Today, the customers are at liberty to choose among billions of websites for making a purchase of a single product. That’s why the volume of competition in online stores has become tighter than it was a decade ago.

Among this hubbub, the best outreach you can have only with accurate eCommerce SEO audit which will reduce the burden of the additional investment in the contents, PPC or social media ads.

The only reason for the audit of an eCommerce site is to increase the search visibility and thereby adding more traffic to your eCommerce store.

What is eCommerce website Audit?

The term “Audit” itself implies an in-depth analysis of your eCommerce website right from the scratch. In today’s highly competitive time, it is imperative to have periodic insights on the over all performance of your website in respect of complete SEO analysis as well as Non-SEO analysis.

While you conduct an eCommerce website audit, more attention is paid to the core analysis of the elements like website performance, analysis of the platform on which your eCommerce site has been built, conversion rate analysis, supply chain analysis, customer’s behavior analysis with the help of the tools etc.

When and Why eCommerce SEO Audit?

Before we discuss the ways to make an effective audit of your website, it is important to know when and why an eCommerce SEO audit needed. The reason may differ from an organization to organization mainly due to varied causes but the prime among the all is:

• There are certain factors that Google Rank Brain takes into consideration in order to decide what page your website should be on.
• Without a strong SEO, you will be found nowhere on Goggle and hence will lose a considerable market share.

eCommerce store audit can be looked upon from two different angles both playing a prominent role in the virtual health of the online store. The first angle is concerned with the technical SEO part whereas the second phase throws light on the Non-SEO functionalities to be taken care of to optimize your eCommerce store.

SEO Audit Analysis

This part basically relates to the technical SEO aspects to optimize your store from various angles according to Google updates.

1. On-page SEO:

The very first thing you need to take care of is the density of the keywords, HTML header tags, and Meta tags.

• Meta Tags: these are a group of words and never appear on the webpage. They are interwoven in the source code of the web page. But they play a vital role in the search results as they attract the search engine with the help of the keywords accurately in it.
• HTML Header Tags: These are nothing but defining the six level Headings on a webpage from the banner heading to the footer heading popularly known as H1 to H6. In other words, it defines the root of the HTML, title, script, styles, and meta information etc.
• The density of Keywords: The most used words by the visitors landing on a particular eCommerce store. You will have to be careful about the density of the keywords to be inserted on your page. You can work out the related keywords with the help of various tools and accordingly optimize your eCommerce web-page.

2. Mobile Responsiveness:

While conducting your eCommerce website SEO audit, it is the most important aspect to be worked out with due care. What you should check and correct:

• Whether your website opens well and compatible with the touch screens all the mobile devices or not.
• Secondly, whether the touch buttons on the screen need the screen to be enlarged or pined or is symmetrical to the screen.

Moreover, you also need to take care of the elements like user-friendliness, load-time, interactive or not, proper display of the page, product category views etc.

3. Security Standards set by Google:

No one is going to buy anything from the eCommerce site that is opened with a Google browser warning, “This page is not Secure”. The warning may appear on any website page when it is devoid of HTTPS. This is so because Google doesn’t consider a non-HTTPS website as a secured one.

Hence to assure your customers in terms of their safety and security of the data, you must follow it by ensuring that all the images, videos, texts, scripts pass through the Google’s standards. You can do away with it with the help of the online tools like SEO crawler to ascertain whether your domain is secure or not.

4. Load time & Speed:

It is to be mentioned inevitably here that if any website on desktop takes less than 2 seconds, the visitor disappears from the webpage and the scenario is quite worse in case of the mobile users. Maybe, due to it, you need to take care of the following elements that slower downs the loading of your website page.

• Compress the large files in gZip
• Minimizing the code by removing the line breaks, user shorter variables etc.
• Defining a pre-set time for the browser to cache a particular asset.

5. Indexing:

This is also a very significant step while auditing an eCommerce website. Indexing of website is basically related with checking the deviation between the number of pages appearing and the pages you had anticipated. The deviation might be there because of the Links between pages, broken links, blocking factors like flash or frames as all the devices might not be compatible with the flash.

