breadcrumbs make it easy for Google crawlers to understand your page better, which may help your page to rank better. Moreover, search results will show breadcrumbs instead of your page’s permalink which is another clue that Google emphasizes breadcrumbs for SEO.
You don’t need to overcomplicate things when implementing breadcrumb navigation. Just make sure to follow the standards of good practice, such as using breadcrumbs only when it makes sense and progressing from highest to lowest level.
5. Optimize your ecommerce site for sitelinks
According to Google, they only show sitelinks for structured websites that allow their algorithms to find good sitelinks.
Sitelinks improve click-through-rates and help searchers quickly see pages that are relevant to their interests. Furthermore, they add credibility to your sites. Google doesn’t show sitelinks for websites that aren’t well optimized and not trustworthy. If Google trusts your website enough to give a large space on search results, you can sort of view that as a seal of approval from Google.
At the very least, you can assume Google doesn’t see your website as untrustworthy and scammy. While you can’t fully control whether your ecommerce site shows sitelinks in search results, there are a few things you can do to increase your chance.
- Enable breadcrumbs and a sitelink search box
- Structure your website clearly
- Use anchor text for your internal links
6. Do you have reviews on your product page?
Reviews on your product page serve several purposes. First, they give useful information to people who visit your website and help them make better purchasing decisions.
Furthermore, your page can show a star rating in search results, which will help your search result stand out and improve your CTR. According to a study done by CXL found that review stars can improve CTR by as much as 35%.
Reviews bring the added bonus of boosting your conversions to your site. You can check out documentation from Google to learn how best to structure your page so you can maximize your site’s chance to display review snippets in search results.
7. Optimize your site speed
Website speed optimization is the most important part. But with Google confirming that page loading speed will become a ranking signal in the coming months, it’s now more important than ever to optimize page speed on your website.
According to a study 87% of ecommerce sites do not meet the page experience standards set out by Google. You can also see this as an opportunity for your site to gain a competitive edge over others. There are many things you can do to improve your page speed, such as:
- Get a better hosting service
- Use lazy loading, so your image only loads as users scroll down
- Remove large elements on your page
You can use PageSpeed Insights from Google to determine what elements on your page are slowing down speed.
8. Does your website have informational content?
Another amazing way to audit your ecommerce website’s SEO is to write blog posts using the keywords that your target audience is searching for. A study shows that 61% of online shoppers in the US are more confident about purchasing from recommendations that they read in blogs.
Blogging for your ecommerce site can help your business in several different ways.
- Build trust with your audience by providing helpful content
- Establish your brand as an expert in the field
- Improved search engine ranking with relevant, high-quality content on your blog
A blog post you publish today isn’t going to bring an impressive result by tomorrow. But it’s a long-term investment that will help your ecommerce site generate more traffic and build trust and authority with the audience in your niche in the long haul.
Conclusion
An ecommerce site audit might seem like a daunting task. Start optimizing from the best-performing pages and move down in the order as your time and effort allows.
Your results with SEO won’t be instantaneous, but you will be glad you put extra effort into optimizing your site’s SEO down the road.