Here are the important points to remember from this step-by-step ecommerce SEO audit to improve your store’s visibility.

• Consistently auditing your Shopify store is the key to keeping your store healthy and at the top of its competitive game. By proactively identifying and fixing SEO issues, you can attract more organic traffic and make more sales.

• Linking your store to Google Search Console and setting up your analytics tracking should be your priority. These tools give you a sense of what’s working, what’s not, and how users are interacting with your site, thus allowing you to make data-driven decisions.

• Audit technical health, on-page elements, keyword strategy, content quality, and site architecture. Resolving problems in all of these categories will make your store more crawlable overall, boosting your users’ experience and SEO performance.

• Improving your site’s loading time, mobile friendliness, and overall user experience will not only benefit your SEO efforts but help you get more conversions too. A website that’s quick and easy to use is one that will retain customers and lead them to convert.

• Don’t ignore the importance of off-page SEO signals. Check what types of backlinks your competitors are building. Next, acquire quality backlinks naturally, use social media strategically, and adopt local SEO strategies to further increase your digital footprint.

• Next steps: After completing the audit, it’s important to prioritize and implement fixes, track key performance indicators, and establish a regular audit schedule going forward. Ongoing tracking and SEO adjustments over time are key to sustainable SEO success.

Our step-by-step Shopify SEO audit guide will help you boost your online store’s visibility. Find out how optimizing your meta descriptions and repairing broken links can help you increase your search ranking. We’ll walk you through the process of conducting keyword research and optimizing each product page.

If you want to increase your amount of organic traffic, check your site speed and mobile-friendliness. Find out how to make Google Analytics work for you to measure your progress and adjust your approach for success.

Our ultimate step-by-step Shopify SEO audit will help your Shopify store get found by more potential customers. By completing these steps, you improve the overall user experience while boosting your conversions/sales. We’re ready to help you get your store found with these simple steps.

Why Audit Your Shopify Store?

That’s why regular SEO audits are so important for your Shopify store and for maintaining your online store’s visibility and search results rankings. After all, you’re a savvy businessperson who wants to ensure your site continues to be the best option for customers to choose.

SEO audits allow you to proactively address problems preventing new traffic and sales from being realized on your store.

Boost Search Engine Visibility

When you audit your store for SEO, you can find opportunities to optimize your store and increase its visibility on search engines. Then, by optimizing your SEO factors, you can rank higher on Google’s results.

We’ve helped many businesses dramatically increase their traffic by making simple SEO enhancements. This serves to both attract more potential customers and drive more of them into their organic traffic.

Enhance Overall Marketing Strategy

SEO audits provide you with a foundational piece of knowledge to help you optimize your broader strategy and digital marketing initiatives. Insights from these audits can help drive your content strategy, marketing emails, and more.

A thorough SEO audit allows you to focus all your SEO efforts and resources on best supporting your larger marketing objectives. By knowing exactly what your customers are looking for, you’re able to tailor and optimize your marketing campaigns to get better results.

Build a Customer-Centric Website

User experience issues uncovered during SEO audits can damage your customers’ experience from day one. These issues can play a role in how often customers make repeat purchases.

Improve your on-site navigation to make it easy for users to find what they need. Improve its performance and mobile usability to establish a safe and reliable purchasing environment.

When you rectify any SEO issues on your pages, not only does it create a better experience overall, but it also leads to more sales.

Identify Growth Opportunities Proactively

An often overlooked benefit of SEO audits is finding new keyword opportunities. Beyond that, they plug holes in your content and expose opportunities for backlinks to fuel your expansion.

By analyzing the strategies of your competitors, you’ll be able to find areas of the market they’ve left open for you to take advantage of. By taking a proactive approach to SEO, you’re likely to see a higher growth rate, and your revenue will be poached by you.

Identifying these SEO issues when they first pop up will keep you from experiencing a drop in your overall performance.

Improve Website Conversion Rates

SEO audits help identify issues impacting your conversion rates, such as page speed. That means you’re leaving money on the table by not increasing the profitability of your non-product pages, calls-to-action, and checkout process.

