Organic search accounts for 38% of merchant traffic. When you consider that 53% of customers always research before purchasing to ensure that they are making the best decision possible, it’s evident that ranking on the SERPs is critical to the success of any eCommerce firm.
On the other hand, a technical audit is the first stage in ensuring that your website is accessible to both search engines and your customers. While resolving technical faults on your website is unlikely to enhance your results, having serious flaws on your site will prevent you from even appearing on the SERP.
There are other tools available for accomplishing this process, but in this piece, we’ll focus on the Website Audit by SE Ranking for performing a technical SEO audit.
Let’s get this party started. But, before we get into how to run an audit with SE Ranking, let’s take a look at what technical SEO is and why you should care in the first place.
What is a Technical SEO Audit?
A technical SEO audit is a procedure for examining the technical aspects of your eCommerce site’s SEO. It examines the health of your website, identifies what needs to be corrected, and makes recommendations for how to improve or resolve the issue. All of your pages are audited, including:
- Your homepage or landing pages have a direct impact on your bounce rate. An audit of this page will check that it returns 200 status codes and is indexable, as well as that it contains proper header and SEO elements such as title and description. It also examines the quality of your internal linking, as customers would most likely use it to access your product pages. They’ll return to the search engine result page if they can’t find your offers on your homepage.
- Product Pages: A website audit of your product pages looks for things like suitable page elements, redirects, and linking structure, as well as the organization of related products, speed, and page performance. It also looks for 404 errors and duplicate content elements.
- Internal linking of your product categories to your product sale pages and the organization of your products in terms of how easy it is for customers to find what they want to buy are all checked during a category page audit.
- Search Filters: Instead of using link navigation or category pages, visitors typically utilize the search tool to find what they’re looking for. So, to provide a fantastic shopping experience, your search feature must be speedy, and an audit checks this.
In general, a technical SEO audit determines whether search engines recommend features such as navigation, textual compliance, link characteristics, security, and speed.
Why is Technical SEO Audit Important for ECommerce Sites?
A technical SEO audit can help you uncover the technical difficulties preventing search engines from crawling your store or interpreting your content and provide concrete solutions that you can use to resolve the issues.
Starting your technical SEO audit using SE Ranking is a good place to start.
SE Ranking can help you check your store’s pages’ security, speed, and ease of use. It also helps you to find broken pages and links, identify redirect and hreflang issues, find indexation issues, check description meta tags and title tags for your product and category pages, examine CSS files, JavaScript files, and product images, audit content and find duplicates, and analyse external and internal links.
Launching the Audit Tool
The website audit tool can be accessed from the main dashboard’s projects table by clicking the three dots next to the relevant project and then website audit, or from the left-hand side’s vertical navigation bar.
The program can start an audit automatically or wait until you start it manually, depending on the settings you’ve made, as indicated below. You can also pause and resume the audit at any time.
You’ll be able to keep track of the scanning process once it’s launched:
The tool will tell you how long it’s been running on this page, and if you’re running more than one, you’ll see them all listed in order of execution. The audit will take only a few minutes if your site has less than 1000 pages, but it will take longer if you have more. The SE Ranking website audit tool, on the other hand, sends you an email when it’s finished.
Overview Section
When the audit is finished, you’ll get an overview page that gives you a basic overview of the website’s technical SEO health so you can figure out what needs to be prioritized. The severity of an issue is determined by the color used to identify it.
A green checkmark indicates that there are no problems with that parameter. In contrast, a blue exclamation mark indicates that there are notices that don’t always indicate a problem but require your attention. A yellow triangle with an exclamation point indicates warnings such as sitemap difficulties, missing alt tags, or too-long title tags. A red cross icon indicates a critical fault that must be resolved immediately, such as duplicate pages, mixed content, or a critically delayed load time.
That said, the tool displayed general information about your store at the top of the overview page, such as the number of crawled product/category pages and identified URLs, as well as their dynamics in comparison to their previous state.
You’ll see the top 5 key concerns on your site, ranked by importance and quantity, underneath the information on page count. Click the view all button to learn more:
A distribution of category graphs is also available, displaying the number of pages with issues from each category. A green bar appears if your pages pass all of the category’s checks:
The page indexation graph (1) below depicts the percentage of crawled pages that have been indexed vs. those that have not. The graph below the block can help you figure out why your pages weren’t indexed. This is either because of the fact that they are non-canonical, non-200, or that they have been closed to indexing.
