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Aniruddh Agarwal for Extern Labs Inc.

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How to Audit an e-Commerce website?

In this digital world, e-Commerce is the best way to keep growing your local business with a wider customer base. After the pandemic, most people get the habit of shopping online and local markets are getting less attention even after the pandemic.

Previously eCommerce industries giants Amazon and Walmart were the only options available but these days even smaller businesses and startups are giving them competition. Technology helped small businesses and startups to come into the online store game. You can build an eCommerce website or app by yourself with some available tools and opt-ground services.

Once you have your eCommerce platform with the infrastructure you are going to need two major things that will keep you in the business Digital Marketing and eCommerce site Audit. Digital Marketing will help you in getting new customers and eCommerce Audit will keep your online platform optimized and engaging for the user.

Today, We are going to guide you to Audit Your eCommerce Website in a few steps. Before we get started let’s know about an eCommerce Audit.

How to perform eCommerce Audit

As mentioned above, This will be a step-by-step process that needs to be done in a proper manner. Usually, Audits must need to be done by only an expert in Digital Marketing. You can use this How to guide to audit your website by yourself.

There are many tools and ways that you try or use. This guide is made by our Digital Marketing Expert. Let’s get started -

SEO Audit

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is mandatory to work that needs to be done for every website. Basically, SEO will help search engines to read and reach your website faster which will allow customers looking for you to get on your website faster.

It’s very complicated than it sounds.

You have to measure these things and try to improve them as much as possible.

Website Usability

Check every single web page and look for poor quality and inappropriate and low-quality images.

Check product filters mechanism and make sure that they are working in every condition with the exact products present, and check it helps narrow down a product search or add some more options.

Check sitewide search and practice searching for different products and make sure that it presents the right products that are supposed to show in results singularly or in a category.

Confirm users can easily access previous pages using hyperlinks and breadcrumbs.

Check meta text, alt tags, and descriptions that should be relevant to each specific product or you can use help from an expert.

Use the tools mentioned below to spot bad or broken links.
Check loading time and speed with tools and try to improve it with tools and plugins.

Try to get feedback from visitors and customers.

Website Content

Check existing keywords and improve them for specific products. Keywords are a vital way to push your site to search engines.
Review every product on-site to make sure their descriptions have described that product as you want and the text is easily understandable for the visitors.

Do traditional content marketing; Post blogs, classifieds, and in any way you want. It will help search engine crawlers to reach your website.

Make user experience as minimal as possible when placing an order or downloading information because many users sometimes leave the website after finding a long process or documentation.

Examine core site pages to ensure the Home Page, About Us, and Services pages communicate with visitors and tell that what you are in minimal works.

Verify that calls to action and contact information are visible: Every page on the site should display your company information with multiple ways to contact you.

Report on missed search results; It is essential to review all words that were searched and returned.

Make sure you mention your work ethics like privacy policy and terms and conditions to stay transparent to the users.

Product Catalog

Make sure every product has been categorized in a proper manner and in respective categories. Hide older products and don’t short or categorize out-of-stock products. Unnecessary products in results will lead to a bad user experience.

SEO tools that you can use to test your website and work.
Google PageSpeed Insights

GTmetrix

Pingdom Tools

WebPageTest

Think With Google

Core Web Vitals in Search Console

Chrome Dev Tools

For the full article visit our original blog.

These are the steps that you should follow to make sure your eCommerce website is in its best size-n-shape and serving the users the way you want. An eCommerce Audit is not a difficult task but it has to be done responsibly and without missing any single step.

The best way to do an eCommerce Audit is to hire a Digital Marketing Expert; To help in giving your website a starter push and filter out issues and errors. Then you can keep doing it by yourself or hire a person to keep maintaining it.

Top comments (1)

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brampayrequest profile image
Bram Hammer

Not a bad writeup, but if you straight copy-paste your website content (which you also link on your post.....) please take the time to format your post.

Apart from looks i guess this will also results in more clicks to your website.