Ecommerce SEO audit is very important for websites that rely heavily on organic traffic. In some cases, SEO is often a matter of survival.
Your online store must be SEO-optimized for search engines. In an E-commerce SEO audit, you identify different areas of your website that need improving and fixing.
In this article, I will use the Semrush SEO tool to perform a detailed audit of an e-commerce website. Semrush will analyze how well your Ecommerce your e-commerce website performs in SERPS.
It gives a report showing your score and a checklist of different SEO errors and fixes. When I work with a new client, I first conduct a full SEO audit to uncover all the existing problems.
I have never had an e-commerce SEO client that did not have a ton of onsite SEO problems. I can guarantee that your e-commerce website has a ton of onsite problems right now.
That might sound scary, but don’t worry it’s really to fix. You must go through each problem the Semrush report will show you and fix each one.
Then run the Semrush audit tool again to make sure you have fixed everything. This can be a tedious process but trust me, your hard work will pay off.
Why you should perform a Website Audit?
A detailed website audit can uncover errors, performance issues and vulnerabilities. Fixing these issues and optimizing your website pages, content and overall website architecture can increase your SERPs.
A detailed website audit can improve your SEO strategy and deliver a great UX ( User Experience )
1. New Growth Opportunities – Improve your top-performing pages and analyze user behaviour patterns and trends. Use this data to create better content and personalizing the customer experience.
2. Detecting potential errors early on – You can figure out what problems are going to repeat in future. For Example – Your WordPress plugin is causing problem right now slowing down your website.
3. Conversion Rates – A survey conducted in 2022, revealed that 37% of buyers would leave a website if it’s difficult to navigate or has a bad budget. Doing a detailed SEO audit may result in better UX and more sales.
4. Security Issues – A good detailed technical SEO audit can uncover security issues and vulnerabilities that lead to data breaches which include malicious codes, outdated plugins and weak passwords.
4 Important Areas for an Ecommerce Audit -
A detailed e-commerce audit isn’t just limited to SEO, security and performance. Factors like accessibility and UX are also important as they can directly impact sales.
For Example – E-commerce companies have been accused of being inaccessible to users with disabilities. Nike has been accused by its consumers of using empty text links which results in empty screens or content inaccessible to users.
The following e-commerce SEO checklist covers five main focus areas –
1. Website Performance
Page loading speed is one of the factors that improve a website’s performance. The higher the page speed, the faster the content will load.
According to Deloitte, a 0.1-second improvement in site speed can boost conversions and cause consumers to spend 10% more.
How to Audit your website using Semrush –
To check your website performance, access the website audit from the Semrush dashboard on the left-hand side. You will find it under “SEO” > “On-Page & Tech SEO”
When you create an audit or project in Semrush. Enter your domain name in the “Enter Domain” text box. Then click on “Start Audit”
If you have created site audits or projects, click “Create Project” on the right side of the page.
Type in your domain name and click on “Create Project”. You will not see this screen if you have never created a site audit or project.
A pop-up window will open with several options for setting up the tool. Choose if you want to edit your whole website, a subdomain or a subfolder.
Then select a crawl source such as a website or a sitemap. You can limit how many pages you want to be checked per audit “Send an email every time an audit is complete” checkbox is automatically checked.
If you don’t want periodic audit updates you can check this option.
After finishing all the settings, click “Start Site Audit”. Semrush will analyze your whole website and return the results in 24 hours. The process can take up to 24 hours depending upon website size and other factors.
Once your website performance audit is complete, go to the “Site Performance” block in the site audit dashboard “Thermatic Reports” section.
You will see a site health performance score from 0-100. The higher the number the better it is.
Click on the “View Details” button for more insights. The audit report will show your average page loading speed and other website issues such as redirect chains and large page sizes.
Click on “Why and how to fix it” next to each error in the report. Semrush tool will show how this issue affects your website and what solutions you can implement.
The Semrush tool will also show you some warnings. These issues include uncompressed pages and uncached CSS files. These issues are less severe, but you should solve them at some point.
Check out the average page (HTML) load speed section. It will show your average loading time for your website pages.
In the above example 0.58 is the average page loading speed. If you consider Deliotte’s recommended page speed which is less than 1 second it is great.
2. On-Page & Technical SEO
In an on-page SEO, you focus on improving your content readability, copy, Internal Linking and other on-page elements.