Near the indexation graph on the overview page is a graph showing the distribution of crawled sites by HTTP server response codes (2). (1). There’s also a graph displaying the minimum number of clicks required to get to a page from the home page, which shows the distribution of pages by their nesting level (3). In addition, a server response time graph (4) depicts the speed with which pages react to browser queries.
Click on any element on any graph for additional information.
Now, instead of only pointing out problems, this tool assists you in determining what has to be corrected.
You’ll be able to see what SSL issues you have, why duplicate pages keep appearing, why specific pages aren’t indexed, which JavaScript and CSS files are large, and why hreflang attributes aren’t working properly, for example. You can also check which pages don’t have a title and which have temporary redirects, as well as which internal links lead to redirect pages. Which external pages lead to 404 errors?
Issue Report
A list of all issues discovered on your eCommerce store may be seen in the Issue Report area. You’ll find information on the technical state of all 110 parameters assessed by the tool in this tab. Crawling, HTTP status code, usability, duplicate content, security, usability, title, description, and so on are among the 16 categories covered. The results are represented by colour icons, just like on the overview page, depending on how critical an issue is.
Found Resources
The analysis findings for your store’s resources, such as CSS, pictures, and JavaScript files, are displayed in the Found Resources section. You can see which sites each resource is utilised on and whether search engines can crawl it by pressing on the number beneath the URL column. A built-in filter in SE Ranking categorizes resources into JavaScript, CSS, and picture categories.
Page Changes Monitoring
You can use the page changes monitoring tool to identify a web page that you wish to keep an eye on for changes on a particular day. The tool will tell you whenever a change is identified. This feature allows you to view page change history, track the performance of your SEO strategy, and monitor page modifications made by teammates to ensure that no one makes changes to critical on-page SEO elements by accident. Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing, such as price changes, new product/service releases, or new publications.
The Things You Must Check in an Ecommerce Technical SEO Audit
To conduct a good technical SEO audit, you must consider the following five factors. Let’s take a look at a few of them.
Ensure Website Security
One of the ranking variables is website security. For example, if you haven’t migrated to HTTPS, visitors and search engines won’t be able to trust your online store. Also, check to see if your security certificate is valid. The website audit tool identifies critical flaws with your SSL that need to be addressed. Your site’s encryption algorithm and security protocol are also things to look into.
SE Ranking Tool: Security
This tool will assist you in understanding HTTPS and HTTP problems, as well as how to resolve them so that your store remains safe and secure.
Run a Website Crawl
One of the first steps in performing a technical SEO audit is to crawl the website. The crawl report will detail the most important aspects of your website, including the Robots.txt file, your XML Sitemap, redirects and detached pages, and the HTTP Status Code (error pages).
SE Ranking Tool: Crawling
This crawls up to 1000 pages in 2 minutes and categorises the results. It also makes crawlers’ job of scanning and indexing your store easier.
Make Textual Analysis
Duplicate material, for example, can jeopardise you’re rating. The website audit tool gives you detailed information about textual issues like long titles, meta descriptions, and unoptimized tags, as well as how to fix them.
SE Ranking Tool: Textual Content
You can use this tool to assess the quality of textual content by identifying formal content metrics such as H1 and H2 tags, titles, and word count. This helps to structure the content and makes search engine crawling easier.
Analyze Link Attributes
You must understand which internal connections lead to redirects and which external links lead to 404 pages, as this not only affects search engine crawling but also destroys the user experience, which is something Google is concerned about.
SE Ranking Tool: Redirects and Internal/External Links
These two tools help you direct users to the correct page, maximise link value, and understand internal/external link quality, even if your store address changes.
Make sure your website is user-friendly
As I previously stated, Google provides a high-quality web experience to its users. So, in order for your site to rank, you must make sure that your page speed is fast, that you provide a good mobile experience through optimization, that your performance is top-notch by ensuring stellar core web vitals, and that your images, JavaScript, and CSS files aren’t too large to slow down the loading process.
Performance of the SE Ranking Tool
This section allows you to examine your website’s quality metrics and Core Web Vitals to see how you can improve its functionality and user experience.
Conclusion
Any ecommerce site that wants to attract customers and make sales should conduct a technical SEO audit. Beyond ranking, having your site free of technical SEO problems improves user experience. Your site will load faster, and customers will have less navigational troubles as a result of erroneous link settings. In general, having the right tool to conduct a thorough audit as well as providing solutions to the issues discovered can help your company achieve greater revenues and success.
