eCommerce SEO audits differ from a standard site audit in a few important ways — mainly because product catalogues create scale problems (thousands of near-duplicate pages) that a typical brochure site never has to deal with.
Product and collection page architecture
Check whether product pages are genuinely differentiated from each other, or thin variations that risk being seen as duplicate content. Collection pages need their own unique content and a clear hierarchy — a common failure is collection pages that are just a product grid with no supporting text at all, missing an easy ranking opportunity.
Duplicate and near-duplicate content at scale
Product variants (different colours, sizes) often generate near-identical pages. Check how these are handled — canonical tags, parameter handling, or a genuinely unique description per variant — since unmanaged duplication at catalogue scale is one of the most common eCommerce-specific technical issues.
Out-of-stock and discontinued product handling
What happens to a product page when the item goes out of stock or gets discontinued permanently? A common mistake is either deleting the page entirely (losing any rankings and links it had built) or leaving it live indefinitely with no clear signal to the customer or search engines. Redirecting to the closest live alternative, or handling out-of-stock gracefully with a clear “notify me” state, usually beats both extremes.
Site search and faceted navigation
Filtered and sorted category views (by size, price, colour) can generate enormous numbers of crawlable URL variations if not managed properly, spreading crawl budget thin across low-value pages. Check whether faceted navigation is properly controlled with canonicals, noindex rules, or crawl directives.
Product feed quality (if running Shopping ads)
Even for the organic SEO audit, it’s worth checking your Google Merchant Center feed — missing attributes, thin titles and wrong categories cap Shopping performance regardless of on-page SEO quality, and the two channels’ data usually overlaps enough to be worth reviewing together.
Page speed at catalogue scale
Product images are usually the biggest page-weight contributor on an eCommerce site. Check image compression, lazy-loading and whether product pages are meeting Core Web Vitals thresholds — this matters more for conversion rate than almost any other technical factor on a retail site.
Structured data for products
Product schema (price, availability, reviews) supports rich results in search that materially improve click-through rate. Check this is implemented correctly and updates automatically as stock and pricing change, rather than going stale.
See our eCommerce SEO service for how we run this as an ongoing engagement, or get a free audit of your store specifically.
