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WOMAN 1: Module four. Technical research your store setup. Your e-commerce store setup has a lot to do with search engine optimization. Doing a quick SEO audit will help you fine tune the technical aspects of your store and make sure that you're set up to capture as much organic search traffic as possible. By improving your search engine ranking positions. You may not be able to fix all of the issues you find, some will certainly require help from your development team but conducting the audit will at least let you bring big issues to the attention of the people who can fix those issues.
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Let's dive into our audit and answer the following questions about our site. Question one. Do you have any crawlers? In other words is Google unable to crawl pages or sections on your site, which could help your overall ranking position. You can use Google Search Console to view this report or an independent third party crawler like screaming frog or Cm brush. A tool like screaming frog provides you with a spreadsheet and crawl of every page on your site.
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It'll be up to you to analyze the crawl codes and see where there are gaps. A tool like rush will give you a report on how many errors you have on your site and tips on how to fix them. Another way to check if you have crawlers is to check how many pages of your site are indexed on Google. There's a very easy way to find out. Go to Google and add site yoursite.com in the search bar and see how many pages are returned as a search result.
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Then compare that to the number of pages that should be indexed and look for discrepancies. Question two. Is your robots.txt file set up properly? The robots.txt file is an important file that Google looks at first. It's a file located in the root directory of a website. You can check this file by navigating to the URL yoursite.com/robots.txt. The good news is that Shopify sets this all up for you.
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Question three. Have you submitted a site map to Google Search Console? You should create your XML site map and submit it to Google Search Console to help Google crawl your site and index your pages more easily. Question five. Do you have a credible and logical structure? You should try to analyze your site like a crawler would. Is the hierarchy logical? Usually your homepage is at the top and your most important landing pages are at level two.
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These could be collections or product pages. Question six. Do you have any 404 errors? Redirect them. 404 errors mean that the page cannot be found on a site. Bad for search engines and user experience. You should use the URL redirect feature in Shopify to redirect all 404 errors to pages that have content. Question seven Do you have any broken images on your site? Broken images are like 404 errors in that they point to images that are no longer available.
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Screaming frog reports provide information about exactly which images are broken. Question eight. To all the images have Alt text are you sure? Your image Alt text is essential. There is a reason that Shopify has this feature available for every image. Unfortunately, many people don't use it. Every blog post, every product image should have an Alt tag that tells users what they are seeing in the image.
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Why? It's good for accessibility and great for SEO value. We love screaming frog as a tool that provides a complete list of images on your site with no Alt text. Question nine. How quickly does your site load? Website speed is important for technical SEO. Load speed effects how people interact with your store and can be a barrier in the path to purchase. People don't want to wait for images and animations to load.
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Search engines generally rank faster sites higher than slower ones. Site speed is very important on an interactive site. But when it comes to e-commerce because there's some level of intent it can be a little bit longer but should not seem broken. Question 10. Is your site optimized for mobile? We have seen that most of your traffic is coming from mobile. The data shows that your mobile experience is causing friction and your customers have told you that they can't find the product they want to see on your homepage.
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What's left? Test your site on the free mobile friendly testing site from Google. Question 11. Do all pages of your site have a H1 tag? Screaming frog can provide you with a report on all your tags. But you can also do this by viewing page source. Search H1 in the find bar. If it finds zero results, your page is missing a H1 tag. Each page on your website should have only one H1 tag.
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H2 and H3 tags can have more than one. Question 12. Do you have any duplicate or empty meta tags? Missing better descriptions are considered an error by Google. They are the best place apart from actually on the page to add keywords that tell people what they are going to find when they visit the page. They help in search engine ranking and provide answers for search or intent. A good meta description can really help your rankings.
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Question 13. Are URLs too long? URL length can impact search results. Each URL should only have one main keyword and be as succinct as possible. Change URLs to reflect the main keyword. You can do this in Shopify for every single page on your site. Don't forget the keywords. Even if you only periodically check on your site and make updates.
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You should at the very least integrate free Google services, Google Analytics and Google Search Console with your website.
