An ecommerce SEO audit, in the order that finds the money

An audit of a store is a different job from an audit of a ten-page brochure site, and most audit checklists were written for the brochure site. A store has thousands of URLs it never meant to publish, a handful of pages that make nearly all the money, and a set of faults that only show up at that scale. This is the order we run, and the reason for the order is that each step can make the ones below it pointless.

Why a store is audited differently

Every category, every filter and every product is a page that has to earn its place in the index. The collective weight of those pages decides how much revenue the store takes from search, and the weight is spread very unevenly: on most stores a few dozen category pages bring in most of the organic sales, and tens of thousands of filter combinations bring in nothing while soaking up the crawl.

So the audit is less about finding faults on pages and more about finding which pages should exist at all.

Indexing, before anything else

Can Google reach the store? First, read the robots file line by line. Call your developer immediately if it disallows the whole site, the category paths or the product paths; that happens more often than anyone admits, usually left over from a staging site.

Then search the templates for a noindex, in the page and in the response headers, because both count and only one is usually checked. Then compare the number of URLs in the sitemap with the number Google reports as indexed. A store with four thousand products and forty thousand indexed URLs has a filter problem, which is the next section. A store with four thousand products and four hundred indexed has a blocking problem, which is this one.

Crawl waste: filters, sorting and pagination

Faceted navigation is where a store's crawl budget goes to die. Colour, size, price, brand, sort order and page number, in every combination, produce more URLs than Google will ever fetch, and each one is a near-copy of a category page. The fix is a decision rather than a setting. Choose the handful of attribute combinations that people actually search for, such as a colour within a category, and give those real pages with text. Everything else gets a canonical to the parent category, and the sort and pagination parameters are told apart in Search Console so the crawler stops treating them as new pages.

Pagination itself has to be crawlable with real links, not a button that loads more products with a script. A crawler that cannot reach page two never sees the products on it.

Category pages: the pages that make the sales

Every category with a search behind it needs its own page, its own title written the way people search, and text on the page above and below the product grid. Look, also, at how far down the site the important categories sit. A category three clicks from the home page is crawled often and ranks; one buried six clicks deep, under a menu inside a menu, is rarely visited by Google and almost never by shoppers coming from it.

Then check that the categories link to each other where a shopper would expect it. A category page with no links to its neighbours is a dead end for the crawler and the customer alike.

Product pages: duplicates and thin ones

Product descriptions copied from the manufacturer appear on every retailer that stocks the item, so Google has already read them fifty times before it reads yours. The products that earn a rewrite are the ones with impressions in Search Console and a poor click rate: a better title and a description written for the buyer turn impressions into visits, and visits into orders.

Out-of-stock handling is the next fault. Deleting a product that sold well deletes the history and every link to it; keep the page, mark the item unavailable, and link to the nearest alternatives. And check the structured data on a sample of products. Price, availability and rating markup must match what a shopper can see on the page, or the rich result that draws the click disappears and a manual action can follow.

Speed, measured on a product page on a phone

The home page is the fastest page on most stores and the one nobody arrives at from search. Measure a product page and a category page on a mobile connection instead. Image weight, third-party scripts from apps, and fonts that block rendering are the usual three, and every one of them is fixable without a redesign.

Tracking that proves sales, and not merely visits

Lastly, do not forget the tracking. Without it, you cannot answer the question the audit exists to answer, such as which categories paid for themselves and which never will. Search Console grouped by page type, and the store's own analytics with revenue attributed to organic search, are the two reports. A ranking report is neither of them.

What to do with the findings

Rank every finding by the revenue it touches, and start with the indexing faults, because a category that Google cannot see cannot be fixed by anything further down the list. The fact is, you could have the best-written category pages in the sector, and they will struggle if a filter fault is soaking up the crawl that should reach them.

If you would rather we ran it

The same audit, run for you, with the findings ranked by what they cost and the sheet handed over whether or not you go on to have the work done, is the SEO audit service. The ecommerce SEO service is the ongoing work, and stores on Shopify have their own Shopify SEO page. For a site that is about to move platform, read the SEO migration checklist first; a redesign is where most stores lose the traffic this audit is trying to grow.