So you have been tasked with optimizing your E-Commerce site’s SEO. You have decided that your first step should be to do a website audit. Should you bother getting a free website audit and is it worth your time?
Most free website audits consist of an automated report that is followed by a sales pitch. The automated reports can provide useful info on simple, technical problems with the site. However, if you’ve got an E-Commerce website, the free report will not be optimized for that type of structure. It’s a one size fits all free audit.
You might think that since these free reports use AI or “machine learning”, they must worth your time deciphering them. Let’s see if that’s the case.
The Cost of Your Time
You’ll need to take time to go through the results and depending on what type of errors are indicated in the summary, this might be a massive time consuming task. Some of the issues that are flagged should be considered non-issues and some should be put high on the priority list. It will be up to you to figure all of this out.
In some cases you will have lists of URLs that you need to go through and investigate and its not uncommon for all of this investigation to lead to nothing actionable.
If everything in the report comes back green and there are no issues indicated, you can just move on but you can also expect a follow-up sales pitch (this is why companies do free SEO audits).
Are Their Error Counts Accurate?
In many of the free reports, you’ll get an alarming number of errors. As an example, it may show 2,500 404 errors. This can be deceiving. In reality, it’s only 1 broken link that is in the footer of your website. But that footer is located on every URL of your site, so if you have 2,500 pages, you’ll get a report showing 2,500 404 errors.
We also see this type of counting when it comes to duplicate title tags & meta descriptions. This can happen when the tool looks at all your category pages and crawls through the pagination series of results for that category. Most E-Commerce platforms take care of this by using a canonical tag on the paginated pages, so these are not true errors in most cases, but can look alarming at first glance. And how are you supposed to know the canonical implementation offsets the other errors?
What Value do Free SEO Audits Provide?
Some of the issues that can be highlighted by a free audit report can be worth putting time into fixing. One of the most valuable things that you might find in a free automated SEO audit is the list of broken links on your website. And optimizing Title tags and Meta Descriptions are other easy fixes these free audits find.
To understand how a free audit will play into the value of your site, you should think of the optimization process just as the word “optimization” implies. This means dealing with things that already exist and making them optimal. These are usually small tweaks and not major initiatives.
A great premium SEO audit is going to go far beyond providing simple list of items to fix. SEO embodies on-site technical architecture, creating unique content & acquiring domain authority through sharing and back linking to your content.
A professional audit will look at SEO like the way you look at your business. It has to have a solid infrastructure and be designed from the ground up to earn lots of visibility in the search engines.
If a roadmap is put in place to implement that strategy, then your site will naturally rank higher for the products and services you are selling.
Are they worth it?
So, what’s the answer? Sometimes they can be worth it, especially if you are new to SEO and have a small website. But if you’re managing an E-Commerce site or large-scale lead generation site, in order to increase your profits you’ll want to invest in a professional audit, done by a team with years of experience and state of the art tools.
You can learn more about our E-Commerce Audits and get in touch with us to see how we can help.
