The Beginner's Guide To An eCommerce SEO Audit

eCommerce SEO audits can be intimidating for people who don’t have a lot of experience with SEO. After all, who the hell knows what a canonical is? 

Well, we do. And as an eCommerce SEO agency, we’ve done more than our fair share of audits over the years. If you’re curious about the ins and outs of a professional eCommerce SEO audit, grab a drink and take a seat, because we’ve got the answers to all your questions. 

A quick disclaimer before we proceed: every eCommerce SEO audit is different, because every eCommerce website is different. Also, every agency has a slightly different process. This guide breaks down what your audit should cover at minimum, but an agency will generally perform a more in depth analysis tailored to your site. 

What is an eCommerce SEO audit?

Okay, first things first: what are we talking about?

An eCommerce SEO audit is an analysis of your website and its organic visibility on search engines like Google. It’s the first stage of an eCommerce SEO project and exists to identify issues that are currently preventing you from ranking and establish priorities for the project moving forward. 

eCommerce SEO audits are also done on a regular basis throughout the project to catch any new issues that can crop up before they have a chance to do any damage. These might include issues with mobile-friendliness, page speed, technical errors or toxic backlinks.

Read more: ‘What is eCommerce SEO?’

Why do I need an eCommerce SEO audit?

The reason you need an audit before creating and implementing an SEO strategy is that no matter what anyone tries to tell you (or sell you), SEO is inherently bespoke. If you’re working with an agency that wants to run your website through the same eCommerce SEO checklist they use for every client, get the hell out of there. 

While it’s true that every website needs a SEO-friendly technical set-up, high-value content targeting relevant keywords and a strong backlink profile in order to rank, you might already have some of that! 

Perhaps your website has a great technical set-up, but dodgy backlinks. You’re not going to want to spend too much on someone fiddling with your website’s back-end, are you? On the other hand, you could have backlinks and great content, but be suffering from technical errors. You could’ve even been the target of a negative SEO attack by a competitor. 

The point is, an agency can’t know what your website’s strengths and weaknesses are until they do the audit. 

eCommerce SEO audit process

Right, let’s get going. 

The first thing to understand about an agency’s eCommerce SEO audit process is that there are several parts to it: on-page, off-page and analytics. This roughly corresponds to the three most important things a search engine will take into account when deciding where to rank your website on results pages: your website, how it relates to other websites and how search engine users engage (or don’t engage) with it. 

On-page SEO deals with everything on the pages of your website. This includes how your website is built from a technical perspective as well as the content that is visible to users. 

Off-page SEO deals with—you guessed it—everything that affects your website but isn’t on it. This includes web pages that link to your website, as well as how competitive your niche is. 

Analytics is all about users and how search engines are interpreting their behaviour on your website. The premise is simple: are people able to find you, and are they finding what they’re looking for? 

On page SEO for eCommerce websites

eCommerce technical SEO audit

Crawlability and indexation

The first question every SEO should ask at the beginning of an audit is: “does Google even know this website exists?”. Plenty of eCommerce business owners sit scratching their heads over their lack of organic traffic, only to learn that their website isn’t even in Google’s index.

The reasons for this require an understanding of how Google works.  

You know how the web is… well, a web? Well, web pages are points on this web, and are connected to one another through links. Search engine bots, known as ‘spiders’,  use these links to crawl through this network and identify different pages based on how they connect to one another. 

The pages that meet Google’s standards get filed away in the search engine index, and will therefore be able to appear in search results—although there’s no guarantee as to where they’ll rank if your site isn’t optimised. 

Your website’s ‘crawlability’ refers to how easy it is for search engine spiders to navigate through your site. ‘Indexation’ is whether or not the pages that have been crawled made it into Google’s index. 

Simply put: if your web pages aren’t in the index, they may as well not exist. In fact, to Google, they don’t. Identifying pages that aren’t being indexed and resolving issues with crawlability and indexation is therefore vital to your site’s SEO. 

Sitemap

If spiders need to navigate through your site, you might as well give them directions.

