A Step-by-Step SEO Audit Framework You Can Run on Your Store This Week

An SEO audit is a diagnostic process, not a report card. The goal is to identify the specific issues causing your store to underperform in search—and to rank those issues by their likely impact on organic traffic and revenue.

Most automated audit tools will give you a score and a list of errors. What they won't do is tell you whether a 301 redirect chain on your homepage matters more than 400 thin category pages, or whether your duplicate product URLs are actually being indexed. That prioritization is where the real diagnostic work happens.

An e-commerce audit differs from a standard content site audit in a few important ways:

• Scale: Stores with thousands of SKUs generate crawl and indexation complexity that smaller sites never encounter
• Dynamic URLs: Faceted navigation, session IDs, and sorting parameters create URL proliferation that can consume crawl budget and dilute page authority
• Product lifecycle: Out-of-stock and discontinued products create recurring technical and UX decisions
• Variant architecture: Color, size, and material variants need a deliberate indexation strategy—index everything and you risk cannibalization; noindex too aggressively and you miss long-tail demand

A well-run audit covers four layers in sequence: technical health, indexation and crawl efficiency, on-page and content quality, and authority and link profile. Skipping straight to content or links before resolving technical issues wastes time—Google has to be able to crawl and index your pages before content quality matters at all.

This framework walks through each layer with the specific checks that matter for e-commerce, the tools to run them, and how to decide what to fix first.

Start every audit by running a full crawl of your store using a tool like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or Ahrefs Site Audit. Configure it to crawl JavaScript if your storefront is built on a headless or React-based framework—many platform themes render critical content client-side, and a standard crawler will miss it.

Flag these technical issues first:

• Redirect chains and loops: More than one hop between URLs wastes crawl budget and dilutes link equity. Common causes include platform migrations, domain changes, and URL restructuring done in stages.
• Broken internal links (4xx errors): Deleted product pages that still receive internal links from category pages or blog posts are a consistent issue in growing stores. Every 4xx wastes a crawl request and sends users to a dead end.
• Crawl traps from faceted navigation: Filter combinations like /shoes?color=black&size=10&sort=price can generate thousands of unique URLs. Check your robots.txt and URL parameter settings in Google Search Console to confirm these are handled correctly.
• Canonical tag conflicts: Self-referencing canonicals, paginated pages canonicalizing to page one, and product variants pointing to the wrong canonical are all common in e-commerce platforms with default settings.
• Page speed and Core Web Vitals: Use Google's PageSpeed Insights and the CrWX report in Search Console. Product and category pages with large unoptimized image stacks are frequently the worst performers.

After your crawl, cross-reference the crawled URLs against your XML sitemap and against Google Search Console's Coverage report. The gap between what Google has crawled, what's in your sitemap, and what's actually indexed tells you more than any single data point in the audit.

In our experience working with e-commerce stores, technical issues—particularly faceted navigation generating uncontrolled URL proliferation—account for a disproportionate share of traffic underperformance on larger catalog sites.

After technical crawl health, the next layer is indexation quality. You want Google indexing the right pages—and only the right pages.

Run a site: search in Google and compare the number of indexed URLs to your crawl output. A significant gap in either direction is a signal worth investigating. Too few indexed pages suggests crawl or canonicalization issues. Too many suggests unintended pages are being indexed—parameter URLs, staging content, or thin filter pages.

Duplicate Product Pages

E-commerce platforms generate duplicate content through several mechanisms. Check for all of these:

• Product pages accessible at multiple URLs (with and without trailing slash, with session ID appended, via category breadcrumb paths)
• Manufacturer or supplier product descriptions used verbatim across your catalog
• Product variant pages (e.g., /blue-widget and /red-widget) with near-identical content and no canonical strategy
• Pagination creating duplicate versions of category pages (/category/shoes vs /category/shoes?page=2 without proper rel=next/prev handling)

Thin Category Pages

Category pages are typically where e-commerce stores have the most organic traffic opportunity—and the most untapped potential. A category page with only a product grid and no descriptive content gives Google very little signal about topical relevance.

Audit every top-level category page for: unique introductory copy (at least 150-200 words), a clear H1 that reflects the search intent for that category, internal links to subcategories and related content, and a title tag that matches how real users search—not just how your merchandising team categorizes products.

