How to Do an SEO Audit for Your Store

An SEO audit is a systematic review of your online store that identifies what is working, what is broken, and where the biggest opportunities for improvement are hiding. A thorough audit covers technical health, on-page optimization, content quality, backlink profile, and competitive positioning. Running an audit every quarter keeps your SEO strategy on track and catches problems before they damage your rankings. This guide walks through the complete process.

What You Need Before Starting

Gather access to these tools and accounts before beginning your audit:

Google Search Console: Free and essential. Shows indexing status, search performance, Core Web Vitals, and mobile usability.
Google Analytics: Shows traffic trends, conversion data, and user behavior by channel and landing page.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider: Free for up to 500 URLs. Crawls your site like Google does and identifies technical issues at scale.
Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz (optional): Provides backlink analysis, keyword tracking, and competitor data. One paid tool makes the audit significantly faster and more thorough, but you can complete a basic audit without one.

Block two to four hours for a full audit. If your store has fewer than 100 pages, you can complete a thorough audit in a single session. Larger stores with thousands of product pages may need a full day spread across the audit sections.

Step 1: Technical Health Crawl

Run Screaming Frog on your entire site.
Enter your homepage URL and let Screaming Frog crawl every page it can find through internal links. Once the crawl finishes, export the results and check for these issues in order of severity:

Broken pages (4xx and 5xx errors): Filter the results by status code to find pages returning 404 (not found) or 500 (server error) codes. Every broken internal link wastes crawl budget and sends users to dead ends. Fix each by either restoring the page, redirecting to the correct URL with a 301 redirect, or removing the broken link from all pages that reference it.

Redirect chains: Find links that redirect to a page that redirects to another page. Each redirect in a chain adds latency and loses a small amount of link equity. Flatten chains so every redirect points directly to the final destination URL.

Duplicate title tags and meta descriptions: Export the Title and Meta Description tabs to find pages sharing identical tags. Every page needs a unique title and description. Duplicates usually indicate pages that were copied without updating the metadata, or product pages using a generic template without dynamic titles.

Missing canonical tags: Check that every page has a self-referencing canonical tag. Filter for pages without any canonical tag and add them. Then check for pages with canonical tags pointing to incorrect URLs, which can accidentally deindex important pages.

Orphan pages: Cross-reference the pages Screaming Frog found through crawling against the pages in your XML sitemap and Google Analytics. Pages that appear in Analytics (receiving traffic) but not in the crawl have no internal links pointing to them, meaning Google can only discover them through external links or sitemaps. Add internal links to these pages from relevant category or content pages.

Step 2: Google Search Console Review

Check every section of Google Search Console for issues.
Start with the Pages report (under Indexing). This shows how many of your pages Google has indexed and why specific pages were excluded. Common exclusion reasons include "Crawled, currently not indexed" (Google found the page but chose not to index it, usually due to thin content), "Duplicate without user-selected canonical" (Google found duplicate pages and you did not specify which is primary), and "Blocked by robots.txt" (your robots.txt is preventing Google from accessing the page).

Review the Core Web Vitals report under Experience. Check both mobile and desktop. Note which URL groups fail each threshold (LCP, INP, CLS) and prioritize fixing the groups that cover the most pages. A single template fix (like compressing images on all product pages) often resolves issues across hundreds of URLs at once.

Check the Mobile Usability report for issues like text too small, clickable elements too close together, and content wider than screen. These directly affect your mobile rankings.

Look at the Manual Actions section. If Google has applied a manual penalty to your site for spam, unnatural links, or other violations, it appears here. Manual actions are rare but devastating, so check this every audit.

Finally, review your Search Performance data. Sort by pages with the most impressions but lowest click-through rates, which indicates your title tags and meta descriptions need improvement. Look for keywords where you rank in positions 8 to 20, where a small optimization push could move you onto page one or higher on page one.

Step 3: On-Page Optimization Audit

Evaluate on-page SEO across each page type.
Check a sample of pages from each template: 5 to 10 product pages, 3 to 5 category pages, your homepage, and 5 to 10 blog or content pages. For each page, evaluate:

Title tags: Does each page have a unique, keyword-rich title under 60 characters? Is the primary keyword near the beginning?
Meta descriptions: Is each description unique, compelling, and 150 to 160 characters? Does it include the target keyword?
H1 tags: Does each page have exactly one H1 that contains the primary keyword?
Content quality: Do product pages have unique descriptions of at least 300 words? Are category pages using manufacturer descriptions or original content? Is blog content substantial and genuinely useful?
Internal linking: Does each page link to related pages? Do product pages link to their category? Do blog posts link to relevant products and categories?
Image optimization: Do images have descriptive filenames and alt text? Are they compressed and in WebP format? See our image SEO guide for the full checklist.
Structured data: Do product pages have Product schema? Do all pages have BreadcrumbList schema? Test with Google's Rich Results Test.

Document every issue you find and note which page template it affects. A single fix to a product page template can resolve the same issue across your entire product catalog.

Step 4: Backlink Profile Analysis

Review the quality and health of your backlink profile.
Using Ahrefs, Semrush, or Google Search Console's Links report, export your complete backlink list and analyze it for overall authority (domain rating or domain authority trend over time), top linking pages (which external pages send you the most link equity), anchor text distribution (should be natural and varied, not heavily optimized with exact-match keywords), toxic links (links from spammy, irrelevant, or PBN sites), and lost links (valuable backlinks that have disappeared recently and may be recoverable).

Compare your backlink metrics against your top three competitors for your most important keywords. If competitors have significantly more referring domains or higher domain authority, link building needs to be a priority in your action plan. If your authority is competitive but you still rank lower, the gap is likely in content quality or technical optimization rather than links.

Step 5: Competitor Benchmarking

Compare your SEO performance against top competitors.
Identify your three to five main SEO competitors (the sites that rank for your target keywords, which may differ from your direct business competitors). For each competitor, note their total organic traffic estimate, number of ranking keywords, domain authority, content volume and quality, and any rich results they earn that you do not. Look for content gaps where competitors rank for keywords you have no page targeting. These gaps represent immediate opportunities to create new pages and capture traffic you are currently missing. Our competitor analysis guide covers this process in detail.

Step 6: Build Your Action Plan

Prioritize findings by impact and effort.
Organize every issue and opportunity you found into four categories: high impact and low effort (do these first), high impact and high effort (schedule these as projects), low impact and low effort (batch these into maintenance tasks), and low impact and high effort (deprioritize or skip these). Create a spreadsheet or task list with each action item, the affected pages, the expected impact, and a deadline. Focus the next 30 days on the high-impact, low-effort items, then tackle the high-impact, high-effort projects over the following 60 to 90 days.

Common high-impact, low-effort wins that audits typically uncover:

Rewriting title tags on pages ranking positions 5 to 15 to improve click-through rates
Adding unique content to thin category pages
Fixing broken internal links discovered in the crawl
Compressing unoptimized images across product pages
Adding structured data to pages missing it
Claiming easy backlink opportunities from supplier and partner websites

How Often to Audit

Run a full audit quarterly. Between full audits, monitor Google Search Console weekly for new issues and run a quick Screaming Frog crawl monthly to catch broken links and new technical problems. The quarterly cadence catches issues before they compound, keeps your optimization strategy current, and ensures you are adapting to any algorithm updates or competitive changes.