E-Commerce SEO Guide: Performing an SEO Audit in 2021

E-commerce enterprises require an SEO strategy. According to Google, 59% of shoppers use Google to research a purchase they plan to make in-store or online. Making sure your products appear first on search engine result pages (SERPs) can make the difference between growth and stagnation for popular brands and retailers.

E-commerce success depends on building your brand, delivering a great user experience, and handling customer interactions well. In addition, search engine ranking is vital for generating growth as it creates awareness and drives users to your site.

Just look at prominent e-commerce players in niche markets: Kroger (grocery), Williams Sonoma (home decor), Home Depot (home improvement), and Nordstrom (fashion). By leveraging SEO fundamentals, they improve product positioning in SERPs and grow their business.

Performing an E-Commerce SEO Website Audit

With a website audit, you can analyze your website’s traffic patterns, ranking keywords, backlinks, and competition. Regularly monitoring your website’s SEO allows you to notice traffic patterns and catch any issues before your website’s sales are affected.

When planning an SEO strategy, all projects should start and end with an audit. We typically analyze the following to create long term SEO strategies:

• Competition
• Website Health
• Page Speed
• Technical SEO
• Keyword Research
• Content

We’ll take a deep dive into each of these categories to analyze some of the more common issues and what to look for when planning your site’s strategy.

Note: You can use many SEO tools and software to analyze your website. In our Adidas example below, we use Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, and PageSpeed Insights.

Competition

By examining the strengths and weaknesses of your competition, you can improve your e-commerce SEO strategy and marketing goals. You can analyze anything from keywords to content type, brand messaging, website metrics, and more.

Using Ahrefs, we found a sample competition for Adidas based on keyword data:

Ahrefs finds keyword similarities between your domain and other domains indexed in search engines. This will help find competition outside of your geographical area. Putting more emphasis on these specific companies is beneficial for your research.

The “keywords unique to competitor” column pulls sites based on common keywords. Thus, a bigger number signifies a bigger competitor. To evaluate your competition, you may want to create tiers based on the metrics of your current website.

With their variety of online products, Dick’s Sporting Goods makes a strong competitor. Your site’s competitors may be like Dick’s Sporting Goods, making this a helpful analysis.

SEO metrics

When using software to audit your website, there are some general terms for understanding your site’s performance. Although each software may brand these metrics differently, having a high-level understanding will help you know your site’s performance.

The most common metrics are:

• URL Rating (UR): This shows the strength of a target page’s link profile on a 100-point scale. If you analyze a domain, you will see the homepage’s UR.
• Domain Rating (DR): This shows the strength of a target website’s backlink profile compared to the others on a 100-point scale.
• Backlinks: These are the total number of links from other websites pointing to your target.
• Organic Keywords: These are the total number of keywords that your target ranks for in the top 100 organic search results across all countries. When your target ranks for a keyword more than once, it’s counted multiple times.
• Organic Traffic: This is the target website, subsection, or URL’s estimated monthly organic traffic from search.
• Traffic Value: This is the estimated value of your target’s monthly organic search traffic.

Using this legend as a reference, let’s analyze the key metrics for Dicks Sporting Goods:

What’s notable is this site’s considerable investment in PPC. Their paid budget is fairly widespread in this particular case and makes up a relatively low percentage of Dick’s estimated traffic value.

When websites like Dick’s, which has a strong Domain Authority, optimize for particular keywords, they have a better opportunity than most to rank highly for that given keyword. Over time, Dick’s Sporting Goods has become an informational authority in the sporting goods space.

Over the past year, Dicks’s has slightly declined in keyword ranking, which directly relates to their site’s overall traffic. It highlights the importance of targeting keywords with higher search volume.

Website health

A typical website health check looks like this:

Note: To analyze the website’s health, we use Ahrefs and Screaming Frog. Ahrefs provides high-level breakdowns for each of the charts.

Here is a breakdown of some other common issues your site may be experiencing:

Capturing your potential readers

• Meta descriptions are a tool for capturing a potential visitor/buyer. You can analyze them in Google’s web crawls, which attribute to user experience.
• Creating a short description for the sites listed can allow you to rank for keywords by bringing additional organic traffic.

Title tags

• Creating a clear structure to your pages and content is vital to how potential readers and customers view and interact with your site.
• They add to the overall structure and hierarchy that Google looks for when fulfilling search queries.

Keyword placement

• Have your main targeted keyword on every page within the first 100 words of text.
• Use targeted keywords in the meta descriptions and titles of pages. Doing so helps the overall message of the page as meta descriptions provide a clear indication of the page.
• On the flip side, avoid keyword stuffing as the goal is to provide a clear structure for each page.

Direct your traffic

• Managing links within your site can make a clear flow for readers and shoppers and even distribute to pages within your site. It is common for e-commerce sites with a large number of SKUs.
• You can present links in the form of orphaned pages or pages lacking internal or external links.