Fixing critical technical SEO problem areas and making your site search better will close the door on lost sales. An easily navigable website is a better experience for shoppers and results in more online sales being made.

Essential Pre-Audit Groundwork

Before embarking on any Shopify SEO audit, you’ll want to lay the appropriate groundwork with tools and accounts. Proper groundwork helps you collect accurate data and thoroughly analyze SEO performance.

Pro tip: A specific action plan can help steer the audit process and allow you to prioritize SEO tasks, big or small. These proactive steps provide an excellent groundwork for successful SEO improvements and sustained online prowess.

Connect Search Engine Consoles

Link your Shopify store with Google Search Console and other search engine webmaster tools. These consoles provide you with rich, actionable insights related to your site’s indexing, crawlability, and performance on search queries.

This information allows you to identify technical SEO problems and efficiently guide search engines as they crawl your site. Make sure to monitor Google Search Console for crawl error reports, address errors promptly, and avoid negative impacts on your SEO rankings.

Staying on top of this data helps you understand how healthy your website is and if it is receiving any manual penalties. Upload your sitemap to Google Search Console. Don’t forget to submit it to Bing Webmaster Tools as well to get your site into search results faster.

Integrate Analytics Tracking Correctly

Ensure GA4 and Facebook tags are properly set up on your Shopify website. Accurate analytics tracking provides insights into site visitors’ behavior, traffic sources, and conversion rates.

This information allows you to determine how valuable, engaging, and relevant content is, SEO performance across the board, and the impact of marketing campaigns. Keeping tabs on these important website metrics will help you gauge the impact of your SEO initiatives and identify opportunities for further improvement.

1. Enable the GA and GSC API Access under Configuration (Optional).

Select Your SEO Audit Toolkit

Pick the SEO tools that are right for you, including keyword research, site audit, and backlink analysis. Some of the more popular ones are Semrush, Google Keyword Planner, and Moz Keyword Explorer.

These tools give you essential information on your current keyword rankings, website authority, and what your competitors are doing. Working with the most effective SEO audit tools will make the audit process faster and help you obtain more successful results.

Generate and Submit XML Sitemap

Generate an XML sitemap for your Shopify store and submit it to all relevant search engines. Submitting an XML sitemap allows search engine crawlers to more effectively index the content of your website.

A properly structured sitemap leads to better crawlability, and it makes sure all of your most important pages are indexed. Keep the sitemap current. Make sure to maintain your website’s sitemap to mirror changes in content and website layout.

Step-by-Step Shopify SEO Audit Process

Now, let’s dive into what a Shopify SEO audit is and why it is an important step in ensuring your store is as competitive as possible. It’s an efficient process to methodically audit your site’s technical health, on-page elements, and off-page signals.

Working through each step allows you to easily identify what needs improvement, creating a foundation for successful SEO and increased traffic.

1. Assess Shopify Technical SEO Health

First, begin by crawling your Shopify store to get an idea of its current structure. Tools such as Google Search Console can be beneficial. Ensure you’re indexed correctly.

Further, check your robots.txt file to make sure that search engines can crawl the pages they need to be able to crawl. It’s just as important to check mobile responsiveness with the Mobile-Friendly Test Chrome extension.

Ensure you’ve secured your site with HTTPS and that your page speed is up to par. Speed optimization apps like Hyperspeed offer features that guide you through performance-enhancing improvements.

2. Review On-Page Element Effectiveness

Update meta titles and descriptions for each page with targeted, relevant keywords to improve the organic click-through rate. Consider the terms your audience is searching for and include those keywords.

Use your header tags hierarchically to create more readable content. Review your product titles, descriptions, and images to ensure they’re optimized for SEO.

3. Analyze Keyword Targeting Strategy

Conduct keyword research to determine the most relevant keywords and phrases for your Shopify store. Prioritize long-tail keywords and target them to individual pages according to the search intent of users.