6. Backlinks planning and management:

Backlinks are an important part of the audit and optimization process of an eCommerce store. It is not the number of the backlinks but also the quality of the backlinks should also be taken care of in terms of contents and the information relevance.

7. Website Crawling:

This check is to be conducted while auditing an eCommerce website as the majority of the eCommerce stores face the problems of the duplicate contents arising due to the filtration by the visitors for the brand, size, color etc. This problem issue needs to be solved with canonical tags which will let the search engine separate the original and duplicate contents.

Non-SEO Audit Analysis

This aspect is basically concerned with the analysis of the elements that play a vital role in deciding the success rate of your eCommerce website besides the Google updates and current trend prevailing in the market. This audit analysis primarily includes the following steps:

Analyze Conversion Rate:

The higher conversion rate is the prime motive of every eCommerce store owner and you should first analyze the behavior of the customers based on data in respect of

• What has remained highly effective and resultant?
• Any change in the customers’ behavior and the reasons thereof.
• Needed changes in the website in respect of the optimization.

Here you need to focus on

• You should also evaluate what was more resultant organic or referrals and accordingly, you should change your strategy. For example, each of these two categories has its own stand and value. There are people who like to refer a product when they gain a good shopping experience while some prefer to remain silent even if they are happy with the visit to your website.
• You should evaluate the changes due to the demographic impact. For example, which part of your prospective customers belonging to a particular age, region etc. engaged on your website as compared to that with other age groups, regions.
• You should also evaluate the products that were more searched and bought by different visitors.
• You can also measure up the visits, purchases, and clicks in respect of time of celebrations and festive seasons.

Analyze the shopping carts abandonment:

While conducting the audit of your eCommerce website, this area also needs your keen attention. Because you can plan your future path based on the facts derived from the analysis of half-complete purchases or shopping cart left somehow.

Shopping cart abandonment is primarily termed as incomplete shopping or a customer leaves the store after adding the products to the cart and leaves the store. The higher the rate of shopping cart abandonment, the greater will be the revenue loss to the eCommerce store.

For example, with the help of the tools, you identify that the shopping cart abandonment rate on your store is 30% with a revenue of $ 10000. This figure implies that your store is suffering a loss of $3000 sales. This simple example shows the significance of shopping cart abandonment.

What is more important is to spot the reasons behind the incomplete purchase on your store which may be due to

• Free shipping: The customers have a tendency to get free shipping when they buy products online. Usually, 60% of customers leave the shopping cart only because the online store doesn’t offer free shipping on the products they are buying.

  The only way you are left with is either to offer free shipping or to clearly mention on the product page whether delivery and shipping is free or chargeable.

• Care of the frequent visitors: There are usually two types of the visitors- one who visit a website glide through the pages or products, pause for a while and then switch to another website repeating the same. Another one who visits an online store with the intent to buy. Now, you need to take care of those who had landed on your website but could not complete their shopping but had the intention to buy from your website. They might have added some product wish list. During the course of the audit of your eCommerce store, these glitches need to be identified and solved.

• Customer loyalty programs: There will always be a comparison of products, prices, and features before a customer makes a purchase. While you conduct your eCommerce audit, you should analyze the incentives that attracted your customers back to your website. based on this past behavior of your customer, you should plan loyalty reward programs.

• Communication channels: Communication is the key to hold a strong footing of your online store especially when your store faces sever cart abandonment issues. You can communicate through well drafted, concise and clear messages to your customers to avoid the undue bounces. Similarly, post abandonment phase, you can focus on email communication with details of the products and updates that reflect the benefits that a customer is sure to get.

• Other Factors: With eCommerce audit, you will be able to identify the exact reason behind the cart abandonment and the solutions for the same. For example, whether you need to ease the navigation, payment processes, goods return policy, security etc. You will also be able to frame a strategy for discounts, free coupons, price, and new product launching strategies.

Conclusion:

The above discussion makes it imperative for every eCommerce store to conduct an eCommerce Website Audit on the concurrent basis as it will definitely save you from undue costs and gain you un-anticipated market share as best eCommerce SEO audit is an investment expenditure giving you better ROI.