Currently, more and more online stores are being created or resuming their digital activity and development given the exponential competition in this channel, ecommerce.

Therefore, it is not only enough to create a website to have an online presence, but we also need to develop strategies in accordance with the objectives of our online store, the available resources, the channels where we want to have a presence and where we will obtain the different sources. of traffic for our ecommerce.

One of the most important channels for any web project is the organic channel. This channel will refer us organic traffic. Organic traffic is the acquisition of users through different search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing...) .

But what does it mean or how does the acquisition of organic traffic occur?

The acquisition of users organically occurs when:

A user makes a query to Google (it can be any other search engine such as Bing, Yandex... but we use Google as an example as it is the most used worldwide. More than 90% of Internet users in different countries use Google

Let's give an example: We are interested in looking for a Shopify Plus ecommerce agency in Madrid.

This will return a series of results with different response options to our query. There may be millions of results for our query, which are ordered according to the relevance they may have for our search. Google is the one who decides the order in which the search results appear, analyzing the pages and checking whether they meet the established parameters to obtain a good position.

Therefore, it is evident that the first positions are the most coveted, because, let's be honest, no one or almost no one usually gets past the first page of Google. The good news is that, although Google is the one that rates websites, it does not depend on Google whether or not a page is placed in the top positions. It is the authors of the pages or whoever develops the strategy, who must ensure that, first, the important technical requirements are met so that Google knows how to interpret the website (technical SEO). And second, the structure and content that we show to potential users (content SEO).

For all this, we see the importance of SEO for an online store. Since it will allow us to develop and implement strategies for better positioning and greater acquisition of organic traffic. Which will generate a greater possibility of achieving conversions for our ecommerce, due to the increase in traffic in our store.

When planning SEO strategies we must start with an audit.

What is an SEO audit?

The SEO audit is a detailed and exhaustive analysis of all aspects, both technical and content, that can affect the organic positioning of a web project in the different search engines.

Therefore, it consists of carrying out a diagnosis of the state in which the website is located, whether it is a blog, informational website, online store... This way we can have a complete vision of the points that can be optimized more and better, establishing priorities. in terms of effort and result and which ones would have to be implemented from scratch.

When we talk about an audit we must know that it encompasses both the On Page SEO audit and the Off Page SEO audit and that both are equally important.

Why is it important to carry out an SEO audit for my online store?

As we have mentioned before, an audit will allow us to know the current state of our website both at a technical level and at a content level. The importance of this lies in the fact that we will be able to know the weak points of our ecommerce, the errors or threats that are harming our current positioning, our strengths and how to continue optimizing them, and the points that we do not consider and are not covering, presenting itself as opportunity to better optimize our website. What has been a lifelong SWOT.

With the results of the audit that we carry out on our website. We can begin to execute the different tasks to optimize our online store and thus boost our visibility in search engines.

What should we take into account in an SEO audit?

As stated above, an SEO authorship or SEO analysis will allow you to optimize all those aspects necessary to increase both your visibility and the conversion or use of your site.

To achieve all this, when carrying out an SEO audit, aspects such as keywords, links, content...

When carrying out an SEO audit we can differentiate 2 parts: OnPage SEO and OffPage SEO.

OnPage SEO analyzes all the factors that occur within a web page. Everything that is controllable by the owner (web development, content, applications...).

Off-Page SEO analyzes what happens outside the web and what impacts it. In other words, it analyzes the strategy that is being carried out outside the web to attract traffic, the links that point from outside and the popularity that our website or online store is obtaining.

Let's look at some of the most important aspects that we will take into account when carrying out an SEO audit:

Crawling and indexing: We will ask ourselves if our pages are crawlable by Google Robot or do we have a blocker? Are our pages suitable for indexing? Do you have any tags that make it difficult to be indexed in the SERPs?

To do this we will look at the robots txt document and the sitemap of our online store. As well as in the index and noindex tags that we have in our code.

1 Robots txt.

In this file it is recorded where the search robots can enter since which parts they will not have access to, that is, through a code we decide whether the search engine robots will be able to read our pages and if, on the contrary, they will not have access to that information to publish it.

2 Sitemap.

We could say that the sitemap, as its name suggests, is a map of our website that search engines use to move around our site and find the information they need. The sitemap will help index content quickly on our page.

