Ecommerce Seo Company Audit

By Author: Destiny Marketing Solutions
Total Articles: 42
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I a came across your site, had a good look at it, and I have a good understanding of what you do, or what you're offering. And first of all, you have a very robust website, a lot of different brands that you're offering, a lot of different products and a lot of different product categories. Saw the programs as well. Maybe you could provide some more clarity on that and what's the priority in regards to SEO and organic traffic. But definitely a very robust website, so good job there. I've jotted down a few things that I found, areas of opportunity with your SEO. And it's fairly long list, so I'll go ahead and jump right in.

The first thing, I did a look at your technical SEO, and I review maybe 500 pages on a website, so this is by no means a comprehensive list, but I did see that there were some broken links on your website. It looks like mostly on your collections pages, where they were showing 404 errors. The reason why this is important, Alex, is that if you have a 404 page and it's not resolved, you're not redirecting that page anywhere, unless it's supposed to be a 404 page, which are, those situations are rare, ...
... you really do need to redirected to either a page that's similar to that broken page, or just send it back to the homepage.

And the reason why is, number one, this detracts from your trust in Google's eyes. Websites with broken links, definitely, they don't provide the best user experience, and Google is all about providing the best user experience for its users. If those issues go unfixed for any considerable amount of time, then it can start to detract from your website's trust and can have a negative impact on your rankings.

The second thing I saw, and this was on your product pages, and I did see this on your collections pages as well, actually more so on your collections pages, is that there were duplicate heading-one tags. If you're not familiar with heading-one tags, Alex, these are basically ... I'll take this to an offline example. Maybe when you were at school you have to write papers, and before you wrote the paper your teacher required that you do an outline just to organize your thoughts. You had your title at the very top of the outline, and then you had your different A, B, C and D, and then maybe some Roman numerals to cover different headings and sections of the paper. On a website with the HTML, it works the same way, except that in the HTML we use heading tags. And so it's basically heading one, heading two, and I think it goes all the way to heading six, maybe deeper.

But at the heading-one tag, that's a very prominent place to include very important keywords for the page, because it's one of the places that when Google crawls your website, it crawls that page, it's going to identify that page with whatever is in the heading-one tag. And the issue with duplicate heading-one tags across different pages, is that you're not optimizing those pages or various keywords.

Instead of maybe, I forget the exact count here, but there were over 40 issues I found, or 40 pages with issues. But instead of optimizing each of those pages for the same heading-one tag, if you have 40 different heading-one tags, you're pretty much optimizing for 40 different phrases or keywords that are important for your website and important for your business. That's the issue you run into with heading-one tags.

The next issue I found with your, on a technical SEO side, are related to your images. Number one, some of your images can be compressed. And really what this helps is with page-load speed. Overall your website speed is fine, but let's say if someone's on a slower connection, or maybe they're on their mobile phone and their Wi-Fi data, or Wi-Fi, or data connection isn't the greatest, it can, these large images can slow down load speed, which is again, going back to my first point, a very important part of user experience as something that Google takes very important.

I did see that your mobile load speed was average, at about 11 seconds. Let's see here. I don't have it up anymore, but it was at about 11 seconds, so you definitely wants to improve your mobile website load speed.

Other than that, your images, there were quite a few that were missing alt tags. And alt tags in a nutshell, were meant for people who are visually impaired, who may not be able to see what's actually on the screen, but that alt tag will actually tell them what that image is, or what that image describes. And again, the common theme here is user experience. Google really likes user-friendly websites, and alt tags are just one more thing you can add to your site to improve the user experience.

Now, for an SEO-specific benefit of alt tags, if you include your target keywords for the page, or even a product name for the page, or the product brand for the page, that can add some SEO benefit for that specific page.

Lastly, with technical SEO, there were quite a few pages that were missing structured data. I saw over 200 pages that were missing structured data. If you're not familiar with this, basically probably the most common form of structured data for e-commerce websites are review ratings. And so I saw that there were some product and collection pages that were missing that structure data. And again, if it is a product page, getting reviews on that page, and having those marked up with structured data, do make that page eligible to show those review ratings in the Google search results.

And Amazon is probably the most popular with this, but you also see this on different hotel or restaurant websites. But just as I said, Amazon, so you see that this star rating here. And when you look at the rest of the search results page here, obviously these three listings stand out a bit more than these images that just have regular text. That's why it is important to make sure that product pages especially, have structured data implementation.

And my next point here, that pretty much wraps up technical SEO, but my next point here are product reviews. Once you have the structured data installed, you definitely want to try to have some type of way to encourage reviews. And usually that's going to be, do an email follow up sequence, since you are e-commerce. And so if you don't already have something like that in place, I suggest that's something that my team and I can help you with. And Shopify actually has a lot of different tools to make that process easy, but very important that you have some type of followup sequence for getting reviews on your products.

