What does an e-commerce SEO audit include?
The featured-snippet answer, in plain language.
An e-commerce SEO audit reviews 52 points specific to online stores, grouped into eight sections: technical SEO (page speed, Core Web Vitals, pagination, tag and filter pages, crawl efficiency), on-page SEO for product and category templates, product and catalogue SEO (variants, out-of-stock handling, faceted navigation, product image SEO, review content), e-commerce keyword strategy, competitor and SERP analysis, backlink profile, UX and conversion, and AI search readiness. The output is a prioritised written report delivered in 5 to 8 business days.
Who this is built for
The shortlist of e-commerce situations where this audit pays back fastest.
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Small business store owners
Seeing flat or declining organic traffic, unsure what is causing it.
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Founders preparing to scale ad spend
Who want to plug organic leaks first so paid traffic does not carry the load alone.
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Replatformers
Moving from Shopify to Shopify Plus, from WooCommerce to Shopify, or migrating between any two stacks, where every URL change is a potential ranking loss.
How much does an audit cost in 2026
An SEO audit often pays off better than paid ads, but that doesn't answer the question of how much it costs. So here is the price, and what you get for it.
| Price | |
| Check count | 52 points |
| Sections covered | 8 |
| Backlink profile | Included |
| AI search readiness | 6 checks |
| Competitor depth | Top 3 competitors, plus SERP feature and Shopping carousel presence and content gap analysis |
| Delivery | 5 to 8 business days |
| Output | Written report, prioritised action plan |
* Discount offered to the first clients 10 clients in exchange for a review on clutch.co. 9 offers left
Want the side-by-side against the the website audit? e-commerce vs website SEO audit.
For full pricing across all audit types, see the pricing page.
The eight sections of an e-commerce SEO audit
Each section is reviewed against e-commerce benchmarks; the standards differ from informational or SaaS sites. Point counts per section are shown below.
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Technical SEO, e-commerce adapted (12 points)
Page speed, Core Web Vitals, HTTPS, mobile responsiveness, sitemap and robots, canonical handling, URL hierarchy, product schema, pagination and infinite scroll, tag and filter page management, redirect chains, and crawl budget. Currently 53% of e-commerce sites have missing canonical tags and around 38.78% suffer from duplicate content issues. Stores also carry the heaviest performance weight of any vertical: 70.5% of e-commerce sites are rated "needs improvement" on Lighthouse, and Deloitte measured a 0.1-second load-time improvement lifting retail conversion by 8.4% and AOV by 9.2%.
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On-page SEO, product and category (8 points)
Title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure, image optimisation and alt text, internal linking architecture, and category page content quality, plus content depth versus competitors and social meta tags. Category pages do the heavy ranking lifting on most stores, typically generating 3 to 5x the organic revenue of individual product pages.
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Product and catalogue SEO (8 points)
Product page quality, product description depth, collection and category architecture, variant and option handling, and out-of-stock and discontinued product strategy. The audit also covers faceted navigation SEO, product image SEO, and on-page review content. Stores using manufacturer descriptions verbatim are deduplicated by Google; retailers that rewrite meta titles and product descriptions see an average 32% lift in organic sales. Filter combinations can generate millions of near-duplicate URLs, so the audit identifies which filtered pages are indexed, which should be, and how the canonical and robots strategy needs to look.
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E-commerce keyword strategy (6 points)
Current ranking keywords, product and category keyword coverage, long-tail and modifier opportunities ("size", "colour", "for [use case]", "under [price]"), and quick-win keywords sitting in positions 4 to 20. The audit also covers the keyword gap against competitors and the branded versus non-branded traffic split.
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Competitor and SERP analysis (4 points)
The top three organic competitors are identified and their domain authority compared. The audit also covers SERP feature and Shopping carousel presence (where Merchant Center and feed health decide visibility) and a content gap analysis against those competitors.
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Backlink profile (3 points)
Total backlinks and referring domains, toxic and spammy link exposure, and the link gap against direct competitors. The average e-commerce DR is around 28; the audit identifies whether the gap to competitors is closeable in 6 months or 18.
