Are you concerned that your website ranking isn’t where it should be? If yes, you must be eager to know what’s hindering your search performance. In situations like this, the first thing you should do is hire an acclaimed SEO agency or digital marketing agency. Once you hire an SEO specialist or SEO consultant, they’ll probably suggest you run an SEO audit.

That’s because an SEO audit will help uncover the main issues holding your website back from gaining a better ranking. Typically, it takes a few weeks to perform a thorough SEO audit. However, some SEO experts can get the job done within a few days. So why should your business undertake an SEO audit? We already discussed a few reasons in the previous post. Here are some more reasons.

1. Helps run a competitor analysis
If your competitors are ranking higher than you in organic search results, you should run an SEO audit to find out what they are doing better than you. Maybe much of your competitor’s better search performance is due to a certain keyword that they use but you don’t. Or perhaps, your competitors are outperforming you in link quality.

When you perform an SEO audit, it helps you compare your performance to that of your competitor in terms of content quality, back links, and on page SEO. Once you know what your competitors are doing right, you can easily overcome your drawbacks and improve your search ranking.

2. Check for page loading speed
An SEO audit also helps you check your website’s page loading speed and whether that’s affecting your search ranking. Fast page loading helps provide a better user experience, which eventually helps improve your SEO.

3. Helps check for formatting errors
Running an SEO audit also helps you detect any structured data errors in your website. For instance, if your website mainly posts product reviews, formatting can make or break your search rankings.

Thankfully, there are structured data testing tools that help you discover any structuring errors in your website.

Just as you need regular health checkups, your website needs an SEO audit every so often. The purpose of an SEO audit is to find out any current or potential issues that might hold your website back from achieving higher rankings.

When you book SEO services, the first thing they do is perform an SEO audit on your website. That helps them detect your website’s drawbacks in terms of SEO.

Typically, you should hire an SEO consultant or SEO specialist for the job. Alternatively, you can enroll in an SEO training course and learn how to perform an SEO audit or get it through a digital marketing agency. Here are some reasons why your business needs an SEO audit.

1. Identify big issues
If you are not happy with your current website ranking, perhaps a few, big issues are responsible for your weak online presence.

An SEO audit will help you check for those issues. For instance, the first thing you should check is if your website’s URL has more than one version. If your website has different permutations of the same URL, an SEO audit will help you check if all those versions automatically redirect to the correct version.

Next, your SEO consultant should run an audit to check if all your website pages are indexed in Google. Other common problems that you can uncover with an SEO audit are thin content issues and duplicate content issues.

2. Helps detect on-page SEO issues
Most SEO services providers use software tools to perform a thorough SEO audit. For instance, they use website-crawling tools to check for indexing errors and HTTP status.

At the same time, they should manually check for any on-page SEO issues. For instance, they will check if your webpage has a well-written title tag and meta description and if it has enough subheads, such as H2s and H3s. Another important thing to check is if your website is optimized for the right keywords.

An SEO audit helps identify all those issues, so you can take the necessary steps to fix your SEO.

One common mistake ecommerce site owners make is they try to optimize their site for highly competitive keywords. However, ranking for those keywords is often an impossible task. A better approach would be to target individual product and category pages.

So, ask your SEO consultant, SEO specialist or digital marketing agency to focus on a few, selected pages. This works better in the long run. We already shared some ecommerce SEO tips in the previous post. Here are some more tips.

1. Use long tail keywords
While everyone is busy optimizing for exact keywords, you can beat the competition instantly by focusing on loan-tail keywords. For instance, a long-tail variation of the popular keyword “kids bags” could be “comfortable school bags for kids.”

The competition for the latter would be low. Yet, it can give you decent traffic to your site.

2. Write unique meta-descriptions
Since ecommerce sites usually have a bazillion of pages, it might forever to write unique title tag and meta-descriptions for each of them. However, the results you get by having unique descriptions for each page is worth the time and effort.

Alright, if you still think it is not feasible, take the middle way. Create a few templates for certain categories but also create some unique descriptions for your top priority pages.

3. Use clean URLs
This is easier said than done. That’s because some CMS will make your product or category page URLs unorganized by default. Ideally, you should use short, clear URLs. For instance, a good example of a clean product page URL is as follows domain.com/category-name/subcategory-name/product-name.

This type of clean URL helps Google locate the right page for the right search term. Eventually, it helps boost your ecommerce SEO. If your CMS automatically creates messy URLs, you can use certain plugins to fix the issue.

Those inspiring ecommerce success stories do not tell you a simple truth. Ecommerce is changing fast – blazing fast. What worked even a few months back may not work now!

In fact, SEO for your ecommerce store needs a complete overhaul right now! You still need an SEO consultant or digital marketing agency. But make sure they are using the latest ecommerce SEO techniques vetted by experts in the field. Otherwise, all your efforts, time and money could go waste. With that in mind here are some of the top ecommerce SEO tips for 2021.

1. Use HTTPS
Most ecommerce sites by the nature of the business need to collect sensitive customer information. For instance, one needs to type their credit card details when making a payment on your website.

Evidently, you need to encrypt all that information for secure transaction. This also helps improve your SEO. In fact, Google recently said not having HTTPS could jeopardize your site ranking.

2. Increase page loading speed
Imagine clicking on your shopping cart and waiting forever for the page to load! What will you do? Perhaps, you’ll abandon the site. After all, you don’t have a lack of options to buy from.

So, this is obvious. Sluggish page loading speed would only increase bounce rates and eventually affect your SEO.

3. Do keyword-research for each page
Granted, ecommerce sites are notorious for having lots of pages. Maybe you have hundreds of category pages and thousands of product pages. But you still need to find relevant keyword for each page. This could be a cumbersome task. But that’s why you need an SEO specialist by your side.

In truth, there’s no way you can rank your site with highly competitive keywords like women’s shoes or kids bags. Instead, try optimizing a few product or category pages using relevant but less-competition keywords.

The sad truth about SEO is that most people do it the wrong way. Then they don’t get the desired results. And then they complain, “SEO is dead.”

But search engine optimization, if done the right way with an SEO expert or digital marketing agency, can still work wonders for your online presence. So what do the experts do differently? In most cases, what sets them apart from others is their ability to avoid certain SEO myths. Without further ado, let’s debunk some of those myths.

1. The title and meta-description don’t really matter
A title tag is exactly how it sounds like. It is the headline of a search result. On the other hand, a meta description is a short summary of the web page that appears just below the link of a search result. In theory, the title tag and meta description do not influence search rankings, but they still matter.

For instance, if you insert the main keyword in the title tag and meta description, it helps Google know what information is available in the webpage/website. Plus, a well-written meta description could help persuade the reader to click and visit the webpage. That way, it also helps with SEO.

2. SEO is a one-time venture
On the contrary, SEO is actually a long-term game. Granted, SEO can sometimes help improve your search ranking within a few weeks. However, if you want to sustain the good results, you need to put constant efforts that’s what an SEO consultant do.

For instance, not refreshing your content for some time can result in link rot and hamper your overall search ranking.

3. Keyword research is not important
Keywords are still important for SEO, although the way you use keywords should change. Without proper keyword research, you may end up optimizing your content with wrong keywords – the ones that have low search volumes or are difficult to rank for.

However, just using the right keyword isn’t enough. You should also consider the search intent behind a keyword or key phrase.