The XML sitemap is a file that does exactly what it says on the tin: it provides a map of your website. More specifically, it provides a search engine with a list of pages that help it understand your website and how it should be crawled. 

Your sitemap allows you to list the pages you think are most important on your site, tell Google when they were last updated and let them know about any versions of these pages that also exist in other languages. 

Although sitemaps are not strictly mandatory, they are standard practice and you’ll be hard pressed to find an SEO who doesn’t think you should have one. They are especially important for eCommerce websites, which are typically large and complex and will therefore be more difficult for Google to crawl with links alone. 

During your eCommerce SEO audit, your SEO will check that:

1. You have a sitemap
2. It is correct and up to date
3. It is submitted to Google Search Console

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is another type of file you provide to search engines to help it understand how you want your website to be crawled. It’s essentially an instruction manual, telling Google “yes, please crawl this page” or “no, please ignore that one”. 

Ideally, you only need a search engine to crawl and index pages that should appear in search results, such as category pages, product pages and blogs. There are several pages on any website that don’t meet this criteria. In eCommerce, this includes your user login, wishlist and shopping cart pages. 

The robots.txt file allows you to tell Google straight up which pages you’d like it to index and which ones don’t matter. It can, of course, ignore you. It’s Google. But the robots.txt is nonetheless a helpful guide and an indicator of a serious website.

Auditing the robots.txt file is chiefly a matter of checking that it exists, that it’s in the right place and that nothing weird is going on, such as category or product pages being tagged as ‘noindex’, which would prevent them from appearing in search results.

SSL

If you’ve been on the internet for a while, you’ve probably noticed that in the last ten years, the “HTTP” protocol at the start of web addresses has become pretty much obsolete, with most URLs beginning with “HTTPS” instead. 

This is thanks to a little something called the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate, and it’s all about web security. SSL certificates enable an encrypted connection for online communications and helps protect your customers’ personal data while using your website. 

Google led the switch from HTTP to HTTPS from the late noughties onwards, and HTTPS has been a direct ranking signal since 2014. Google went a step further in 2018 when it announced that all plain HTTP websites would be marked as not secure, and therefore devalued in rankings. 

The message is clear: if you don’t have an SSL certificate, you don’t have a chance in hell of ranking. 

If your website URL begins with “https://”, then congrats—you’re on the right track. Your SEO is also going to want to check that the non-HTTPS version of your URLs redirect to the secure versions. If they don’t, this needs to be fixed ASAP.

HTTP response codes

Error 404: consistent organic traffic not found.

See? Some technical SEO knowledge is quite common after all!

(Bad) jokes aside, there are a variety of response codes that can come up in your eCommerce SEO audit that may need addressing. 

It is important to note that not all response codes are error codes, like 404. Many response codes are intentional, on account of content having been moved or deleted, and Google is smart enough to understand this. The important thing is that response codes don’t indicate neglect or manipulation.

Basically: don’t panic. There are some that will need fixing, some that will need checking and others which can be left well enough alone.

Canonicalisation

Duplicate content is a major pet peeve of search engines. This isn’t the last time we’re going to bring this up, but for brevity’s sake, let’s first talk about the part that canonical tags play in resolving duplication. 

Canonical tags are HTML elements that tell a search engine which version of a page is the master page. 

“But Reboot, why would I have multiple versions of the same page?” Well, intentionally, you wouldn’t. 

The problem is that search engines recognise every URL as a separate page, even if it has the exact same content. For example, your homepage URL will have several different versions that all take users to the same place:

http://www.homepage.com
https://www.homepage.com/
http://homepage.com
http://www.homepage.com/
http://homepage.com/

Without canonicalisation, all of these pages are considered duplicates by search engines. The same phenomenon can occur across your category pages, product pages and more, which can severely affect your ability to rank. 

Canonical tags give you the ability to elect one of these pages as the page you want Google to crawl and index. The eCommerce SEO audit will therefore check that canonicalisation is correctly set up across your entire site, so that you’re not being penalised for duplication.

