A Step-by-Step SEO Audit Framework Built for Jewelry Store Websites

This audit framework is designed for three situations: you're launching a new jewelry store website and want to start clean, you've had a site for years and Google traffic has plateaued, or you're preparing to invest in SEO services and want to know your baseline before a vendor starts work.

It's also useful if you've recently migrated to a new platform — Shopify, BigCommerce, or a custom build — and want to confirm nothing critical broke in the transition.

Who can run it: A store owner comfortable in Google Search Console and a basic site crawl tool can complete most of this audit. The technical sections require free tools like Screaming Frog (up to 500 URLs free) or Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. The schema and structured data sections require the Google Rich Results Test.

What this audit does not replace: A log-file analysis, a full content gap assessment against competitors, or a link profile review. Those require more advanced tools and time. If you've already completed this self-audit and still can't explain your traffic performance, that's a reasonable point to bring in a professional.

Plan for two to four hours to work through this framework on a site of 50–500 pages. Larger catalogs with thousands of product SKUs will take longer, and the ecommerce-specific sections will have proportionally more issues to triage.

Technical issues set the ceiling on everything else. A well-written product page that Google can't crawl or render correctly won't rank regardless of its content quality. Start here before touching anything else.

Crawlability and Indexation

Open Google Search Console and check the Coverage report. Look for pages marked as Excluded — specifically those excluded by noindex tag or blocked by robots.txt that shouldn't be. Jewelry store platforms sometimes add noindex to faceted filter pages, which is often correct, but it occasionally catches category pages by mistake.

Run a crawl with Screaming Frog or a similar tool and check for:

• Redirect chains longer than one hop (common after platform migrations)
• Broken internal links returning 404 errors
• Pages returning 200 status but serving thin or empty content
• Duplicate page titles across product variants (e.g., the same ring in three metal types all sharing one title tag)

Mobile Rendering

Most jewelry shoppers browse on mobile. Use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test on your homepage, a collection page, and a product page. Pay attention to whether product images scale correctly and whether any above-the-fold content is hidden behind interstitials or pop-ups that Google's crawler will flag.

Core Web Vitals

In Search Console, open the Page Experience report. Jewelry sites with large, high-resolution product photography consistently underperform on Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Flag any pages in the Poor category — these are your highest-priority technical items. The image performance section later in this audit addresses the fix.

Content issues on jewelry sites cluster around two page types: collection pages (engagement rings, bracelets, fine jewelry by metal) and individual product pages. Both have distinct failure modes.

Collection Page Thin Content

Collection pages — /engagement-rings/, /gold-necklaces/ — are often your highest-traffic organic landing pages, but most jewelry stores publish them with zero editorial text. The page is just a product grid. Google can crawl it, but there's no signal about what the page is authoritative on.

Check each major collection page for:

• An introductory paragraph (150–300 words) describing the collection, materials, and what differentiates your store's selection
• A unique meta title and description — not auto-generated from the category name alone
• An H1 that matches the search intent (e.g., "Engagement Rings in [City]" for a local store)

If your collection pages have no editorial content, that's a fixable gap that often produces visible ranking movement within a few months.

Duplicate Product Descriptions

This is the most widespread content issue in jewelry ecommerce. Many stores use descriptions pulled directly from supplier or manufacturer feeds. Those same descriptions appear on dozens of other retailer sites. Google identifies this as low-originality content and suppresses rankings accordingly.

Pull a sample of 10–20 product descriptions and run them through a plagiarism tool or simply paste a sentence into Google in quotes. If the description appears verbatim on other sites, it needs to be rewritten. Prioritize your best-selling SKUs and any products with high organic impressions but low click-through rates in Search Console — those are worth rewriting first.

Structured data (schema markup) tells Google what your content represents — not just that a page exists, but that it's a product with a price, availability status, and aggregate review rating. For jewelry stores, two schema types matter most.

