38% of retailer traffic comes from organic search. When you pair that with the fact that 53% of shoppers state that they always do research before buying to ensure they make the best decision, it’s clear that ranking on the SERPs is critical to the success of any ecommerce business important.
That said, a technical audit is the first step in making sure your website is accessible to both search engines and your customers. While addressing technical issues alone won't usually really improve your rankings, having serious issues with your site won't even give you a chance to show up on the SERPs.
There are tons of tools to choose from to perform this task, but in this post, we'll look at Website Audit SE Ranking for performing a technical SEO audit.
let's start. But before we dive into how to perform an audit of SE Ranking, let's understand what technical SEO is all about, and why you should bother with it in the first place.
What is a Technical SEO Audit?
A technical SEO audit is a process that involves you examining the technical aspects of your e-commerce website's SEO. It checks the health of your website and finds what needs fixing and suggests how to improve or fix the problem. Moderation runs on all your pages, including:
Homepage : Your homepage or landing page directly affects your bounce rate. Therefore, an audit run on this page will primarily check that the page returns a 200 status code and is indexable, has the correct title and SEO elements such as title and description. It also checks the quality of your internal links, as users are likely to navigate to your product pages from there. If they have trouble getting your offer from your homepage, they will fall back to the search engine results page.
Product Pages : Do a site audit of your product pages to check for correct page elements, redirects, and link structure, such as related product organization, speed, and page performance. It also checks for duplicate content elements and 404 errors.
Category Pages : Do an audit of your category pages, primarily checking your product categories with internal links to product sales pages and your product organization to see how easy it is for customers to find the products they intend to buy.
Search Filters : Visitors typically use the search function to find what they're looking for, rather than using link navigation or category pages. Therefore, your search function must be able to quickly provide a great shopping experience, and the review will check for this.
So, in general, a technical SEO audit will find out if search engines recommend things like navigation, text compliance, link properties, security, and speed.
Why is a Technical SEO Audit Important for Ecommerce Sites?
Running a technical SEO audit will help you identify technical issues with your site that are limiting search engines from crawling your store or understanding your content, and provide actionable solutions that you can perform to resolve the issues found .
Start Your Technical SEO Audit SE Ranking
SE Ranking can help you check the status of your store pages for security, speed, ease of use, find broken pages and links, identify redirects and hreflang issues, spot indexing issues, check description meta tags and title tags for product and category pages, Check CSS files, JavaScript files, and product images, review content and spot duplicates, and analyze external and internal links.
Start the audit tool
The website audit tool can be launched from the project table on the main dashboard by clicking the 3 dots next to the relevant project and then website audit, or from the vertical navigation bar on the left.
Depending on your settings, the tool can automatically start running the audit or wait until you start it manually, as shown below. You can also restart the review at any time.
Once launched, you will be able to follow the scanning process:
On this page, the tool will show you how long it's been running, and if you've run more than one, you'll see all of them in the queue position. If your site has less than 1000 pages, the review will take only a few minutes, but if you have more pages, the review time will be longer. However, the website review tool will notify you via email when SE Ranking is complete.
Overview section
After the review, you'll see an overview tab that shows a general summary of your site's technical SEO health to help you understand which areas need to be prioritized. They are identified by color based on the severity of the problem.
A green check mark means there is no problem with the parameter, and a blue exclamation mark means there is a notification, which doesn't always mean a problem but requires your attention. A yellow triangle with an exclamation mark indicates a warning, such as a sitemap problem, a missing alt tag, or an overly long title tag. A red cross icon indicates critical bugs that must be fixed immediately, including duplicate pages, mixed content, and long load times.
That is, at the top of the overview page, the tool will show you general information about your store, such as the number of product/category pages crawled and URLs discovered and their dynamics compared to their previous state.
Below the information about the number of pages, you'll see the top 5 key issues on the site by importance and volume. To learn more, click the View All button:
There is also a distribution of category graphs showing the number of pages with problems in each category. If your page passes the checks for each category, a green bar will appear:
Below is the page index graph (1), which shows the percentage of crawled pages that are indexed and not indexed. The chart below this block will help you understand why your page is not being indexed. This is either because they are non-canonical, non-200, or because they are indexed off.
The overview page also displays a graph of the distribution of crawled pages by HTTP server response code (1) near the index graph (2). And there is a graph showing the distribution of pages by nesting level (3), showing the minimum number of clicks email list required to access a page from the home page. In addition, the server response time graph (4) shows how quickly pages respond to browser requests.
All elements on all diagrams can be clicked for more details.
Now, the tool can not only point out the problem, but also help you understand what needs to be fixed.
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For example, you'll be able to know exactly which SSL issues you're having, why you keep getting duplicate pages, why some pages aren't indexed, which JavaScript and CSS files are heavy, and why the hreflang attribute isn't working correctly. You can even see which pages have no titles, which pages have temporary redirects, and discover which internal links lead to pages with redirects. and which external pages go to the 404 page.
problem report
The Issue Reports section contains a list of all issues found in your eCommerce store. In this tab you will see technical status information about all 110 parameters analyzed by the tool. These checks are grouped into 16 categories such as Crawl, HTTP Status Codes, Availability, Duplicate Content, Security, Availability, Title, Description, and more. Depending on the severity of the problem, results are represented by color icons, just like on the overview page.
Discover resources
The Found Assets section provides analysis results for your store assets, including CSS, images, and JavaScript files. By clicking on the numbers below the URL section, you can see which pages are using each resource and whether search engines can crawl it. SE Ranking includes a built-in filter to categorize resources into JavaScript, CSS, and images.
page change monitoring
The Page Change Monitoring Tool allows you to specify which pages you want to monitor for changes on a specified date. The tool will notify you once a change is detected. Using this feature, you can view page change history, track the performance of your SEO strategy, and monitor page changes performed by team members to ensure no one accidentally changes critical on-page SEO elements. Track what your competitors are doing, such as price changes, new product/service launches or new publications.
Ecommerce Technical SEO Audit Fundamentals - What You Must Check
There are 5 key areas you must check to perform a proper technical SEO audit. Let's take a look at them.
1. Keep your website safe
Website security is one of the ranking factors. For example, if your website has not yet switched to HTTPS, visitors and search engines will not be able to ensure that your online store is secure. Also, make sure your security credentials are okay. The website audit tool identifies major issues that need to be fixed with SSL. Other aspects to check are your site's encryption algorithms and security protocols.
SE Ranking Tool: Safety
This tool helps you understand HTTPS and HTTP issues and how to fix them to keep your store safe and secure.
2. Run a website crawl
Running a website crawl is one of the first aspects of conducting a technical SEO audit. Crawl reports will provide details about the most critical aspects of your site, such as Robots.txt, your XML sitemap, redirected and detached pages, and HTTP status codes (error pages).
SE Ranking Tool: Crawl
This can crawl up to 2 pages in 1000 minutes and filter results by category. It makes it easier for crawlers to scan and index your store.
3. Perform text analysis
Mistakes like duplicate content can ruin your ranking chances. The website audit tool provides clear details on text issues such as heavy titles, meta descriptions, and unoptimized tags and how to fix them.