Site structure

A recurring theme of an eCommerce SEO audit is making sure that a search engine spider can navigate your website as easily as possible. Site structure is a major component of this. After all, a spider isn’t going to be able to find its way through a web that’s a big tangled mess.

eCommerce site structure is a bit of a beast. eCommerces websites can have hundreds, if not thousands of pages that need crawling and indexing—including informational pages, landing pages, category pages, products and blogs. Organising this all into a simple, common sense structure is not for the faint hearted, especially when you bear in mind the golden rules of a little something called crawl depth.

Crawl depth is a term used in SEO that boils down to “how many clicks away from the homepage are the rest of your pages?”. Your homepage is the most authoritative page on your website, and that authority gets passed down through your site structure. The pages furthest away from the homepage therefore receive the least authority, and are considered less important by Google. 

As a general rule, no page on your website should be more than three clicks away from the homepage. There are of course exceptions to this, but it’s the target most SEOs will aim for. 

Your SEO audit will therefore flag how many pages are more than three clicks away from the homepage, so that this can be addressed in the eCommerce SEO strategy. 

URL structure

Similarly, eCommerce URL structure is about being straightforward and organised. You’d be shocked how much effort it takes to keep things simple! 

There are lots of things that go into creating the perfect eCommerce URL, but to avoid a massive tangent about pagination, parameter handling and multilingual SEO (more on that in a jiff), let’s just stick to a couple of core principles:

• Keep it short
• Be organised
• Use the right keyword

For example, it doesn’t take an SEO genius to figure out which URL is going to rank better for “toy dinosaurs” out of the following:

https://www.example.com/13354992
https://www.example.com/action-figures/toy-dinosaurs

The second example tells a search engine exactly what to expect, indicates a good site structure and, if “product-name” is targeting a specific keyword (such as “womens-clothing”), gives the page a better chance of ranking. 

There should be no exceptions to the rule. Every URL on your eCommerce site, whether it’s targeting a keyword or not, should have a clean and descriptive URL structure. 

Site search

eCommerce SEO is sometimes more like eCommerce SEO-inception. 

That’s right folks: on top of optimising your website for a search engine, you need to make sure that your site’s internal search engine works just as well. It’s the first place 43% of site visitors go when they land on your site. Not having this optimised will cost you leads. 

Additionally, each customer search will generate a unique URL. You can probably see where we’re going with this if you’ve been paying attention. 

These URLs can create crawlability issues if you allow a search engine to crawl and index them. It’s generally advised to block these URLs from within the robots.txt file for this reason, although your SEO agency will advise on the best course of action if you find yourself in this situation. 

Additionally, an SEO agency will likely advise that you have Google Tag Manager set up to track internal site search if this isn’t already the case.

International and multilingual SEO

Now, this is a part of the audit that isn’t going to be mandatory for everyone. If you don’t sell in multiple countries or require a website in multiple languages, you can just skip this part.

However, if you do need it, it’s going to be one of the more specialist and potentially time-consuming parts of the audit. It’s absolutely critical that you hire the right eCommerce SEO agency for the job if your website needs internationalisation.

Internationalisation in SEO is mainly governed by the hreflang tag, a nifty little HTML attribute that indicates the target geographical region and language of a piece of content. Thanks to this, you do not need to have your website completely rewritten in multiple languages. 

Unfortunately, implementing hreflang across eCommerce sites can be a little tricky. This is because eCommerce websites are often built on specialist eCommerce content management systems (CMSes) and these are not made equal in terms of internationalisation. 

If your CMS of choice either does not support hreflang or there are difficulties in implementing it, your SEO agency may recommend that you migrate to a different CMS in their audit.

Page speed

This one is simple: if your site doesn’t load in under three seconds, you can kiss your rankings goodbye. 

Page speed is a direct ranking factor with Google, which makes it incredibly important for SEO. Even in the extremely unlikely event that you end up on the first page with a slow-loading site, search engine users are not going to wait around for more than a few seconds. They’re going to click straight back to the search engine results page (SERP) and visit a competitors’ website. 

This also happens to be bad for your SEO—a double whammy of bad SEO, if you will—because Google will see users leaving your website and assume they aren’t finding value there, resulting in you being pushed further down the results. 

