10 Steps That You Never Expect On How To Check Your Ecommerce Store SEO.

How to Check Your Ecommerce Store SEO in 10 Easy Steps

 But professional SEO audits are technical and time-consuming, often taking up to 40 hours or more. What if all you need is a basic understanding of your website's organic strengths and weaknesses so you can make better decisions about upcoming strategies?

 Enter "SEO Audit Lite": all the decision-making power of a regular SEO audit without much research. This 10-step audit will help you gain a basic understanding of your website's usability, content, traceability, and appearance in search results. From there, you can start prioritizing the strategies necessary to define your high priority keywords and help your website rank for them. Best of all, you can put your website exactly where it needs to be - in front of buyers who need exactly what you're selling.

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 Before you begin ...

 Make sure Google Analytics and Search Console are connected to your website and working properly. If you got this right before starting your SEO audit, you've come to an ideal place - these tools are the best information when there's a lot of historical data. If you're just getting started with these tools, don't worry, they'll still help you with your audit and it's a great way to have your data close at hand in the future.

 1. Check Your Tickets To Travel

 You may consider some critical elements as your Ticket to Travel factors: Having them won't necessarily improve your SEO, but not having them will completely divert you from the waiting map. These are the first things to look for in an SEO audit. Without them, none of your other SEO efforts will have much of an impact.

 The easiest way to check for critical crawling components is to do a crawl with a tool like Screaming Frog (if your site is smaller, the free version can help). Use this or your favorite tracking tool to find the following tickets:

HTTPS:

 Google prefers secure HTTPS hosted websites over their HTTP counterparts. In fact, it becomes difficult for ecommerce sites to rank if they don't use HTTPS. This makes perfect sense when you think about it; Would you like to share your credit card information on an unencrypted website? Fortunately, most platforms (including Volusion) make it easy to use HTTPS. Just buy your SSL certificate, open your configuration variables and search for "url". Then add an s to your full store URL if it isn't already listed.

Crawling and Indexing:

 Your Screaming Frog-Crawl shows you a list of pages that cannot be crawled because they are blocked by a noindex tag. Check the list and make sure any blocked pages are one that you really want to hide from search engines. You certainly don't want transactional pages or sensitive information to rank in search, so many pages are blocked for good reason. But sometimes a villainous bug can add noindex tags to pages that you really want people to find. When you're done with that, go to www.yoursite.com/robots.txt and make sure there are no blocked pages in your robots.txt file that you want to crawl.

 

Mobile Responsiveness Check:

 Google prefers websites that display well and work well on mobile devices. Take a free mobile trial to make sure your website is in great shape. If errors occur, the test will show you how to fix them.

 2. Test your website speed

 Website loading / rendering time is an increasingly important metric that Google uses to measure website usability. Three great places to check your website speed are Google's Page Speed ​​Insights, Pingdom, and GTMetrix. Pingdom and GTMetrix are better tools, but getting their recommendations straight from the source using Google's tool is never a bad idea.

 For each of the three test platforms above, you will receive a desktop and mobile score, along with location-specific tips on how to improve your score. You can give this list of recommendations to a developer, or you can make the simplest adjustments yourself. Image compression that you can do yourself often has a big impact on website speed.

 

3. Learn more about your keyword landscape

 First, use Search Console or a paid SEO tool like Ahrefs to find the keywords your website is currently ranking for. This is an important way to understand not only how competitive your website is in the SERPs, but also how Google "understands" the content on your website. Here, worry less about the individual keyword and more about the general "categories" these keywords refer to. If you're not driving keyword traffic for a particular high-level topic and are surprised, optimizing for that keyword type will become an important part of your strategy.

 When conducting keyword research and planning your content, link building, and social media strategies, you need to understand what your competitors are doing so that you can evaluate your strategy against the closest competition. You can do your competition research in one go before starting your audit or incorporate it into your audit if necessary. Here's your first instance of that need - understanding the keywords your competitor ranks for can help you identify weaknesses and opportunities your keyword strategy can target. We love using SpyFu for competitive research, but any paid SEO tool that researches keywords and content, like Ahrefs, will work too.

 Now that you know your keywords and how they stack up against the competition, please rate the following:

• Are they relevant?
• Are you competitive?
• Do many people search for this keyword?
• Search Google Trends for your keyword - does it increase or decrease over time?

 Your observations here will flow directly into your keyword strategy when it comes time to put one together.

 4. Rate your search score

 Getting your website in the SERPs doesn't mean your job is done; actually, you need people to click your way. Review the factors that affect your website appearance and SERP click-through rate:

Outline markup:

 Outline markup helps your website display additional information (reviews, internal sitelinks, and more) directly in the SERPs. While there are hundreds of different types of markup you can use, targeting all of them is not the right idea; actually it will be marked as spam. Instead, choose the types of markup that make sense for your industry. You can also Google the individual keywords you are targeting to see if your top SERP competitors are using markup. If so, you are using the same type of markup that the competition uses.