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UX and conversion, e-commerce adapted (5 points)
Navigation and site architecture, the SEO impact of cart and checkout, trust signals and social proof, page layout and readability, and the overall conversion funnel. 57% of e-commerce sales now happen on mobile; the audit reviews the mobile category and product page experience against conversion benchmarks.
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AI search and answer engine optimisation (6 points)
Google AI Overview and Shopping AI presence, whether answer engines recommend your products, and AI crawler access and product feed health. The audit also covers product structured data for AI, review and rating signal strength for AI synthesis, and buying-guide and comparison content. The AI Overview share of e-commerce queries is currently small (around 0.3% of AI Overviews cite e-commerce sources), but it is growing fast.
What our clients say about us
The following widget shows the reviews we gathered on clutch.co.
How an audit takes shape, in five steps
Same shape for every audit. The detail differs by vertical; the deliverable does not.
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Intake
A short brief: the site, the stage, the question you want answered. WhatsApp or email; no calls required.
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Crawl and tooling
The site is crawled and analysed across the standard toolset (Google Search Console, PageSpeed, SEOptimer, structured-data validators).
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Manual Research
We research your business, industry, we read your website, so we are sure we have a clear picture.
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Analysis
Once the data is gathered, it's time to analyze it. The analysis is done manually, no AI.
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Report
A written PDF report with scored findings, prioritised fixes, and an action plan. Delivered to your inbox.
Full process detail at How an Illucrum SEO audit takes shape.
Why this audit, not another
We don't sell a dump of an automated tool. We look into your business, your industry, to understand the context. This is the only way to ensure the audit is 100% helpful to your website.
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One process, adapted to each client
The templates are not rigid. If we think breaking the pattern will be more useful, we are happy to adapt and deliver the audit you need.
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Source-backed methodology
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Written-first delivery
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E-commerce SEO audit FAQ
The questions that come up most often before an e-commerce audit. The full FAQ has more.
Why is SEO especially important for e-commerce stores?
Around 43% of all e-commerce traffic comes from organic search, making it the single largest traffic channel for online stores. Paid ads, social, and email combined typically generate less. Organic visitors also convert at higher rates on average (around 2.8%) than paid (around 1%), because they are actively searching for what you sell.
What's the ROI of e-commerce SEO?
The published 3-year benchmark is around 317% ROI, with break-even at roughly 9 months. Every $1 invested in e-commerce SEO returns about $2.75 to $5.30 depending on store size and execution. Paid ads typically deliver a 2 to 4x return that stops the moment you stop spending.
Do you audit Shopify stores specifically?
Yes. Shopify is the platform we see most often at Illucrum desk; the audit framework handles the Shopify-specific patterns (Liquid templating, app bloat, theme-level SEO defaults, robots.txt customisation limits). The same audit covers WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Squarespace Commerce, and custom-built stores with platform-specific notes.
Should I focus on product pages or category pages first?
Category pages, in most cases. Well-optimised category pages typically generate 3 to 5x more organic revenue than individual product pages because they rank for high-volume head terms and capture buyers earlier in the journey. The audit identifies which category pages are underperforming and what is fixable.
What about faceted navigation? Does it hurt SEO?
It can, badly. Filter combinations can generate millions of near-duplicate URLs that drain crawl budget and split link equity. The audit identifies which filtered URLs are currently indexed, which should be, and how the canonical and robots strategy needs to look.
Will an audit help if I'm replatforming soon?
Yes; in fact, a pre-replatform audit is one of the highest-leverage times to commission one. The report becomes a checklist for the migration: which redirects to set up, which URL patterns to preserve, which technical wins to roll into the new platform. The alternative (replatform first, audit later) usually means recovering from a 20 to 40% organic traffic drop.
See the full FAQ for e-commerce audits for more questions, or jump to general SEO audit questions.
Ready to find what's capping your organic sales?
Audits are scheduled in the order requests come in. Describe the store and the question you want answered; we will scope it from there.
Contact us