By The ecommerce industry completely relies on the digital ecosystem and given the current landscape, businesses need to upscale their marketing strategies to stay ahead. Truth be told, the fierce market competition and dynamically changing user expectations often create bottlenecks and stringent situations for businesses that are hard to overcome. Furthermore, if the ecommerce website is not aptly optimized for the search engine, it will never appear in the top results against any user search.
This is why every SEO outsourcing company adapts a thorough and well-executed audit checklist. It helps the professionals to analyze the current performance metrics of the website, determine the loopholes and key development areas, and draft result-yielding action strategies. That being said, we have compiled a complete SEO audit checklist to help you cater to your ecommerce client requirements with ease.
Technical SEO analysis
SEO is not just about curating the perfect content or including the most searched keywords. If you want the website to have higher online visibility and better KPIs, you should pay attention to the technical components also. Below we have described the major areas that should be included in your audit list for technical SEO outsourcing services.
- SSL certification
With increasing cybercrimes, search engines have included security and privacy as the two major ranking factors in their algorithms. Therefore, if you want the website to have higher SERP and better online visibility, acquiring SSL certification for the website is imperative. It determines the level of data security and privacy embedded in the technical architecture of the website, which is why this has become so crucial for SEO.
- Mobile-friendliness
Mobile commerce has become quite popular in recent times. Many users prefer to shop directly from their mobiles rather than depending on the desktop. That’s why Google has introduced the mobile-first indexing algorithm according to which the mobile version of any website is preferred and ranked higher than its desktop counterpart. As a part of technical SEO, you should check the mobile-friendliness of the ecommerce website and ensure its behavior is not compromised when accessed from different mobiles.
- Design responsiveness
Another key area you have to focus on to enhance the technical SEO index is the website’s device-responsiveness. In other words, check if the website behaves differently when accessed from different devices having varying screen size, operating systems, or resolution. It’s imperative to launch a device-responsive commerce website to offer omni channel user experience across all touchpoints.
- URL structure
The structure of the website’s URL plays a crucial role in its online visibility and search engine ranking. It primarily depicts the organization and hierarchy of all the webpages included in a concerned website. Therefore, structuring it appropriately is crucial for allowing the search engine crawler programs to correctly index the web pages. For instance, category pages should be defined properly so that they can be differentiated from the product pages.
- Backlinking quality
If you want to offer the best-in-class ecommerce SEO outsourcing services, ensure to focus on the backlinks and internal links present in the website. There shouldn’t be any dead or obsolete links present in the webpages as that lead the crawlers to nowhere and significantly lower the traceability index. Furthermore, if the links do not have proper domain authority, the web pages won’t be ranked properly and the online visibility will take the hit.
- Website indexability and crawlability
Often the search engine ranking algorithms fail to index the web pages due to hindrances in the crawling action. For instance, if the content arrangement loaded as the HTML schema is not properly structured or there are broken links in the web page, the crawler won’t be able to crawl through the entire page. Hence, the indexability will reduce and the website’s online visibility will be severely impacted. So, check for any crawl errors and fix the problems at the earliest to acquire higher SERPs.
- Page loading speed
Last but not the least, you need to focus on the page loading speed and optimize the same as a part of your technical SEO audit checklist. Large-sized multimedia files, improperly positioned content, and inefficient codes can severely impact the speed, causing the pages to load later than expected. Therefore, you should optimize these factors and reduce amu discrepancy to impart a lightning page loading speed to the website.
On-page SEO optimization with keyword research
Apart from technical SEO, you also need to pay attention to the on-page SEO metrics. Keywords lay the foundation of on-page auditing, which is why curating a proper strategy is imperative. Every ecommerce website has category and product pages. So, you should choose the keywords accordingly while ensuring the category and product keywords are different. Also, if there is any existing keyword list, evaluate the same to check the efficacy and if needed, replace them with newer and more trending ones.
Conclusion
With this comprehensive guide, you will be able to provide the top-notch services to your ecommerce clients as a leading SEO outsourcing company. However, there are several other verticals to be included in the audit checklist, which will indeed depend on the business requirements, current market statistics, and other variables.
