Tired of SEO reports with no real insights for your team to implement? You’re not alone. SEMRush or aherfs reports are great for scaring you with long lists of red-colored errors. But where are the true insights?
Our SEO audit roadmap includes real work and insights from our team. Our SEO audit checklist has more than 150 checkpoints and they are grouped into many subcategories to help organize the audit. Overall these SEO checkpoints fall into two categories:
- Technical SEO insights
- Website content recommendations
Technical SEO Audit & Insights
What does technical SEO insights refer to? Here are a few examples straight from our checklist:
Indexing – Examples of SEO aspects that we look at here will include looking for duplicate content and examining canonical links. We look to make sure key pages are indexed and that Google is not flagging any issues.
Website Speed & Core Web Vitals – These factors deal with the user experience on your website and they are also SEO factors that Google uses to rank your content. Some of these things deal with the coding of the website. This will include code minification and inlining non-critical assets. Website speed also involves dealing with some other speed factors like server response time.
User Experience
Breadcrumbs and site usability are at the center of what we look for in this part of our checklist.
Mobile Experience
Do you have a mobile responsive design? How do the search engines see your content for mobile users? Are you hiding some content on mobile just because the page looks too crowded?
Measurement and Monetization Checklist
Here we are looking at your set up to make sure that we can measure results and we make sure that you have checked a few of the boxes on your monetization checklist. This means making sure that you are collecting customer emails, using cart abandonment to target your customers.
Link Building
Overall we are looking at the composition of your backlink profile to see if it is a weakness, strength, and how it is affecting your website’s performance. This allows us to understand your capabilities when it comes to ranking for tough keywords and this may affect our blog strategy recommendations later on.
Multi-Lingual
Do you use proper “hreflang” markup? There is a difference between telling Google that a web page is written in Spanish vs telling Google that a webpage should be shown to people in Spain.
Policy Essentials
Believe it or not, this stuff does affect conversions, it does affect user metrics and it does affect SEO. No need to go in-depth here but we do check this stuff off of the list.
Search Console and Google My Business
We do request access to these tools and this helps us assess your website. Most importantly, it allows us to find crawling and indexing issues that have been flagged by Google.
Content Recommendations
Our checklist methodically covers each page type on an e-commerce store. Each of the page types tends to be structured differently and they will often have issues that are common across the subset, but not across the whole website. We look at the most important SEO aspects of these pages:
- Homepage
- Category/Collection Page
- Product Page
- Blog Pages
Blog Content
The blog content is often a central part of our recommendations. This is because this can often play an important role in your content strategy moving forward. In this case it is not the audit of the blog content that matters so much (you might not even have one yet) but it is our recommendations that make up the bulk of the time that we spend on this section of our roadmap for you.
Blog Content Planning and Roadmap – Pillar & Clusters, Episodic Content, Link Magnets, Sales Tools & More
This is one of the things that sets our e-commerce SEO audit process apart from other agencies. We don’t just hand you a stack of reports and tell you to let us know if you have any questions. We create a content roadmap, we walk you through it, and we provide your team cross-training so you can implement it. And of course, we are here to help if you want it.
This may include a range of content strategies and/or a combination of many including pillar/cluster strategies, episodic content, content that is designed to earn incoming links, and content that is designed to play a role in the sales funnel as a sales tool.