Product Schema

Every product page should implement Product schema with at minimum: name, description, image, SKU, offers (price and availability), and — if you have them — aggregateRating. Use Google's Rich Results Test on five to ten product URLs. Look for:

• Missing required fields (offers.price is the most commonly omitted)
• Price mismatches between schema markup and visible page price
• Availability set to InStock for products that are actually out of stock or made-to-order

Incorrect schema is sometimes worse than no schema — it creates a trust signal mismatch that Google penalizes in rich result eligibility.

LocalBusiness Schema

If your jewelry store has a physical location — or multiple locations — your site should implement LocalBusiness or JewelryStore schema on the homepage and contact/location pages. Check for: business name, address, phone, opening hours, and geo coordinates. This schema directly supports your local search visibility and map pack eligibility.

Many Shopify and BigCommerce themes do not include LocalBusiness schema by default. It usually needs to be added manually or via a structured data app.

BreadcrumbList Schema

Breadcrumb schema helps Google understand your site hierarchy and can display breadcrumb trails in search results, which improves click-through rate. Check whether your theme generates this automatically — most modern themes do, but verify with the Rich Results Test rather than assuming.

Jewelry photography is detailed by necessity — customers want to see texture, stone clarity, and metalwork up close. The result is that jewelry product images are typically larger files than almost any other ecommerce category. Unoptimized, they create substantial page speed problems.

What to Check

Run your product pages through Google PageSpeed Insights. In the Opportunities section, look specifically for:

• Serve images in next-gen formats — WebP or AVIF reduces file size significantly compared to JPEG without visible quality loss at typical display sizes
• Properly size images — if your product photos are 3,000px wide but display at 600px, you're loading unnecessary file weight
• Defer offscreen images — lazy loading ensures images below the fold don't block initial page load

Alt Text Audit

Beyond speed, image alt text is an SEO signal. In Screaming Frog, export all images and filter for missing alt text. On a jewelry site, descriptive alt text matters for both accessibility and image search visibility — queries like "diamond solitaire engagement ring white gold" drive meaningful traffic through Google Images.

Write alt text that describes what's in the image specifically: metal type, stone type, style. Avoid generic text like "product image" or leaving the field blank entirely.

Image CDN and Caching

Check whether your images are served through a CDN (most hosted platforms like Shopify handle this automatically). If you're on a self-hosted WordPress or custom setup, verify image caching headers using a tool like GTmetrix. Images without proper cache headers are re-downloaded on every page load, compounding your speed problems.

Beyond general technical and content issues, jewelry ecommerce sites have a set of platform-specific patterns that cause recurring SEO problems. These are worth checking regardless of how healthy the rest of your audit looks.

Faceted Navigation and URL Proliferation

Filters for metal type, stone, price range, and style generate large numbers of URL variations. Left unchecked, these can create thousands of thin, near-duplicate pages that dilute crawl budget and confuse Google about which page to rank for a given query. Check whether your platform uses canonical tags or parameter handling to consolidate filtered URLs. In Search Console, look at the total number of pages Google has indexed versus how many pages you've intentionally published — a large discrepancy usually points to faceted navigation creating unintended index bloat.

Out-of-Stock and Discontinued Products

Jewelry catalogs change frequently — seasonal pieces, limited editions, and custom orders create a constant stream of products that cycle in and out of availability. Returning 404 errors for discontinued product URLs wastes accumulated link equity. Audit your 404 report in Search Console for any product URLs that previously had inbound links or organic traffic. Redirect those to the closest relevant collection page rather than letting them disappear.

Pagination

If your collection pages paginate (page 2, page 3 of results), check whether those pages are indexed or excluded. In most cases, collection page 1 should be the canonical target and subsequent pages should either use rel=next/prev signals or be noindexed — depending on your platform's current best practices. This varies by platform and CMS version, so verify against current Googlebot guidance rather than assuming your theme handles it correctly.