Top 5 Things to Look Out For in an Ecommerce SEO Audit
An SEO audit is a process for assessing how well a website is optimized for search engines. It is an important part of any SEO strategy, as it can help to identify and highlight common SEO issues that may be holding a site back from achieving its full potential.
There are a number of different focus areas that can be included in an SEO audit, but some of the most common are website structure, content, HTML, and technical SEO factors. If you are looking to improve your website’s SEO, then an audit is the first place you should start. Setting up a baseline and understanding where your site stands currently is imperative if you want to move forward. This article will take a closer look at what an SEO audit is and how it can benefit your website.
1) Robots.txt
The robots.txt file is a text file that contains instructions for web robots (also known as web crawlers or spiders). These instructions tell the robots what parts of the website they are allowed to crawl and index.
The robots.txt file is placed in the root directory of a website, and it can be used to tell robots which pages on the website to crawl and which pages to ignore. For example, if you have a page on your website that you don’t want to be indexed, you can add it to your robots.txt file, and the robots will know to ignore that page. This file may seem simple in nature but is one of the most important files you can have on your website. When auditing your Robots.txt file, you should audit your list of disallowed pages and verify that they should be excluded.
Ecommerce sites often contain a very large number of urls, so it’s important to use your robots.txt file, canonical tags, and noindex tags to preserve your crawl budget and direct Google bots to the more important pages on your site.
2) XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a file that lists the web pages of your website to tell Google and other search engines which pages you want to be crawled and about the organization of your site content. Your sitemap should only include urls you want to be indexed and can typically be configured with a few clicks in the admin of most ecommerce platforms. For ecommerce businesses, including image urls in your sitemap is often a great way to get a boost in image search traffic.
3) Title Tags
Title tags are one of the most important on-page SEO elements. They tell search engines what your page is about and appear at the top of the browser window when it is loaded.
A well-optimized title tag can help improve your organic rankings and click-through rate from search engine results pages. Here are a few optimization tips for ecommerce businesses:
- Use relevant keywords in your title tag
- Keep your title tag under 60 characters
- Use proper capitalization
- Avoid stuffing your title tag with keywords
Optimizing your title tags is not a one time activity for ecommerce brands. Be sure to continue to run controlled tests on your title tags to see the impact to rankings and click through rates.
4) Schema Markup
Schema markup is a type of structured code you can add to your website to help search engines understand your content better. By adding schema markup to your website, you can improve your chances of appearing in rich results and getting more traffic to your site.
For ecommerce, product schema is critical but it’s not the only type of structured data to add to your website. Consider the type of content you have available and use relevant schema to improve your rankings and search appearance. From images to videos, blog content to FAQ pages, there is a wide variety of structured data that can be used to improve your ecommerce brands visibility in SERPs.
5) Core Web Vitals
Core web vitals are a set of key metrics that measure the health of your website. They include things like page load time, responsiveness, and stability. Google has emphasized the importance of these metrics, which is used as a ranking factor in search results. These metrics are especially important for ecommerce businesses to monitor as page load time has a direct impact on ecommerce conversion rates and sales.
To ensure your website is in good shape, you should start by monitoring your core web vitals. There are a few different ways to do this, but one of the simplest is to use the PageSpeed Insights tool from Google. This tool will give you a report on your website’s performance, and it will also give you recommendations on how to improve your scores.
Most ecommerce websites feature a lot of product images that can result in dramatically slow page load times if not properly optimized. Fixing image size, compressing image files, and lazy loading are three of the most common recommendations we encounter when running these tests on ecommerce websites.
Once you have an idea of where your website stands, you can start making changes to improve your scores.
Let ATF Help You be Successful
An SEO audit is an essential tool for any website owner. It can help you find and fix the problems preventing your website from ranking well in search. This article provides a brief overview of SEO auditing and some of the most important things to consider when auditing your ecommerce website but is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all of the items you should be reviewing on your site regularly.
Our in-depth ecommerce SEO audit helps us create an actionable roadmap prioritizing the most impactful optimizations to help ecommerce businesses like yours improve their site health and grow their business.
Contact us today to schedule yours.
