2 of 2: How I consult on, perform and deliver site audits for larger agency e-commerce clients.

Opportunity

• Business: improve search position/ appearance/ performance for business critical product and product category keywords
• SEO: give client a realistic path to address and fix priority onsite SEO issues, utilizing indexing, keyword optimization and site/URL structure tactics to make improvements quickly

The Way Forward

August-September 2017: I’ve been working with digital agency Visiture to consult and perform technical SEO and backlink audits for their large e-commerce clients since early July. For their client SportsBraces.com, this involved…

• Content/search appearance analysis: category- and page-level recommendations, sitewide keyword insights, click-through rate input

• Site structure analysis: looking at navigation, breadcrumbs and platform-specific structural SEO issues and laying out ‘best path’ solutions

• Technical SEO: taking a look at their current site index in Google and tabbing out technical SEO work for removing irrelevant, low quality and account/cart pages from search (indexation tactics – Robots.txt, no index, XML sitemap)
LEARNING: one thing we learned with Shopify is that it doesn’t allow you to make changes to Robots.txt file, so a recommendation I’m making to clients going forward is to use a Shopify app like Sitemap & NoIndex Manager instead. I’ve implemented this successfully for another client to resolve /pages/ indexation issues.

• Performance analysis: image optimization process improvement, site speed report

Of note for SportsBraces.com is that I especially wanted to target search visibility (including SERP appearance for improved click-throughs) for their valuable, high volume, high “purchase intent” searches around key product categories, so this audit work emphasized category-level, onpage and page-title structure recommendations.

It’s been great to hit the ground running with Visiture and improve my own technical understanding of the ins & outs of platforms like Shopify as well as help refine how we do auditing for this client/website type.