Is an SEO audit of an online store different from an audit of a company website?

Conducting an SEO audit of a company website and an online store definitely differs on several levels. The most mundane, will be the time you need to spend on it. Due to their size and the multitude of products available, online stores usually have several hundred to even tens of thousands of subpages. These audits will also differ in the layer of content and technical analysis in terms of Google’s requirements for Webmasters.

What are the elements of an SEO audit of an online store, and what are the elements of a “regular” company website?

Many elements of a business site audit and an online store audit will be the same, as Google outlines many technical requirements that every site must meet regardless of its type or target audience. Among such elements are, among others:

• Correctness of head section elements such as title and description
• Correctness of construction of sitemap.xml and robots.txt files
• Originality, quality and quantity of content on the site
• Page loading time and Core Web Vitals scores
• Correctness of language version implementation
• Correctness of image descriptions, size and format
• Correctness of any redirects
• Correctness of backlink profile

The SEO audit of a small business website can basically be closed in the points listed above. In the case of an online store, this is only part of the activities to be performed. A very large part of the SEO audit of an online store is the analysis of its structure and construction of the category tree. Such an analysis will include, for example, verification of the friendliness of links and category descriptions, optimization of product content, and checking the occurrence of orphan pages, which, due to the number of subpages in online stores, can take a long time.

4 things you should especially pay attention to when doing an online store SEO audit

1. For an online store, especially important is the aforementioned category tree design, which must be designed in such a way that both the search engine robot and the user are able to get to the product of interest in 3 clicks.
2. When auditing an online store, attention should also be paid to optimizing the content of the descriptions of each category and subcategory and including the corresponding keywords in them. Similarly, when examining the descriptions of individual products, it is worth taking a very close look at their originality because copied descriptions are a huge affliction of online stores.
3. Another element is the operation of the store’s internal search engine, which, if poorly constructed, can generate additional URLs when responding to a user’s inquiry, causing a large duplication of content.
4. Link friendliness—Building product URL paths in an online store is usually done automatically and directly reflects its structure. However, if the structure is very extensive, the links can be extremely long. In addition, the names of products very often contain many of their differentiators, which also go into the URL. This is how it may turn out that our product has, for example, a link of 300 characters, which is most simply problematic for the user.

Summary

An audit of an online store, compared to an audit of a corporate website, will take considerably more time and therefore be considerably more expensive. This is mainly due to the peculiarities of its store construction and the content of a huge number of sub-pages. The duration of the audit and the price will depend on the specific store, in the case of small, containing only a few dozen products, prices can start from as little as PLN 1500.

For a store that offers, for example, 1,000 or more products, the starting price will most likely be around PLN 5,000. However, the valuation of the audit is always very individual. Due to the multitude of available technologies, online stores can significantly differ from each other, and therefore, their audit can be a slightly more or less complicated process.

The audit of a store can be a bit more or less complicated.