Moving on, so YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google, and Google actually owns YouTube, so any SEO press ... Or I'm sorry, any presence that you build on YouTube, if you're cross-promoting your YouTube videos on your website, it is going to have a positive benefit for your brand and for your website specifically.

Now, when I did a Google search for your company name in YouTube, I didn't see anything. And I'm not sure if I'm missing your channel, but it's not showing up here in the search results. What I would recommend are at least two types of videos. First, you can put together videos that show you or someone on your team using a product, just to kind of add that how-to element. And of course you can upload those to YouTube, and assuming that the YouTube video is optimized for SEO, that's going to have a benefit on getting more discoverability and visibility for that YouTube video. But it's also, again, like I mentioned, going to help your website.

The other thing, the other type of video are video testimonials. And since you do serve B2B clients, from what I gather, maybe going after those larger companies that really have some type of brand presence in their industry, because if they're a big company and people know about them, the smaller guys are going to look at that and say, "Oh, if these guys are able to serve them, they can definitely help us." That's going to have some credibility. And I understand getting clients on video, it's difficult. It's challenging. People are busy, and even if they do have time, everyone's not comfortable with being on video. I would say try to have some type of structure on what are you asking them. Pretty much, a structure I like to use is, what was the problem that they were experiencing? What were some of the bottom line results if they didn't solve that problem? How did California Equipment and Tools step in to solve that problem? And what are some of the benefits of them solving that problem?

Let's say, if you were able to help them save on equipment costs on year-to-year, with those extra, that extra profit those savings, maybe they were able to reinvest in other parts of their business. Maybe they were able to grow their team. And so now they can serve more people, take on more jobs. There a lot of different ways you can go with that. But you kind of want them to tell a story.

And going back to how it's hard to get people on video, one of the things you can do is maybe say, "Hey, this is the expectation. This shouldn't take any longer than 30 minutes, or an hour to put together." And maybe you can offer them some type of incentive where, maybe you give them 10% off or some type of discount on their next order. A lot of different things you can do there to incentivize them to get on video. And I would say that would be very important for your SEO, but also your credibility and your conversion-rate optimization on the website.

Now, going into my last point here, content. And I checked out your blog, you have three articles, I saw the last blog article was from February. Blogs are very powerful, but you just don't want a blog just a blog. You do want to have some type of strategy that's going to benefit your SEO, and you can cross-promote it on your social media channels. You can cross-promote it on other websites, and that's going to help you get more organic traffic and referral traffic to your website.

The reason why I love blog articles is that they provide great opportunities to target your long tail keywords. And so these are keywords that maybe you just don't have enough room on your product pages to target, but using those blog articles, you can target those long tail keywords. And your blogs, you should use interlinking or eternal links between your product category pages, your product pages and your blog articles, and if they're relevant, your program pages. Make sure that you build out links that will interlink them and create what we call in SEO, virtual silos. And those can be very impactful for your SEO longterm, and we can target your blog articles on topics that are around your most important product categories, or your high priority programs. And that will help you over time not just rank your product page, but all of those pages that are related to that category, or product, or program, help all of those pages to get more visibility in the search results.

Other than the rankings, websites are not going to be very open to linking out to product pages, because they have tremendous commercial intent. But they would be a lot more open to linking out to product pages. And for e-commerce websites, this is really the best way for you to get backlinks. Backlinks, if you're not familiar, I have a website, you have a website, I'll link to you. Those are seen as votes of confidence in the eyes of Google, and it's always been an important part of their Google, or of their ranking algorithm. And so very important that you do get backlinks, and blog are the best way to do that, when you have an e-commerce website.

Other than that, overall, just blog articles like I said, you can target kind of what we call higher level, higher up in the funnel keywords. People that might not even be aware of your company, they might not even necessarily have a need for equipment, new equipment right now, but maybe something along the lines of, with the COVID situation, we have the Congress, they're putting out different bills that actually help contractors, and contracting businesses. Maybe something, I saw that you have the PPE article here, maybe something you could have also wrote about, was the Paycheck Protection Program, that Congress is giving these businesses money to kind of help carry them over as the COVID situation hopefully resolves. Now, of course that's not directly related to your products, but it is related to the audience that you're serving and the audience that you're targeting. Again, you're putting together something that's higher level, but it does get people, new business owners, affiliated with your company, with your website so that when they do need, they have a need for new equipment, you'll be top of mind.

And if you're running any type of paid advertising campaigns, then there's a lot of things you can do with remarketing on different social channels or on Google that can really help. And if you are in need of some advertising help, that is a service that my team and I also provide.

That brings me to the end of the video, Alex. I hope that it has been helpful. These are just some thoughts. Of course, I don't have any context on your business, on kind of what are your priorities as far as business strategy for the upcoming year and longer. But just as an outside observer, these are the opportunities that I see.

Thanks for watching and I look forward to your response. Take care and have a great rest of your day.

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