Page speed is pretty easy to check. Google provides a free tool called PageSpeed Insights. It’s best practice to test multiple URLs that are representative of the different types of pages on your site, such as the homepage, a category page, product page and the blog. 

While this is something you can do yourself, page speed optimisation - interpreting the results of PageSpeed Insights and deciding the best course of action to address any areas of concern - usually requires a more in-depth knowledge of SEO. It is also just one part of the eCommerce SEO audit, and carries a lot more value in that context. It’s best to leave this to a professional eCommerce SEO specialist.

Mobile SEO

There is no excuse for a website that isn’t optimised for mobile. In fact, if your website isn’t optimised for mobile, it isn’t optimised.

Since 2020, Google has been using mobile-first indexing. This means that the mobile version of the website is the one that is prioritised for indexing and ranking. It doesn’t matter how pretty and SEO-friendly your desktop site is, it won’t count for anything if your mobile site is a mess.

Like page speed, mobile-friendliness can easily be checked with Google’s own free mobile-friendly test. You can even test it directly within the SERP! Again, although it’s possible to do this yourself and it can give you an early indication of what your SEO issues are, an eCommerce SEO specialist is the person best placed to interpret the results and make recommendations.

eCommerce SEO content audit

Duplicate content

As we mentioned earlier, Google hates duplicate content, which it defines across its Content Guidelines as:

“Substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.”

This includes duplicate titles and meta descriptions as well as on-page copy. 

You can probably already imagine that duplication is fairly common in eCommerce websites. After all, there are only so many ways to describe a certain product or highlight your customer incentives. But duplicate content will tank your rankings. It’s a clear sign that you’re not producing original content for each page that meets the search intent of the user, and can also confuse search engine algorithms as to which piece of content they should rank for a particular keyword. 

Duplicate content auditing is fairly straightforward, but fixing the issues the audit raises is a time-consuming, if not slightly tedious, process. Nonetheless, it is worth it to give your website the best possible chance of ranking. 

Thin content

Similarly, Google does not generally like pages with very little content on them—this is known as “thin content”. 

The term “thin content” roughly translates to “pages with a low word count”. However, the exact amount that qualifies as “thin” varies between page types. For example, a 500-word landing page that hits all the right notes and ranks well is not a problem, but a 500-word blog is unlikely to provide the kind of insight search engine users are looking for. 

More is also not always better in SEO. While it’s true that the average word count across all top-ranking pages is 1,449 and subject matter experts should be able to write 1,000+ words on their area of expertise, a well-written 500-worder that answers the search intent will perform better than 2,500 words of nonsense. 

Ultimately, content “thinness” is a question of value. eCommerce SEO audits flag thin content as something to investigate, and then it’s up to the auditor to determine whether word count is a problem.

Keyword audit

Can you believe we made it this far into the guide before talking about keywords? 

The keyword audit can be the most exciting part of the SEO audit, because it’s as much—if not more—about flagging opportunities than errors. 

During the keyword audit, your eCommerce SEO agency will pull up the list of keywords your website is already ranking for and evaluate how well optimised your site is for those keywords. 

This is where we can start to pull out some quick wins. If you’re already ranking 10th for a relevant keyword without trying, how much better could you rank with a bit more optimisation? 

We can also identify potential keyword clustering opportunities and start to set the priorities for the content strategy. 

Titles and meta description

Titles and meta descriptions are absolutely crucial elements of on-page SEO for two reasons: they tell a search engine what your page is about and, alongside the URL, they are the main bits of information that appear in organic search results. 

There are four red flags that your SEO agency will be on the lookout for as a first priority:

• Missing titles and meta descriptions
• Duplicate titles and meta descriptions
• Titles and meta descriptions that are too long
• Keyword stuffing

Any of these need to changed ASAP. The best practices for optimising titles and meta descriptions are:

• Exact keyword usage or semantically related keyword(s).
• Descriptive and accurate to on-page content
• Engages the user to click through to the site

Which keywords you should be optimising for will depend on the outcome of your keyword audit, as well as the keyword research conducted as part of the content strategy. 