3 MetaRobots.

This tag will allow us to notify Google if a page can be indexed or not. This tag is placed in the header of our code.

404 errors and redirects Surely as a user more than once you have arrived at a page with a 404 error and have suffered the frustration of not finding what you are looking for. Therefore, it is very necessary to prevent your page from leading to 404 pages that could create a bad user experience for the user.

For this reason, we must review the response codes offered by the pages of our online or ecommerce store. The most common response codes that we can find are:

• 200. It is the best you can find since it indicates that the status of a page is correct.
• 301. This code indicates that a redirect has been carried out. A redirect tries to offer a response path to the user to a page that no longer exists. It is advisable to perform a redirect whenever a page is deleted.
• 302. They occur when the redirections are temporary.
• 404. As we talked about before, they occur when a page is deleted but the user continues accessing them. The problem is that you will not find what you are looking for since the content has been removed. It is advisable to redirect all 404s on a site. Even so, this is often unavoidable, so we will also have to optimize the navigability of these types of pages to avoid losing the session.

In addition, we must also make sure that 301 redirects do not have duplicate content or that 302 redirects, also known as temporary redirects, really are.

Once you have reviewed this part, check that all those pages that you want to show to your users are at 200.

Content optimization. The content must be as user-friendly as possible, facilitating navigation and allowing them to find what they are looking for.

4 URLs.

Related to the keywords we find the URLs. These must be friendly, that is, not contain strange accents or parameters in their configuration.

If you want your page to position correctly, you must enter the keyword for which you want to position within the URL. In addition, search engines are becoming more advanced, so you must make sure that the content on the page you want to position is related to the keyword you have chosen, otherwise they could penalize you.

5 Titles and Meta-Description.

The title should not be very long and should contain the keyword that we want to position.

In the meta-description, although it does not serve to position, it does influence the CTR (Click Through Rate). You must put the keyword and a brief description of the article in an original way, to differentiate yourself from the competition.

Pay attention to the content you enter in both the title and the meta-description, since it will be the content that is displayed on the results page.

6 Headings (H).

Headings or headings are the titles that you put based on the importance they have within your content. That is, as H1 you will put the main heading of your article, as H2 you will put the secondary ones, those that are relevant but not enough to be the main one, and finally the H3 which will be those that you want to highlight but that really do not have much importance. within the content

7 Duplicate Pages.

Search engines do not like to find different results for the same web page, so it is advisable to choose the one we want to show and redirect the rest to the corresponding pages, in this way we avoid showing both pages and duplicate content. We can also apply canonical tags in this context, to provide hierarchies between pages.

8 Keywords.

Keywords are those that you select because they define your business and you consider that they are the words by which your users will search for you. To know if the keywords you have selected are the correct ones, you must analyze the volume of searches they have by the users you are interested in.

9 Images from your website.

For the images on your website to be “read” by search engines, you must put words in the “Alt Descriptio” tag, these must be short and concise. Additionally, the words you choose must describe the image they replace, since if there was a problem loading the image the words would describe the content that could be seen in them.

10 Responsive design.

Remember that today mobile devices are the most used, so your page must be fully adapted to any device and work perfectly on any of them.

11 Loading speed of your site.

One of the most important points. Loading time not only influences the SEO of a website, but also conversions. A long loading time will lead to user frustration and abandonment of the store, which will mean the loss of a potential customer. To avoid this, your images should be compressed and lightweight. But not all loading problems can be related to images, so it is necessary to consult a tool that tells you how the speed of your page is on both computer and mobile and what the points for improvement are.

After analyzing these and other aspects, we must make a checklist in which we detail all the results obtained, which are good and which we should improve, explaining in each of them what changes should be applied. Finally, we will create a roadmap with the efforts necessary for each improvement, the time it will take and the weight of the results that will be obtained with each change. In this way we can prioritize those that require little effort and a great result.

All the effort you invest in carrying out this work will be rewarded with an increase in traffic to your website, but remember that this is not something that you should do in isolation, but rather it is something that you should optimize from time to time, having a good defined strategy to increase your visibility.

If you want us to do a free SEO audit of your ecommerce, click here .

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