How to Conduct SEO Audit for eCommerce Website?

Among all websites, eCommerce sites stand out like high-performance sports cars on a crowded highway. They are the ones who sustain extreme traffic loads and speed, requiring them to be reliable and resilient. 

And what’s the best way to maintain reliability and resilience? Among other things, through regular maintenance.

eCommerce SEO audit is one effective type of such maintenance. Regular SEO audits ensure the optimal functioning of all internal and external website elements for the achievement of peak performance and top search engine ranking.

The question is — how to perform an SEO audit of an eCommerce website? Stay with us as we walk through the essential steps of this process.

Backlink Profile and Off-Page SEO Audit

Backlinks are often compared to metaphorical portals that bring organic traffic to one’s website. Think of a backlink profile as your roadmap to credibility, guiding users and search engines toward your products and services.

However, not all backlinks can serve as high-quality roadmaps. There are those who fail to transfer value (in SEO slang called equity/juice) and those who excel at this. The latter are usually the ones that fall within this checklist:

• Connect your eCommerce website with authoritative and relevant domains out there.
• Are naturally embedded within proper content, ensuring contextual relevance.
• Provide a natural mix of dofollow and nofollow link types.
• Originate from diverse and high-quality digital sources.

A thorough off-page eCommerce SEO audit can help you maximize the number of backlinks that exhibit the above-mentioned qualities. Join our team to learn how to buy backlinks wisely and maintain a healthy backlink profile. 

To conduct a thorough backlink profile audit, follow these steps:

1. Analyze Your Existing Backlinks – Use SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEOAnt to check your backlink profile health and report on opportunities for improvement.
2. Disavow Toxic Links – As a first step, get rid of what’s harming your website’s performance, i.e., spammy or irrelevant backlinks pointing to your site.
3. Diversify Your Link Sources – For search engines to rank your website higher in SERPs, ensure a diverse backlink profile spanning blogs, social media, editorial sources, and industry influencers.
4. Monitor Competitor Backlinks – Scan through competitors’ backlink profiles to detect and borrow the best practices (oftentimes, it’s better to do that than to invent a bicycle).

Among the best practices in off-page SEO audit for ecommerce site, the ongoing monitoring of unlinked brand mentions stands out as a high-impact practice. 

Here is the whole routine in a nutshell: whenever you find an unlinked mention of your brand, product or service, reach out to the source’s owner and persuade them to connect with your website.

Content Quality and Optimization

For an eCommerce website, content quality equals conversions, including sales. The content on your website should not only be useful and attractive for the users but also inviting for the search engines.

An eCommerce SEO audit can help with everything above, provided it targets the following elements:

Product Descriptions & Metadata

Identify duplicate descriptions of your product categories and text within those. The end goal is to ensure unique and persuasive copy tailored to your target audience.

In addition, integrate high-value keywords into your meta titles and descriptions. The goal is to make these elements succinct and with enough depth and a clear value proposition to encourage clicks. 

To maintain content quality and optimization, turn to dashClicks for white-label content marketing solutions that meet diverse client needs.

Blog & Informational Content

The purpose of SEO audit for blogs and informational content is to ensure SEO-optimized formatting, keep the audience actively engaged, and provide timely answers to their queries.

Blogs can drive traffic and maximize customer lifecycle value (CLV) if they drive business-relevant information and are updated regularly. Updates are essential for search visibility and should not be neglected.

Customer Reviews & User-Generated Content

eCommerce site audits often discover poor customer review policies. What impact does a website owner or SEO administrator have on customer reviews, one may wonder? The reality is – customer reviews can and should be encouraged and maintained.

Firstly, by enabling reviews technically, i.e., with a proper section on one’s site. And secondly, by contacting customers and asking them to share their opinions on the purchased products and services. 

The encouragement can be supported by a reciprocal value proposition, e.g., a discount, a giveaway, a free subscription, etc. Engaged customers will be more willing to create the so-called user-generated content (UGC) – product unpacking videos, usage feedback, and the like to influence those shoppers weighing their purchase choices.

Keyword Strategy and Optimization

Keywords have long been the basis for eCommerce SEO. Even today, they bridge the gap between what your customers search for and what your website has to offer in terms of content.

What does keyword audit do? Several things:

Assessing Keyword Relevance and Coverage

The primary goal of a keyword strategy audit is to assess if your eCommerce website targets the right keywords. Focus areas to assess can be:

• Relevance to Products and Categories – Assessing if the keywords on your website match what users search for.
• Search Intent Alignment – Assessing if the website has a natural mixture of informational, navigational, and transactional keywords to satisfy users’ diverse search intent
• Competitor Benchmarking – Benchmark high-value keywords against those of your competitor (e.g., their ranking performance).

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Evaluating Keyword Implementation

The next step in an ecommerce content audit is to evaluate how well the identified high-value, long-tail, and other types of keywords are placed on a website. The key elements to evaluate include:

• Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
• Product Pages & Descriptions
• Category & Subcategory Pages
• URL Structures
• Image Alt Text

Ensuring the right keywords appear naturally in all these structures is the main prerequisite for high search engine rankings of your eCommerce website. Higher rankings convert into more traffic and potential customers.

Identifying Keyword Optimization Pitfalls

Poor keyword optimization is the number one downgrading factor in SEO. It’s like an anchor that will be dragging your website down the competition line, no matter how good your products and services are.

Here are the keyword pitfalls to look for when performing ecommerce site audit:

• Keyword Stuffing – It’s no longer the first and even the second decade of the 21st century when the more keywords marketers use, the higher their content ranked in SERPs. Keyword stuffing is against natural content patterns, and search engines in the 2020s understand it very well.
• Duplicate Keyword Targeting – Even the high-ranking keywords should be naturally distributed across websites’ pages. Overusing the same keywords on a single page, as well as cannibalization across multiple pages, are known keyword pitfalls to avoid.
• Lack of Search Intent Consideration – Each product and service ideally should have its specific semantic core (keyword list). On the other hand, irrelevant keywords will attract the wrong audience.
• Outdated Keywords – It’s not enough to ensure the right keywords are in the right places; keywords must also be up-to-date. Failure to adapt to search trend shifts will result in poor ranking performance.

A keyword strategy should never stand still and rest on its laurels. User preferences and trends change, and this volatility is immediately reflected in the search intent and high-impact keyword combinations. Tracking these changes and updating keywords regularly is what each eCommerce website SEO specialist should do.

The Road Ahead is Bumpy

Have you already used ChatGPT or other LLMs (Large Language Models) to search for stuff? As of December 2024 alone, over half a billion search queries were sent to ChatGPT by people worldwide. 

While Google and other search platforms still dominate the market with their 16+ billion monthly visits, LLMs are breathing down their necks and quickly gaining momentum. Experts predict that by the end of 2025, searches done through LLMs will account for 70% of all queries globally, while traditional search engines will have to forage on the remaining 30%.

What does it all mean for the SEO of an eCommerce website? It means that eCommerce websites need to get ready to optimize for the successor to SEO – GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization. Several focus points stand out:

• Optimizing for conversational queries as people converse with GPTs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.
• Focus on Entity-Based SEO – Focus your optimization efforts, particularly GEO audit, on entities like brand name, product and service names, people, etc.
• Ensure Content Depth & Relevance by providing detailed, context-rich answers that align with AI-generated responses. 

Your ecommerce SEO site audit practices should already account for these GEO-specific focus points. This will ensure you are not left behind in the competition of those who are more agile in adopting GEO-focused optimization practices.