Include target keywords organically within the meta title, meta description, and body text. Solid keyword research lays the groundwork for attracting qualified traffic.

4. Evaluate Content Quality and Gaps

Create measurable goals and create an inventory of your website content. Leverage Google Analytics to identify your top-performing content.

Identify and eliminate all duplicate pages to better rank in search results. Don’t forget—a good content marketing strategy is the perfect magnet for new customers.

5. Inspect Site Architecture and Navigation

Review your URL structure to ensure that these attributes are attached. When categories or products go missing, use canonical URLs appropriately and clean up broken links.

Inspect your URL hierarchy and XML sitemap for proper structure.

Optimize Store Performance and UX

So website performance and overall user experience should rightly have a large impact on SEO rankings, as well as ultimately boosting sales. A website that is quick loading and user-friendly on mobile devices improves SEO effectiveness. Returning happy customers would be very pleased with clear and simple navigation.

First and foremost, keep a watchful eye on your site’s loading time. Next, make sure it all works perfectly on mobile and that your customers can quickly locate whatever they’re looking for. By optimizing for these areas, you’ll bring more people out to your experience. This will result in more sales and loyal customers who come back again and again.

Measure and Improve Site Speed

To start, see how quickly your Shopify store is loading with a tool like Google Page Speed Insights. Discover what’s bogging it down, whether that’s massive images or junky code. First, optimize your images for store performance and user experience.

Then, add browser caching so your store loads faster for repeat visitors, and take advantage of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve your content from different servers. Sites that load in about one second can see up to 2.5 times more sales than sites that take five seconds or longer to load. Don’t forget that Google is a big fan of fast sites.

Ensure Seamless Mobile Experience

You will need to ensure your Shopify store is optimized for mobile in both appearance and overall user experience. Optimize your mobile meta tags and content so that you appear higher in the mobile search results. If phones aren’t working correctly during online checkout, stores are losing conversions and sales.

You earn and retain more business when your mobile experience is on point. Unsupported cart loading times can now be as much as 50 percent faster.

Enhance User Journey Navigation

Review your Shopify store’s navigation and ensure users can quickly find what they’re looking for. Optimize your category pages, product pages, and site search. Implementing breadcrumbs and clear internal links will guide users to navigate through your site.

There are two big benefits to having a clean, logical, user-friendly site structure. When a website is straightforward to use, customers spend more time on it, bounce rates decrease, and revenue increases.

Check Website Security (HTTPS)

If you have a Shopify store, your store must use HTTPS to protect your visitors’ experience and personal data. HTTPS encrypts the data that travels back and forth between your site and your users, making sure their sensitive information stays confidential.

Purchase an SSL certificate and install it to enable HTTPS on your store. Website security helps ensure that you maintain customers’ trust while benefiting your SEO rankings.

Tackle Common Shopify SEO Hurdles

Those of us who operate Shopify stores know that we run into very specific SEO hurdles. Though Shopify may have a 23% market share, reaching Google’s search results page can be difficult. It’s all about tackling platform quirks, canonical tag issues, and the impact of third-party apps.

In addition to this, optimizing your collection pages is key to improving your overall SEO health and organic visibility. Once you tackle these common hurdles, you’ll establish a solid SEO foundation to grow your online visibility.

Address Platform-Specific URL Quirks

We can’t just wholesale clog up development by filtering out every potential URL quirk that could affect SEO and crawlers. Change the URLs of any non-optimized product pages, collections, or blog posts. This is critical to increasing your search visibility, clicks, and ultimately sales.

Use URL redirects to manage changes and avoid broken links. By addressing these quirks, you’re improving crawlability and your overall user experience as well. For example, leverage custom URL parameters to develop a more organized store, as Shopify doesn’t support nested collections.

Resolve Canonical Tag Conflicts

Unlock new traffic by addressing conflicting canonical tags that send mixed signals to search engines. Utilize canonical tags to indicate the preferred version of a page that can be accessed through multiple URLs.