Content freshness

At this point, it’s pretty clear that Google has a lot of pet peeves. One of them is outdated content. 

Google’s mission is to rank pages that provide value to the user by answering their questions with reliable and accurate information. Part of being accurate is being up to date. 

One example of this would be years-old blog posts where the advice is no longer relevant. After a while, you’re going to stop generating value from that content, because people aren’t going to be looking for it. Therefore, you might as well get rid of it. 

Outdated content stretches your crawl budget and can cause keyword cannibalisation if you produce updated versions of that same search query—which, in the example used above, you probably should. 

However—important disclaimer incoming—just because a piece of content is old doesn’t mean that it’s outdated. If content is continuing to bring in traffic and leads, leave it alone

Let’s take a look at a blog from eCommerce cosmetics company Cult Beauty, titled ‘The best beauty products of 2019’:

As you can see, the page—which intends to drive traffic from the blog to its category pages—hasn’t generated any organic traffic in 18 months. So why keep it? Well, it’s possible that the internal links to products and categories support those pages by passing ‘link juice’ or authority. 

But one of those pages, for a soy-based cleanser, has 143 backlinks pointing towards it, which does the exact same job (and perhaps even does it better). 

Is it better to delete the outdated content to avoid keyword cannibalisation, alleviate the crawl budget and show Google the site is well-maintained, or keep the page to support the flow of link juice to high-value category pages? That’s for the SEO to decide, and that’s why you need professional eyes on the job.

Your eCommerce SEO audit will highlight any pages that are outdated, as well as make recommendations as to which ones should be deleted. 

On-page factors 

Then, of course, there is the content itself. 

Users don’t care about your keywords, or your canonicalisation, or your backlog of outdated content they don’t see. They care about what is presented to them on the page.

SEO has a reputation for being strictly formulaic—“insert keyword here”, “redirect page here” and so on—but that is becoming less and less the case. Google has ramped up its use of natural language processing APIs to help understand web content on a near-human level. 

It’s all very tech-y and complicated, but what it boils down to is this: Google wants content that is well-written, because its users do. It’s therefore extremely important that, as well as meeting technical and keyword requirements, your content is well-presented, engaging and genuinely helpful to the user. 

On-page SEO content audits for eCommerce websites also have a lot of tie-in with user experience (UX) and conversion rate optimisation (CRO), which—despite being unique specialisms—are a definitive part of SEO.

Your eCommerce SEO audit should therefore involve your SEO agency looking at the level of value your content is providing, as well as things like search intent, E-A-T and calls to action.

Off page SEO for eCommerce websites

eCommerce backlink analysis

Oof, backlinks. 

Welcome to the argument zone of SEO. Backlinks are a bit of a minefield, but they shouldn’t be. 

Basically, backlinks are links from other websites pointing towards yours. Google interprets them as a sign of trust—a website with a lot of backlinks is one that a lot of people trust as a source. That’s the logic of it, at least.

Unfortunately, it became fairly common practice in SEO to exploit Google’s blind trust in backlinks as a ranking factor by simply buying a bunch of low-quality ones from unrelated websites. However, Google has been cracking down on this practice for years to prevent websites from cheating their way to the top with crappy content and bad backlinks.

Nonetheless, you will still find some SEOs encouraging their clients to buy backlinks. You can also find SEOs that will build a bunch of toxic links to their clients’ competitors as part of what’s called a ‘negative SEO attack’.

Due to the importance of all this to a website’s ranking potential, and the amount of B-S out there about link-building tactics, it is absolutely crucial to get your backlink profile audited by a trusted and experienced SEO professional. 

They will look primarily at the number of backlinks you have, the quality and relevancy of those links and the anchor text that is being used to link to your website to determine how natural and organic your backlink profile looks to Google.

Toxic backlinks can then be removed or disavowed, and your SEO agency can decide the best approach to take in your eCommerce link-building strategy moving forward. 

eCommerce competitor analysis

Not to be dramatic, but the SERP is a battlefield. Luckily, it’s also a resource.

There are two very important reasons why your eCommerce SEO audit needs to include competitor analysis. 