Optimizing images

• Associating images with keywords is an opportunity to fill searchers’ queries with images from your site. You can do this using alt attribute.
• When using alt attribute to describe your image, search engines will use it to understand the content of your image files. Also, if the site can not display your image, it will use this text instead.

Leveraging SEO experts

Getting started on building an SEO strategy can be challenging, especially with no technical background. You can take advantage of experts from Fabric Digital Services to overcome these obstacles.

Page speed

PageSpeed Insights manages your website by measuring the page load speed of your site. It also provides insights on how to improve performance.

The metrics from this test are called Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals are Google’s indicators for page speed as well as user experience. In the summer months of 2021, Google has been rolling out an update that applies more weight to the results of this test.

Making sure your e-commerce store is user-friendly has SEO implications, but the primary beneficiaries are your customers. Providing an easy-to-use and fast-loading shopping experience is critical for conversion.

How Page Speed Improves User Experience

User experience can be the difference between making or losing a sale, especially in e-commerce. Although it is a broad metric, we tend to break it down into technical/web development and content.

Tools like PageSpeed Insights focus on the technical portion and suggest what elements slow down your website. Regarding content, having an accurate product page is extremely useful for potential customers. In addition, heatmap applications or plugins are valuable for determining a customer’s response to your site.

Here is PageSpeed Insights’ report on Adidas:

Let’s first break down the test criteria and passing score ranges.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how long the primary content renders in the user’s browser. Google PageSpeed Insights identifies the LCP loaded content in the user’s viewport before any scrolling. Adidas measured at 8.4s and thus is red.

Time to Interactive (TTI) measures the time taken for a page to become fully interactive. It relies on the FCP, event handler loading, and response to user interaction within 50ms. Measuring at 4.2s, Adidas can improve its TTI.

Speed Index measures the time it takes to display content during the page load visually. Adidas’ ranking is 3.1s and thus good.

PageSpeed Insights also offers opportunities and diagnostics for remedy. For example, see the recommendations it provides for Adidas:

There are many great features and applications to help you speed up your website.

Here are the solutions to more common issues:

• Compress and manage image files: As many image files on your site are large, you can compress them with an application.
• Minimize main thread work: By default, the main thread of the renderer process typically handles most code.
• Differ off-screen images: Consider lazy-loading offscreen and hidden images after all critical resources have finished loading.
• Reduce unused Javascript and network payloads: Consult your web developers to remove excess code in the theme.

Technical SEO

This section of your audit consists of many components. The more common issues stem from your site’s structure. To understand how closely related these issues are to your site performance, we recommend consulting your web developer.

Another component to keep in mind when designing your site’s architecture is usability. Ultimately, you want to transform the complex multiple categories, products, and descriptions into something easy to use.

A website hierarchy will look like this:

Your website’s sitemap defines site Architecture. Search Engines can then define the appropriate weight of each category stemming down from your home page. Clear structure leads to easier navigation for your customers and increases your opportunity to rank for more keywords.

Keyword research

Utilizing the right keywords is vital. Tools like Ahrefs can formulate and implement a successful keyword strategy.

When reviewing keyword research, it’s essential to understand some metrics. These depend on the software you use.

• Volume: Search volume represents the average monthly number of searches for the keyword.
• Keyword Difficulty: This estimates how hard it will be for a given keyword to appear in the top 10 search results.
• Cost Per Click (CPC): This shows the average price that advertisers pay for a click on their ad for a target keyword.
• Traffic: This metric estimates the monthly organic search traffic to the website’s ranking page from the given keyword.

Solving these keyword issues can ultimately solve many other SEO issues. Thus, making these changes first will lead to better results.

Content

Content engages the user, increases search engine ranking, and improves the likelihood of getting quality links from other sites. Your content also needs to be relevant and positions your brand as authoritative and trustworthy.

Having a list of targeted keywords when optimizing your pages will provide better results. When optimizing these pages, section headings are opportunities to include some of your targeted keywords.

Product detail pages (PDPs)

The majority of your content resides on your PDPs. As e-commerce removes the possibility of physically touching a product, your PDPs are vital in converting sales.

A well-structured PDP contains the following elements:

• Product Description: Unique descriptions of your product resonates with your target audience and improves SEO.
• Call-to-Action: Including one on your PDP helps your audience start a transaction.
• Product Images: Images are a crucial element, especially with e-commerce.
• Price: Having the price is essential if you have Google AdWords and want your product listing to appear in Google Ads at the top of the search page.
• Heading Tags: Using targeted keywords increases your opportunity to rank in Google search results.
• Hyperlinks: Linking internally to your site has a high SEO yield while also providing additional context to potential buyers.

The goal with website content is to provide value to users while having all the key attributes necessary to allow your content to appear in search results.

Conclusion

Building SEO-friendly e-commerce sites and content make your products competitive with other e-commerce giants on search engine rankings. Many tools and resources can help plot and manage your SEO journey.

Your site’s performance impacts your SEO ranking. Thus, a flexible platform is crucial to improve your site’s performance. Take advantage of the power of microservices with Fabric XM and decouple your e-commerce solution elements to improve your front end shopping experience.