eCommerce SEO Agency

Importance of Auditing Your eCommerce Website’s SEO and Content Hierarchy

Look at this if you’re going to execute a migration as well because you don’t want to start off with problems and end with problems. Conduct an audit before you start to migrate, or execute an eCommerce SEO strategy. Break everything down and look at your content hierarchy.

Why are you doing this before the migration process?

There’s no point in fixing something that’s already broken after you go through all the work of migrating. Once you finally migrate, because you’re going to have to do 301 redirects. So why not fix the content hierarchy and URL structure and breakdown of all your categories prior, if you know that you’re going to have to execute the 301 redirects anyway?

Are you thinking about doing any kind of migration or re-platforming from one eCommerce platform to another platform? Then you need to significantly review your content structure and hierarchy, as well as your category and product structure respectively. That’s the best time for you to review all of that.

As you are doing the migration, it will be more efficient. Once you’re done with that analysis and optimization, your new site is going to have a better structure. Despite that, many people don’t do the difficult stuff, which is writing unique titles and descriptions, meta titles, meta descriptions, and unique product descriptions. This is going to differentiate your website, eCommerce store and brand from that of all of your competitors significantly.

Our Tools for Starting Your eCommerce SEO Content Audit

Let’s say we looked at all of this before the migration process. Which elements do you review?

Use tools such as Google Analytics to now prioritize what categories you should strongly focus on. If you don’t have GA set up, do that now. In order to do that, you can work with an experienced SEO partner. Data is crucial here; without data, you can’t really move forward. Start generating that data before you come to any conclusion as to how your site should be structured.

Break it down. Which products or which categories are getting the most organic visibility, especially products within categories? From a revenue standpoint, which outputs and categories generate the most cash flow?

The answer is the top sellers. Now you can prioritize this structured content. If this one category is my bread and butter and these five outputs within there are my top sellers, I need to make sure that throughout this migration process or eCommerce SEO content strategy process that I am focusing on this category and these outputs within it.

After this, optimize that category structure and those product pages. Then go down the list and repeat. Prioritize in that manner. To do page optimization, you need Google Analytics data.

How We Audit an eCommerce Website with 1 Million+ SKUs: Prioritizing Category and Product Pages

This is easy to do for several hundred products, but if you have tens of thousands or even millions of SKUs, how do you do this prioritization?

As an SEO agency, we do a very basic Excel formula: a specific score and a weight on every single page, including outputs and categories. Then we take all of that data through five sources. As a very experienced eCommerce SEO partner, we grab Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMRush, and the keyword rankings.

Our data comes from page authorities for both product pages and category pages from SEMrush. We also grab all the backlinks from Ahrefs and Moz. Then we combine the information and create a scoring structure.

Let’s say you have a hundred categories, each with a thousand products. Here are your most important product page and categories respectively. Look at your categories on outputs that get less than twenty traffic. You’re actually diluting your entire site authority, and you don’t want to do that.

As an expert SEO agency, how do we do the cleanup?

That is a good question. People love having tens of thousands of products on their sites. Our job is to say, “You got to lose 50% of these outputs.”

Review your top pages, top products, traffic drivers, and revenue drivers. You have a segment that we call the lowest-hanging fruit. They are the pages that have the potential to jump into that first segment. But right now they’re just off page one.

That could happen due to thin content, or no backlinks. Identify those as well. That last segment is really just insignificant pages that are bringing you down. They weigh down and dilute your authority.

Decide whether you’re going to cure or kill those pages. It’s tough for many clients when you tell them, “We’re going to cut your product offering, by a third.”

“What do you mean?” they ask

“These products have never sold.”

Identify parameters to justify this claim. Point out that these outputs have never driven any traffic. There’s no real significance or value in having them on your site. Thus, you don’t want to dilute your authority by having 25,000 or 75,000 URLs that don’t get any traffic.

Ask the following: “Do I kill or delete the pages completely? Or are some of these somewhat significant that I can redirect them to other relatable pages?”

The first step is to do an audit, because there are many details, especially on a site that has tens of thousands of products. Break down and prioritize the outputs. We suggest doing a deep eCommerce SEO/content audit first. 

This audit addresses all of the lowest-hanging fruit: the closest keywords, or the closest search engine rankings opportunities, or sales opportunities that you have, as well as your best sellers.

Refining Your eCommerce SEO Content Marketing

You will be on the first page, but the difference between the

number one position and number nine position on the first page could be three, four, or six X traffic. Many people don’t understand that. 

It’s incredibly important that you do an eCommerce SEO, Facebook page search, or AdWords audit before you actually engage with an eCommerce SEO company or SEO experts to do your marketing.

Digital Marketing Partner and Marketing Strategy

If you don’t get an audit or statement of work, you don’t know your key performance indicators or KPIs. 

In addition, you don’t know how you judge, or how you rate that service that you’re getting from a marketing standpoint. 

If an SEO agency is doing SEO campaign for a couple of months, but you don’t know how to really gauge their success, or gauge their results. 

Do an audit first before you engage in an internet marketing partner and SEO campaign.

To recap: in this audit, we look at the eCommerce websites and platform and its content structure. These include content hierarchy and integrated marketing. We actually have a checklist with close to 140 different items and elements to review.

As an Expert eCommerce SEO Agency, How We Audit Your eCommerce Website for Conversion Optimization

After reviewing, our eCommerce SEO experts break down your website and look at the moneymakers. The bottom line is the most important quality. Then we do a six-month strategy for your conversion optimization and your brand to basically take you from A to B.

The A to B could be revenue, visibility, or leads from phone calls. It depends on those established KPIs. From there, you can review that six-month strategy and evaluate if those KPIs are aligned with your brand or organization’s objectives.

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