The first is that your ability to rank is highly dependent on the websites outranking you. There’s no point in any SEO agency promising you that you can crack the first page for “mobile phones” when every website on the SERP for that term is either a household name or has thousands of backlinks.

Analysing who your top-ranking competitors are on the SERP helps you set realistic expectations for the SEO project, as well as come up with a strategy to help your website grow despite the competition. For instance, you might not rank first for “mobile phones”, but you might be able to rank for a less competitive longer-tail term like “secondhand mobile phones” 

or a longer-tail category page term like ‘mobile phone lenses’

Ranking for these terms while taking the time to build quality backlinks will eventually grow your site’s traffic and authority to a point where you might be able to compete for more top-level queries.

The second reason you need to study the SERP is that the top ranking results for your target keyword are essentially a guide to what Google wants to see. The first organic result is the best version of that page in Google’s eyes. Don’t get jealous—get even! 

By studying your competitors’ pages, you can learn exactly how the search engine is interpreting that term and what on-page features it’s rewarding. 

• What is the average word count of the top-ranking pages? 
• What subheadings do they include? 
• How is their content laid out on the page?
• Do they use a lot of image or video content?
• What are their calls to action and where are they placed?

All this information gives you a great basis for what you need to incorporate and improve on in your eCommerce content marketing strategy.

Analytics 

Bounce rate

So… remember we said that when people arrive on your page and then leave seconds later, it’s bad for your SEO? There’s actually a name for that. It’s called your bounce rate. 

Google tracks how many users arrive on your page from an organic search and then return to the SERP in order to gauge user engagement. 

Again, Google’s raison d’etre is to provide value to its users. If people are leaving your site without clicking through to another page—such as going from a category page to a product and then to checkout—they take that as an indicator that they aren’t finding what they’re looking for, and will push you further down the SERP. 

What counts as a bad bounce rate differs between page types. It’s pretty normal for blogs to have a bounce rate of 70-90%. Users come looking for information, and once they have that information, they leave. Landing pages, on the other hand, are conversion-focused. People type in a commercial query, such as “buy holiday gifts” or “shop electronics”, and arrive on your site with intent to purchase. A bounce rate of above 50-70% is something worth looking into. 

Including your bounce rate in your eCommerce SEO audit is a good way of identifying pages that are failing to engage and convert site visitors, and might therefore warrant investigation into things like page speed, on-page factors and UX.

Traffic irregularities

It’s important to look at where your site traffic is currently coming from. Are you bringing visitors in mostly from social? What is your current organic traffic like?

There’s an obvious reason for this and a less obvious one. The obvious reason is that we need to understand where you’re starting from in order to measure progress over time.

The less obvious reason is that irregularities in the sources of your site traffic—such as a disproportionate amount of visitors coming direct from typing your URL into Google—could indicate spambots. This could be either the result of negative SEO from a competitor or from malpractice by a previous SEO agency to artificially inflate the amount of traffic they were generating from you. 

Either way, this is something seemingly small that Google will pick up on, so it would need fairly swift attention.

Core Web Vitals

Ah, Core Web Vitals. They’re one of those things that sound really complicated but actually aren’t when you get down to the, uh… core of it. 

Core Web Vitals are essentially a set of signals Google uses to understand and measure the experience of a user on your page. Page experience is a slightly newer ranking factor with Google, and one of the many ways it’s trying to prioritise quality content over “search-engine-first content”. Core Web Vitals are not the only metric that goes into your page experience score, but they’re a major part of it.

There’s also a high level of transparency from Google towards websites with Core Web Vitals. You can view your data directly within Google Search Console, as well as which URLs require some improvement and which ones are just plain bad. 

This is one of the many reasons you must have your Google Search Console and Google Analytics set up before the eCommerce SEO audit.

Manual actions

If Google is very, very unhappy with your website and thinks you’re trying to game the system to rank higher than you deserve, it can issue your site with a penalty which will severely limit your ability to rank at all and kill your organic traffic. 

There are two types of penalties: manual and algorithmic. Algorithmic penalties are a bit ambiguous, as it’s not an “official” penalty, but rather the effect of an algorithm update—of which there are 4,500 a year—devaluing your content and your website. 

