There’s a lot of misconceptions out there about what an SEO audit is. Primarily, this is due to some agencies providing “free” website analyses and calling them “audits”.
In general, while these can be useful in identifying low-hanging fruit your team can address to improve your rankings, they are not true SEO audits.
From our perspective, this is what needs to be included in an SEO audit worth paying for:
- Identification of Metrics and Goals
- Technical On-site SEO
- Content Marketing Strategy
- Competitor & Backlink Analysis
- A Roadmap to Optimize the Site & Achieve Goals
Let’s have a look at these pillars.
Identification of Metrics & Goals
It’s the best & only place to start:
- What are we trying to accomplish?
- What are achievable goals?
- What are the metrics we will use to measure success?
These will be on both the micro and macro level, meaning we’ll have a clear set of measurements that show progress- not just an end game that we don’t have a path to.
As examples:
Metrics
- Number of monthly organic sessions
- Number of adds to cart
- Click through rate on Google search results
- Total organic impressions of your key category and product pages
Goals
- Percentage increase in organic product revenue in 6 months
- Moving into top 5 search positions for important keywords
- Page load speeds of under 2 seconds
- Organic search indexing & growth of a new product line
Technical On-site SEO Audit Factors
Technical SEO audits cover a variety of factors around the construction of your website, how it loads and behaves, and how the search engines crawl and index it. We use many different tools in doing this portion of the SEO audit. When completed, the analysis should report on, at minimum:
- How your site is being crawled by the search engines, and any potential issues/improvements
- The health of your site, such as 404 errors, site speed and mobile friendliness, and any redirects you have in place
- Instructions you are sending to the search engines on what you want them to show searchers, and if those instructions are working as intended
- All security related items, such as HTTPS/SSL and HSTS protocol usage
- A full examination of your XML sitemap(s), with recommendations
- Your use of product level structured data, and other schema mark-up to enrich search results
- Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager implementation, including Enhanced E-commerce Tracking
- Ensuring your website is both desktop and mobile friendly
On-Page SEO & Content Related Audit Factors
A lot goes into each and every web page you create, whether it’s a product, category, or educational content piece. This portion of the audit looks to make sure that search engines will like what your visitors see. An excellent audit will examine and suggest improvements to:
- A full target keyword audit and recommendations
- Analysis of meta page titles and meta descriptions for all types of pages on the site, including the home page, category pages, product pages, blog posts, etc.
- Detection of duplicate content, as well as the proper use of canonical tags to prevent such issues.
- An examination of your navigation from an SEO perspective, & your category hierarchy
- Rich content opportunities: Images, videos and other media can be optimized for specific types of searches
- Schema markup for products, articles, reviews, Q&A, FAQs etc
- User experience and conversion rate optimization analysis
- Originality of product related content, especially for resellers and dropshippers
- Identification of over optimized pages, and suggestions to fix that content
- A complete evaluation of your internal content linking strategy, with a report on additional opportunities and strategy
Content Marketing Strategy
While some website audits may include a basic GAP analysis, we believe a great analysis should include a basic content marketing strategy. This includes all the means content can be created to achieve higher visibility of your site in search engines. Some examples would include:
- A product category GAP analysis to determine what growth opportunities exist
- Suggested blog topics and categories to support your product offerings
- Opportunities for PR pieces
- Opportunities for guest posting on other websites
- General non-paid digital marketing strategies to increase visibility
- Where and how to elevate your rankings by leveraging social media
- Suggestions for creating new video content for social and your website
Competitor & Backlink Analysis
Your e-commerce store doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The actions of your competition, as well as your ability to attract backlinks from content websites has a major impact on how you rank.
Your SEO audit should fully examine both of these SEO factors, and provide insight into:
- Who are your core product competitors– those who are selling against you
- Who are your main content competitors– those who are ranking highly for your keywords without actively selling a product
- What content is your competition producing that you are not
- How much organic traffic are they acquiring as a result of their content efforts
- Backlink “toxicity” audit- Reporting on any truly malicious backlinks in your profile, especially in Google Search Console
- External links that lead to 404s on your site, and suggestions to fix the issue
- Opportunities to acquire backlinks from other websites, especially highly ranking content competitors
- A strategy that complements your content marketing to naturally grow your link building
A Roadmap to Optimize the Site
Now that the audit itself is complete, the logical question becomes: What are the next steps, and who is taking them?
At seo4anyone, we believe our clients should be provided a roadmap that provides clarity as to:
- What are the quick wins that can lead to revenue growth in months as opposed to years
- A force ranking of items that need to be addressed and fixed, and a proposal of ownership for each project
- Knowledge transfer- We work hand-in-hand with your team during implementation, so they’ll be able to achieve excellent results on their own in the future
Let’s Talk about your E-commerce SEO Audit
Ready to get ranked? We’re ready to help.
Read More about our Enterprise SEO Audits
We’ve worked with dozens of e-commerce stores to achieve big results in the search engines. While SEO may be the long game, starting today can get you positive results in less time than you might think.
Let’s schedule a discovery call, and start building your roadmap today.