Take care to make sure these tags are set up properly throughout your entire site. Keep in mind, Google only indexes the canonical URL, which limits what breadcrumb links are effective. Resolving these conflicts improves search engine rankings.

Audit Third-Party App SEO Impact

Sure, consider how apps will impact website speed, URL structure, and preferred content. Configure app settings to maximize your SEO impact.

Just keep an eye out that these apps don’t end up inadvertently harming your SEO efforts.

Optimize Collection Page SEO

Utilize relevant, high-value keywords and conduct a comprehensive SEO audit to bulk up meta descriptions while writing high-quality content focused on SEO optimization. These pages can effectively answer high-intent niche queries and drive organic search results, ultimately increasing SEO visibility.

Deliver an experience that guides users through easy-to-follow navigation and product filters. Optimizing collection pages not only enhances the user experience but also helps improve organic rankings and boosts revenue for your e-commerce business.

Amplify Off-Page SEO Signals

These off-page SEO signals are extremely important in helping search engines figure out how to rank your website and how authoritative your website is. Get your store more visibility by studying how your competitors are getting backlinks.

Next, build quality backlinks naturally, use social media to your advantage, and focus on local SEO tactics. Next thing you know, more folks will be discovering you online, you’ll have increased online traffic, and your business is sure to be booming.

This research from Wolfgang Digital illustrates how approximately 35% of all traffic to e-commerce stores comes from SERPs. This emphasizes the vital role that off-page SEO plays.

Analyze Competitor Backlink Strategies

Start by checking out what your competitors are doing for backlinks. Use SEO tools to find out which trustworthy websites are linking to them.

Then, aim to get backlinks from those same sites. Look at the quality and relevance of your competitors’ backlinks to guide your own efforts. This helps you create an effective off-page SEO plan.

Build High-Quality Backlinks Ethically

Develop strong backlinks the right way through content marketing, guest blogging, and outreach. Produce authoritative, high-quality content that establishes your expertise and earns links from authoritative websites.

Engage with them online and build mutually beneficial relationships to get industry-relevant backlinks. Keep these things in mind when creating backlinks, because they will signal to Google that your store is a trustworthy and authoritative source of information.

The more high-quality links you earn, the more authoritative your Shopify store will become. This increase in authority is what gets you ranking higher in Google’s search results.

Leverage Social Media Integration

Learn how social media can supercharge your SEO efforts and drive more traffic to your Shopify storefront. Promote all of your website content through social media and earn new shares from reputable outlets.

Make sure to optimize your social media profiles using a variety of industry and niche keywords and always link back to your website. Create Google Alerts for when your brand, products, or other relevant terms related to your industry get mentioned.

This will improve your search visibility and SEO, as well as brand awareness.

Implement Local SEO Tactics

If you are looking to bring in those customers right in your backyard, then prioritize those local SEO tactics. Claim and optimize your Google My Business page using accurate information and images.

Create or update business listings on trusted business listing sites and local/city websites. Introduce these backlinking tactics slowly and regularly.

You’ll improve your store’s authority, trustworthiness, and search rankings, making it easier than ever to attract more high-quality organic visitors.

Post-Audit Actions and Monitoring

After finishing up your Shopify SEO audit, it’s important not only to act on the resulting discoveries but to continue tracking and monitoring your SEO performance. Finding problems is only the beginning. You have to proactively address them and routinely check your site to improve your visibility.

Let priorities drive an improvement plan, use KPIs to measure the improvements, and set a schedule to re-audit regularly. With consistent tracking of search ranking fluctuations, you’ll enjoy ongoing SEO enhancements and overall long-term web prosperity.

Prioritize and Implement Fixes

Begin with the most important on-page SEO problems before anything else. Consider it to be like repairing a building’s foundation before other renovations. Establish a post-audit action plan that outlines the necessary follow-up work, with timeframes, priorities, and assignment of responsibility for each task.