Manual penalties are the ones we can check. These happen when a real-life person at Google has gone through your site and decided that your content is trash and that you’re trying to manipulate the search engine. 

Manual penalties are somewhat rare, especially as Google’s spam detection capabilities get more and more sophisticated. The last official figure they released was 4.3 manual actions taken against site owners in 2019, which might sound like a lot but is a drop in the ocean compared to the 50bn+ websites estimated to be in its search index. 

If a manual action has been taken against you—which you can find out in the ‘Manual Actions’ section on Google Search Console—your SEO agency will be able to take the necessary steps to resolve it and rebuild Google’s trust in you.

eCommerce SEO audit tools

Obviously, a proper eCommerce SEO audit requires the proper tools. 

There are many, many free SEO tools you can find online, but you won’t find any professional SEO agency using them to audit an eCommerce site, that’s for sure. They’re often based on extremely outdated SEO advice, and at best they will recommend changes you won’t be able to implement yourself. It’s best to let a professional SEO agency do the audit, that way they can do more than just point out problems—they can fix them. 

If you’re an absolute beginner just getting started and can’t afford an agency right now… fine. We won’t hold it against you. We just hope you’ll come back and see us once your site has grown! 

The tools most eCommerce SEO agencies will use to audit your site will likely be:

• Screaming Frog. This one is actually free! Screaming Frog is an SEO spider that mimics a search engine crawling your site. It’s actually a nifty little tool, as it allows you to see which pages are being indexed, their titles and meta descriptions, status codes and also highlights thin and duplicate content. 
• A professional SEO software suite, usually Moz, Ahrefs or SEMrush. These are the backbone of most SEO agencies. They have SEO audit guide tools that are slightly more in-depth, but the true golden nugget is their industry-standard metrics and data for keyword and backlink analysis. 
• Majestic. Majestic is a tool that allows you to analyse and grow your backlink profile. Like the SEO software suites, Majestic’s Link Intelligence metrics are industry standard, and it also has built-in tools to develop and implement your link-building strategy.
• Webmaster Tools (Search Console and Analytics). Google provides these free tools to anyone with a website, so there’s no excuse for you not having them set up already! If that’s not done, get on it ASAP before your audit starts.

How long should an eCommerce SEO audit take?

In general, there’s a lot of misinformation out there about how long SEO services take. This is understandable: no one wants to be strung along by an agency that is collecting a fee without providing results. 

However, there is a grace period with all things SEO—especially auditing. 

It’s important that the process is thorough, and eCommerce is one of the most time-consuming types of websites to audit due to their complexity and the amount of pages involved. You will find some sources online claiming an eCommerce SEO audit can be done in as little as a few hours. Theoretically it can, but it’s highly unlikely that audit will cover all your bases.

Ultimately, the length of your audit will depend on your site—how many pages you have, which CMS it’s built on, whether you’re targeting multiple locations or languages, how many pages get flagged as having issues that need inspecting… You get the picture, there’s a large number of factors that can drag out an eCommerce SEO audit.

For a decent and thorough professional agency audit, the answer is generally somewhere  2-6 weeks. If you’ve taken the steps to hire the right SEO agency, there’s no reason to think they’re pulling your leg if it’s not done in that time frame, or even slightly beyond it.

Hire Reboot Online

If you’re looking for an eCommerce SEO audit service, but are a bit overwhelmed with the amount there is to learn, we’ve got some advice. Don’t worry about it. That’s our job.

In case we haven’t said it enough, eCommerce SEO audits are best done by an industry expert with specific experience with eCommerce websites. Well, we’ve got several of those on tap. 

Reboot is an eCommerce SEO agency that has helped brands grow into multi-million pound companies with the power of digital PR, technical SEO and content marketing. We have over 15 years of experience, 60+ employees and speak more than nine languages between us, and we use all of this juicy expertise to earn high-quality, natural links for clients in publications like Yahoo, GQ, Huffington Post and LadBible—not to mention too many international sites to name. 

If these are the kind of results you’re interested in, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us to discuss your business.