Title and meta description tags:

 It is important to remember that your title and meta description tags are not just about ranking your keywords (in fact, Google doesn't even consider meta description keywords as a direct ranking factor), it is your opportunity to catch up with the user as well. Your title tag is an important place for keywords, but it is equally important that you have a title tag that actively reflects the page and attracts the user's attention. Make sure your meta descriptions do the same, and consider adding a call to action with an incentive to your last sentence.

Check your competitors:

 Are your competitors using outline markup? Are they contained in answer boxes? Do they rank on vertical search engines like Google Images, Google Shopping, and comparison engines? How many SERP real estate are they taking, just organic results or ads too? Try to be visible in the same way as your competition.

 5. Perform additional checks on your metadata

 In step four, we focused primarily on the quality of your meta titles and descriptions. This is priority n. 1, but quantity also plays a role. After all, you want every indexed page on your website to have the best chance of ranking, not just a few.

 You can use Screaming Frog, a paid SEO tool or even Search Console to find:

• Duplicate titles / descriptions
• Missing titles / descriptions
• Title / description too short
• Title / description too long
• If H1s are used correctly on each side

 

6. Dive into your content

 Now let's take a look at your content.

First, do a crawl for duplicate content. 

When something comes up, troubleshooting is manual (rewriting duplicate pages to make them unique) or technical (adding canonical or other tags to indicate page relationships, or fixing bugs that are causing the problem).

Next, use Google Analytics or a paid SEO tool to explore your main pages and content.

 Beware of surprises like B. High priority pages not in your top results. Then check out the blog posts or informational content that was ranked; you may want to focus on that topic in the future.

Analyze the content of your competition. 

We like to use Ahrefs for this. Write down the weaknesses and opportunities.

Check the quality and usefulness of your content.

 Use a crawl tool to find instances of thin content by setting the parameters to <150 words. You can also manually rate the usefulness and quality of your content. Incorporate updates and improvements into your content strategy.

 7. Rate your backlink profile

 You can use Search Console to view inbound links from your own website, or a paid SEO tool like Ahrefs to learn more about how your website is doing over time. Links accumulate or lose. Either way, you need a paid tool to check your competitors' backlinks. Knowing the latter will give you some benchmarks and can often point you to low-threshold link opportunities by showing you which websites are interested in your topic.

 When looking for inbound links, look for problems like broken links. Then check your internal links.

 8. Track your brand's mentions and reputation

 Google's party line is that social media links are not considered a ranking factor. However, pay attention to "brand mentions", which often boil down to the same thing. For Google, seeing a lot of people talking about a brand without linking to it is a positive sign, as it is a real word-of-mouth signal.

 Use a social media listening tool to keep track of your brand mentions and the sentiment behind them. Talk about anything that requires a response.

 Then rate your overall reputation. How many reviews does it have and how positive is the mood? Do you have a bad press? Are there brand-name keyword searches that are producing unpleasant results? Is there a bad review that you will not stop following you? If so, incorporate some reputation management into your strategy. Otherwise, you won't be out of the woods until you dominate the search results and control the narrative surrounding your brand.

 

9. Get subjective

 Your objective data retrievals are complete! As a final step, take a look at your website in the most subjective way possible (we know this is difficult) to see what additional improvements may be necessary. Some of the questions you can ask include:

• Does your website seem current and up-to-date?
• Does the design match that of the competition?
• Is it easy to navigate and use?
• Is your content compelling and informative?
• Does your brand express a clear identity?
• Would you buy here?

 If you have trouble being overly subjective about your own site, ask other users for feedback.

 10. Put it all together: Your strategy

 At this point, your audit is technically complete; Most audits, however, include a final step so you can prioritize your results, organize them into recommendations, and develop your SEO strategy. Otherwise, you will only have an audit without a meaningful action plan.

 Develop your SEO strategy on a timeline to work with and prioritize your most important results first. In general, with many exceptions, your priorities are in this order:

1. Critical technical issues and other technical basics.
2. Keyword search, metadata updates, and content and outline markup for your pages with the highest priority ( home page, top-level categories, priority products, etc).
3. Strategy and content production - continuously after the first 2 steps.
4. Link building - continuously after the first two steps.
5. Search for Keywords, metadata updates, and content and schema markup for lower priority pages.
6. The Bells and Whistles: Lower priority content, appearance and functionality enhancements.

 There you have it:

 Your hassle-free SEO audit that provides the ingredients for a solid strategy for the future. With these steps, you are sure to see positive results in your organic rankings.