For instance, if you find a high occurrence of 404 errors in your audit, make that the first thing you fix. Monitor progress as all the fixes go in, making sure that they’re installed properly and doing what they’re supposed to do. By prioritizing fixes, you can get the most SEO impact and boost your website performance in less time.

Track Key Performance Indicators

Monitor these KPIs regularly to track the success of your SEO efforts. Monitor organic traffic, keyword rankings, and conversion rates to gauge the impact of your audit. Leverage analytics platforms such as Google Analytics to monitor these KPIs and identify opportunities.

As an example, if you see a decrease in organic traffic, look into what keywords are losing rankings. Tracking KPIs helps you evaluate SEO performance and make data-driven decisions.

Establish a Regular Audit Schedule

Create a new audit schedule to maintain your SEO performance and discover new opportunities. Aim to do mini-audits quarterly or as frequently as you need to remain in tune with current SEO best practices. For general maintenance, run a mini audit every month to review and fix crucial elements of core web vitals, PageSpeed issues, 4xx errors, and sitemap errors.

Continue to align your SEO strategy with new developments in search engine algorithms and user behavior. Continued and periodic auditing is key to long-term online advocacy success.

Monitor Search Ranking Changes

It’s critical to track where you rank for your primary keywords to ensure that your SEO campaigns are yielding results. SEO tools can help you in tracking keyword rankings, especially big jumps or drops in search engine results pages positions.

If you experience a decline in rankings, do a deep dive to figure out how you were impacted and why, so you can pivot and update your strategy. Checking your ranking changes on search engines prevents you from losing online visibility, driving valuable organic traffic to your website.

Conclusion

You’re better equipped to increase your Shopify store’s visibility. I’m confident that with these insights, you can maximize the likelihood of your store getting shown on relevant search engine results pages. I’ve provided you with the tools, now use them to help your store shine online!

Apply these lessons to perform regular audits of your store. Remember, SEO is not a set-it-and-forget-it affair; avoid it if you can! Most importantly, you start seeing changes when you stick with it.

Now, get out there and audit to optimize! Begin your audit now and see your store rise through the search rankings. So what are you waiting for? Your customers are already searching for you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why should I audit my Shopify store’s SEO?

A comprehensive SEO audit helps to identify where these issues exist, increasing your e-commerce store’s visibility on search engine results pages. In turn, this results in higher organic search traffic, more interested potential customers, and ultimately more sales. Regular auditing will help ensure that your e-commerce business remains competitive.

What’s the first step in a Shopify SEO audit?

Before you get started, conduct a thorough ecommerce website audit to research who your ideal customers are and what they’re searching for. Identify relevant e-commerce keywords and phrases that potential customers are using on Google to find products like yours. Additionally, ensure you establish your KPIs as a measure of success.

What are some essential on-page SEO elements to check?

Make it a priority to ensure your product titles, descriptions, and image alt text are optimized with appropriate e-commerce keywords. Additionally, ensure your URLs are short and relevant, as a thorough ecommerce website audit can reveal how internal linking signals to search engines the structure of your site.

How does store performance impact SEO?

An image-heavy ecommerce site that loads slowly frustrates users and negatively impacts search engine rankings. To increase SEO, optimize images, leverage browser caching, and utilize a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to improve load speed, keeping page times at 3 seconds or less.

What are some common Shopify SEO issues to avoid?

Duplicate content is a common issue in e-commerce websites. To improve SEO visibility, utilize canonical tags to indicate which version of a page should be indexed. Additionally, repair any internal and external broken links and ensure your sitemap is submitted to Google Search Console for a thorough ecommerce website audit.

How important is off-page SEO for Shopify?

Off-page SEO, particularly through acquiring high-quality backlinks from reputable websites, not only establishes your site’s trustworthiness in the eyes of search engines but also enhances your e-commerce site’s authority, ultimately fueling referral traffic.

What should I do after completing the SEO audit?

Put the recommended changes from your ecommerce SEO audit into action. Keep an eye on your website’s performance with Google Analytics and Search Console to enhance your e-commerce site’s organic search results.