In technical SEO you focus on improving your website architecture to improve your website visibility in SERPs.
An on-page and technical SEO audit can help you identify bad links, missing alt tags, broken links, external and internal links and more.
If these issues are not solved they can affect your search engine rankings. Broken links can impact your UX.
These hyperlinks point to pages that no longer exist. When a user encounters a broken link the server returns a 404 error. Here’s an example from the Slack website:
Your website visitors cannot access your content. This error can lead to high bounce rates and low sales.
How to perform a On-Page and Technical SEO Audit -
Use Semrush’s “Site Audit tool” to find out on-page and technical SEO issues hindering your website. Let’s start with the technical SEO audit.
Open your Semrush account click on “Site audit tool” and create a project ( As described earlier in the guide ). Next, click on “Issues” in the top navigation menu.
Check the list for the following Technical errors –
1. Broken links.
2. Duplicate Meta Descriptions.
3. XML Sitemaps errors.
4. 4XX status code.
5. Duplicate Title tags.
6. Slow Loading Pages.
7. Broken Internal CSS and Javascript files.
Scroll down the page you will find a list of notices and warnings. These issues are less severe, but you should also fix them.
Click on an error, notice and warning to find out which page or website needs attention.
Click on “Why and how to fix it” to get more information.
3. User Experience (UX)
UX (User Experience) is how your user feels about your website, service and product. Baymard Institute surveyed 1,012 consumers in 2024 to find out why consumers abandoned the cart.
17% of consumers said they abandoned shopping carts because the website had crashed or errors.
22% of consumers said they left because the checkout process was too long and complicated.
You have to ensure a great user experience otherwise, you could miss out on potential customers and sales.
How to perform a UX (User Experience) Audit -
A user experience audit involves collecting quantitative and qualitative data.
CTR – % of people who clicked on the link divided by people who saw the link.
Organic Traffic – Number of users who arrive on your website through organic marketing.
Bounce Rate – % of sessions that last only 8 seconds or less, don’t trigger an event. (e.g.- Clicking a button).
Page Views – Number of times a user has loaded a web page in a browser.
Conversion Rate – % of visitors who took a designed action. (e.g.- buying a product).
Session Duration – The amount of time a user spends on your website during a single website visit.
The average bounce rate across all e-commerce industries is around 44.82% in 2023 according to the databox report. If your bounce rate is higher than that, you have to optimise your website.
You can use Semrush organic traffic insights to help you view your site data on a single dashboard. You have to connect organic traffic insights with your Google account. This tool will give you details about site visitors.
Where they come from, how much time they spend on each page. It can also measure your bounce rate, conversion rate, engagement time and other valuable metrics.
For Example – Using this data you find out why most users are leaving a particular page. Then use the Semush site audit tool to find out potential technical issues.
After solving all technical issues, check the page copy and assign. You can also do an A/B testing version and create a different headline, copy and Image.
Change only one element (e.g.- copy ) at a time and test the new version against the original version.
4. Security
Baymard Institute conducted a survey and reported that 25% of online shoppers abandoned their shopping carts. Why because they felt uncomfortable sharing their personal credit card information.
A website that’s not secure is prone to cyber threats and data breaches. It could damage your website reputation, loss in sales & revenue, and affect your marketing and SEO efforts.
How to perform a Website Security Audit -
A website security audit helps you detect vulnerabilities on your website and protect yourself from Cyber threats.
- Missing HTTPS.
- Outdated Plugins and Themes.
- Weak Passwords.
- Expired SSL.
- Improperly configured permissions.
HTTPS (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) encrypts all the data that is transferred between browsers and websites. HTTPS tells your consumers your website is secure. HTTPS is a common Google ranking factor in SEO.
To start the security audit, Go to your Semrush dashboard on the Left side. Then click on Issues and select “Security & HTTPS” from the drop-down menu under “Category”
Semrush tool will display your website’s most critical security errors with a list of notices and warnings.
Click on each of these errors, notices and warnings to improve different areas of your website. You can also click on “Why & How to fix it” to understand why this problem exists & how to solve it.
Conclusion
An e-commerce website audit can help you uncover important aspects of your website security, performance and other key areas. Using the Semrush tool you can improve different aspects of your website.
Once you have your website audit completed and fixed all the problems, your E-commerce store will have the perfect foundation to build on.