Perfect Ecommerce SEO Checklist for Online Stores

Check your eCommerce SEO strategy if your business growth has stagnated and sales are not skyrocketing. Since SEO for retail businesses can be incredibly complex, checking all your marketing techniques and strategies will help ensure you are moving in the right direction. Maybe you need a team of SEO specialists to identify and fix issues.

An eCommerce SEO checklist is a list of proven methods for optimizing your website and improving its performance on the search engine results page. The goal is to avoid missteps and add important elements to help Google reward your site in the rankings.

Here’s the best eCommerce SEO checklist for your online store.

Set Up Online Tools

The eCommerce SEO checklist should begin with a basic setup of essential tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and more.

Check Google Analytics

One of the top, most powerful tools, Google Analytics, helps you monitor and analyze traffic on your website. Make sure you have set up a Google Analytics account. It will give you a lot of information about:

• Who is visiting your site?
• What are they looking for?
• How are they getting to your site?

Check Google Search Console

Search Console allows you to monitor easily and sometimes resolve server errors, site load, and security issues. It provides you with valuable insights into your site’s performance. Use this tool to maintain diverse data to grow your site’s organic visibility and traffic.

Check Bing Webmaster Tools

Google may dominate the search market, but Bing still shares a fair portion. Setup: Bring Webmaster tools to upload and submit your sitemap, view your biweekly SEO Report, and use the SEO Analyzer tool to check your site.

SEMRush

User Experience (UX)

Great UX raises the possibility of searchers successfully accomplishing tasks. Here’s what you need to check to ensure a great user experience.

• Check Mobile-Friendliness: Check the mobile-friendliness of your site with Google’s test to ensure how easily a visitor can use your page on a mobile device.
• Check HTTPS and Security Seals: Review your SSL certificate yearly to ensure your store’s checkout process is secure. This builds trust with users and is good for SEO purposes.
• Check Reviews & Ratings: Encourage shoppers to write reviews and give ratings about your products. Show off these reviews and ratings on your site. Google gives more weight to insightful reviews.
• Check Search Functionality: Don’t let users spend more time than necessary browsing through your product pages. Make their experience infinitely better with a user-friendly website and easy-to-navigate design. Analyze their search terms to improve your eCommerce SEO keyword strategy.

Related:How to Do Keyword Research for An ecommerce Website?

• Check Information Pages: The information page contains shipping times or returns policy information. Users will likely see additional information related to your products.
• Check Payment Options: Check if you have integrated any payment gateways into your site. Popular payment gateways are Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal, and Amazon Payment. Also, consider payment methods such as credit or debit cards, online payments, cash, etc.
• Check an HTML Sitemap: Your eCommerce site contains vast content that can be confusing. So, create a user-facing HTML sitemap to help visitors quickly find what they want. Ensure your pages have a maximum of three navigation clicks.
• Check Breadcrumbs: The breadcrumb is another great asset for improving site navigation and user experience. Ensure you have added Breadcrumb Markup to see the page’s position in the site hierarchy and help users understand and explore your site effectively.

Website Speed

Test your website speed using tools like Google’s Page Speed Tool. Or, use the Test Your Mobile Speed Tool to get a broader look at the website speed on mobile devices.

• Check GZip Compression: Check if you have enabled GZip compression to reduce the size of the files being transferred and make your page load faster.
• Check HTML, CSS, and Javascript: To speed up the website, minimize unused or even white space within your HTML, CSS, or Javascript.
• Check third-party resources: Keep them to a minimum, as they add many unnecessary scripts to the user’s browser. Useless scripts lead to slowing down your page speed.
• Check image size: Check the size of product images. Resize and compress them. Optimize them for your website to improve page load time and user satisfaction.
• Check ALT Tags: Use ALT tags to add a description to images. This helps search engines understand what these images are about.

Crawling and Indexing

Take a look at the checklists for crawling and indexing.

• Check Product Variations: The structure of your product color and size variations can be critical to the best eCommerce SEO service. You need to get this right and prevent duplicate content.
• Check Robots.txt File: Have the robots.txt file in place. To check this.

You can find your site’s robots.txt file at https://www.example.com/robots.txt.

• Check Discontinued Products: Check whether your online store has discontinued products. If any, redirect their URL to a relevant product URL. The best bet is to redirect to the relevant category page.

Category Pages

Category pages are among the most powerful assets of your online store website. Find out what you need to check to improve category page performance.

• Check Priority Keywords: Check if keywords are available on your category page. These pages need higher-volume keywords as they require more chances of ranking.
• Check Introductory Content: Treat ecommerce category pages like the landing pages and create supporting content. Ensure the content highlights specific sales or links to specific informational content.
• Check Filters: Your category pages or your main shopping page should have’ filters’ for colors, sizes, ages, price ranges, and more.

E-commerce Product Pages

Product pages are essential to an optimized eCommerce site.

• Check Related Products: Find products or items related to your users’ searches and display them on the site until your user converts. This is excellent for UX and helps get people to browse your site.
• Check Videos: Use product videos on your site to keep users on the page longer and get the vital message across faster. This also demonstrates value to search engines.
• Check Product Images: Check product images to ensure they are high resolution and have accurate color. Improve the quality of your product photos. They will highlight your products and packaging and help spotlight your brand.
• Check Product Descriptions: Check product descriptions and ensure they are unique and meaningful. Avoid copying and pasting product information from the manufacturer’s website.

Click here to learn about Effective Strategies For E-commerce Product Page SEO.

On-Page Optimization

• Check Page Titles: Check the uniqueness of page titles and their target keyword. Search engines will fail to understand which page to rank if it’s not unique.
• Check Meta Descriptions: Create unique, informative, and appealing meta descriptions using the main keywords. The character limit ranges between 155 and 160. This will be great for eCommerce SEO.
• Check Internal Linking: Ideally, add links from your home page to your category pages. Then, from your category pages to your product pages. This will give your poor-performing pages an SEO boost.
• Check Permalinks/URLs: Be descriptive and use your target keyword while adding your slug. Keep it short and unique, and avoid using underscores and words like “and,” ‘if,’ ‘to,’ etc.

Also Read: The Complete Guide to On-Page SEO Optimization in 2024

Wrap-Up

SEO is a continual process. Since organic search drives 53.3% of all web traffic, it is very important to get your online store as high up in search engine results as possible.

While satisfactory SEO service in USA results for your online store may be challenging and take some time, it’s very important to keep optimizing your pages to hit page one of Google and avoid penalties.

Now that you have a complete checklist to optimize your site for ranking, it’s your turn to take the perfect eCommerce SEO checklist for your online store. This will help you get your site on top of the result pages soon, but sure.

Also Read: Ecommerce SEO Audit Checklist in 2024