Cannibalization Between Variants and Categories

When a product variant page and a category page both target the same keyword, Google often ranks the wrong one—or oscillates between them, causing ranking instability. Use Google Search Console's Performance report to identify queries where multiple URLs are appearing, then decide which page should own that keyword and consolidate signals accordingly.

Once you've confirmed that Google can crawl and correctly index your store, assess the content quality of the pages you want to rank.

For e-commerce, the highest-value content targets are:

1. Category pages — highest traffic potential, most often neglected
2. Core product pages — especially for branded or high-margin SKUs
3. Buying guides and comparison content — captures mid-funnel intent before purchase decisions

Category Page Content Audit

Pull a list of your top 20-30 category pages by organic traffic (or potential traffic if traffic is currently low). For each, assess:

• Does the H1 match the primary keyword for that category?
• Is there unique, helpful copy above or below the product grid—or is it just products?
• Does the meta title and description reflect what a shopper actually types into Google?
• Are subcategories internally linked in a logical hierarchy?

Product Page Content Audit

Sample 50-100 product pages across your catalog and check for: unique product descriptions (not manufacturer copy), structured data markup (Product schema with price, availability, and review data), optimized image alt text, and a clear path to related categories and products.

Structured data matters specifically for e-commerce because it enables rich results—star ratings, price ranges, availability indicators—that improve click-through rates from the SERP even when rankings don't change.

Title Tag and Meta Description Audit

Export all title tags from your crawl and filter for: duplicates, titles over 60 characters, titles under 30 characters, and titles that contain only the product name without any descriptive modifier. E-commerce platforms often default to templates like "[Product Name] | [Store Name]" that don't capture search demand.

Link authority is the fourth layer—and it's the one most stores want to address first, which is usually a mistake. Technical and content issues suppress rankings regardless of how many links point at your store. Fix those first.

Once you've resolved layers one through three, assess your link profile with these checks:

Overall Domain Authority and Competitive Gap

Use Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz to compare your referring domain count and domain rating against your top three organic competitors for the category keywords you want to rank for. This gives you a realistic picture of the authority gap you're working to close—and whether the gap is driven by volume of links, quality of linking sites, or both.

Internal Link Equity Distribution

Internal links are the most controllable authority signal in e-commerce. Check whether your highest-priority category pages are receiving internal links from: your navigation, your homepage, your blog or buying guide content, and related category pages. Orphaned category pages—those with few or no internal links—will consistently underperform their content quality.

Toxic and Irrelevant Link Patterns

Review your referring domain profile for links from obviously irrelevant or low-quality sources. In most cases, disavowing a handful of low-quality links has minimal impact on rankings—but a pattern of manipulative link building from a previous agency or owner can create manual action risk. If you acquired the store or changed agencies, review the historical link profile carefully.

Competitor Link Gap

Identify domains linking to your top competitors but not to you. These represent the most actionable link acquisition targets—sites already willing to link to stores in your category. This analysis is more useful than raw link volume metrics for building a practical outreach list.

A completed audit will surface more issues than any team can address simultaneously. The audit's value is in the prioritization—not the list itself.

Organize every issue you've found into a two-axis matrix: impact (how much will fixing this move organic traffic and revenue?) versus effort (how long will this take to implement, and does it require developer resources?).

High-impact, low-effort items belong in your first sprint. For most e-commerce stores, these are:

• Fixing broken internal links to high-priority category pages
• Resolving canonical conflicts on top product and category pages
• Adding or improving H1s and title tags on top category pages
• Blocking parameter URLs from crawling via robots.txt or GSC URL parameter settings

High-impact, high-effort items need to be scoped and scheduled—not ignored. Typical examples:

• Rewriting category page content across a large catalog
• Restructuring URL architecture to resolve a faceted navigation crawl trap
• Migrating from a platform with structural SEO limitations

Low-impact items—many of which automated audit tools score as critical—can be batched or deprioritized. A missing alt tag on a product image in a subcategory that receives no organic traffic is not a first-quarter priority.

Document your matrix in a shared spreadsheet with columns for: issue, affected URLs (sample or count), estimated impact (high/medium/low), estimated effort (hours/days/sprint), owner, and status. Review and update it monthly as fixes are implemented and new issues emerge.

If you want an expert assessment of where your store's biggest opportunities sit, get a professional SEO audit for your online store before committing resources to a fix sequence.