Technical SEO Audit for Ecommerce Websites: Ensuring Compliance & UX
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Technical SEO pretty much forms the foundation of a successful online presence today. Business owners need to conduct a thorough technical SEO audit of their ecommerce website for better search engine optimization (SEO) and seamless user experience (UX).
In this article, we’re going to discuss how to do a comprehensive technical SEO audit yourself to ensure compliance with search engine guidelines and enhance the UX of your website.
Crawling and Indexing Analysis: Ensuring Proper Visibility
Look at the strategy used by any reputable SEO agency like Comrade digital marketing and you’re bound to find a technical audit to primarily look at crawling and indexing issues that the existing website has. Over time, and often due to neglect, a website becomes a mess of code and scripts, poorly managed pages and databases, and media that are not properly optimized.
Things are even more difficult to deal with if it’s a CMS like WordPress that can introduce a lot of conflicting code due to various plugins and themes.
So, first of all, we look at the current errors that are keeping your pages from being visible. Note that not all websites are going to have crawling and indexing issues—Especially those that are kept in good standing with regular health checks and cleanups.
You can use any crawl tool like Semrush or Ahrefs to identify the current errors with your website. They will tell you about a bunch of stuff like meta descriptions that are too long, titles that are too short, images that don’t have an alt description, links that are not working or redirecting, and so on.
Take your time and fix all these issues, warnings, or notices that you get from these tools.
Website Speed and Performance Optimization: Enhancing User Experience
The speed and performance of your website are important factors that Google takes into account when deciding the position to rank your pages. You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and many others to find out what’s taking up the most time.
Usually, scripts that load first (like Google Fonts or Facebook Pixel) can take longer to be fetched from the server while the rest of the webpage is stuck without loading. And in the majority of cases, it’s perfectly fine to move them to the bottom of the page so they are loaded the last instead of the header.
Apart from delaying script loading, you can also minify CSS and JavaScript code, convert images to WebP and AVIF formats, and make sure that the basic structure and text of your webpage load instantly.
Mobile-Friendliness and Responsive Design: Catering to Mobile Users
Ecommerce SEO services often prioritize responsiveness more than anything else. This is because today, internet users are mainly browsing and shopping from their mobile devices. In fact, it’s even recommended to make a mobile-first website (vs. a desktop-first website, which is then optimized for mobiles later).
Websites that adapt nicely to all types of phone screens offer better sales and experience. Mobile responsiveness is single-handedly the most important consideration when it comes to ecommerce SEO. For example, we have seen websites that did a poor job of using keywords or writing a bunch of text—They still sell well. We have seen ecommerce stores with bad-quality images, still selling well.
But we’re yet to see a well-known website that’s considered good and modern that breaks down on mobile or has glitches when viewed on mobile.
Make responsiveness your #1 priority and fix all issues that you see when the website renders on a small screen. You can also test your web pages on online tools that allow you to view your webpage on multiple screen sizes. Most browsers today also have a responsive mode that allows you to change the window size, but it’s not a 100% accurate reflection of a real mobile screen.
URL Structure and Site Hierarchy: Organizing Content Effectively
A well-structured URL and a clear site hierarchy play a pivotal role in enhancing user experience and search engine visibility. These aspects not only guide visitors through your website but also help search engines understand the organization of your content, leading to better rankings.
Here’s how to optimize your URL structure and site hierarchy for maximum impact:
- Avoid using long strings of numbers or characters that provide no context. A URL like “yourwebsite.com/product-category/product-name” is not only user-friendly but also signals to search engines what the page is about.
- Place related pages under relevant categories to create a logical flow. For example, if you have an e-commerce site selling electronics, your URL could be organized as “yourwebsite.com/electronics/televisions/smart-TVs.”
- While it’s crucial to include keywords in URLs, avoid keyword stuffing. Keep URLs concise and focused on the main topic of the page. Search engines prefer URLs that are easy to understand and don’t feel manipulated.
In Conclusion
A technical SEO audit is a fundamental step toward achieving search engine visibility and providing a seamless user experience for your ecommerce store. By doing all of this that we mentioned in this article, not only are you aligning your website with search engine guidelines, but also creating a platform with an engaging experience. It will ultimately help you drive more sales and conversions. If you’re not feeling up to it, you can also try SEO audit services. These services can point out the current problems that should be fixed from an SEO perspective.
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