An automated audit tool spits out a two-hundred-warning report in minutes. Most of them don’t matter, and the three that really cost you sales are buried in the list. A useful audit does the opposite: it sorts.
Here are the points we check first on a store, in the order they affect revenue.
1. Does Google see the right pages?
Everything starts in Google Search Console, in the page indexing report. We compare three numbers:
- the number of product and category pages you want to see on Google;
- the number of pages actually indexed;
- the number of pages crawled but not indexed.
A large gap in either direction is a signal. Too few pages indexed: Google can’t find your product pages, or doesn’t consider them useful. Far too many: it’s indexing variants, filter pages or internal search results, and your crawl budget is going to waste.
2. Category filters and sorting
This is the most common problem on WooCommerce and on large Shopify catalogues. Every filter combination (size, colour, price, sort order) can create a new URL. A catalogue of 300 products can generate tens of thousands of near-identical addresses.
What we check:
- filtered pages have a canonical tag pointing to the main category, or are excluded from indexing;
- sort parameters (
?orderby=,?sort_by=) are not followed by Google; - the few combinations with real search demand (“women’s running shoes”, for example) have their own page, with a dedicated title and copy.
3. Product pages
These are the pages that sell. Three systematic checks:
Content. A description copied from the supplier appears on dozens of other sites. Google has no reason to rank you ahead of them. Even 80 words written by you, using the questions your customers ask on the phone, make the difference.
Out-of-stock products. Deleting the page means losing its history and its links. As long as the product may come back, we keep the page with a clear notice and alternatives. If it’s permanently withdrawn, we redirect to the closest product or to the category.
Variants. A colour should not create a page competing with the main product page, unless it’s searched for separately.
4. Speed, measured on mobile
We look at Core Web Vitals in Search Console, meaning real measurements from your visitors, not just a lab score. Three indicators:
- LCP: how long the largest element takes to appear, often the product image or the banner;
- INP: responsiveness when a button is tapped, such as “Add to cart”;
- CLS: layout jumps during loading.
The causes are almost always the same: oversized images, carousels at the top of the page, poorly loaded fonts, and above all too many third-party scripts (chat, reviews, ad pixels, pop-ups). On Shopify, every app can add its own script. On WooCommerce, it’s usually plugins and under-sized hosting.
5. Structured data
Product and Offer markup (price, availability, currency) lets Google show that information directly in search results. We check that it’s present, consistent with what’s displayed on the page, and error-free in the rich results test. A marked-up price that differs from the displayed price is worse than no markup at all.
6. Internal linking
The pages that receive many internal links are the ones Google considers important. The checks:
- your main categories are one click from the home page;
- product pages link back to their category and to related products;
- your blog posts point to the categories they serve, with descriptive anchor text.
7. Redirects and errors
A quick list: redirect chains (A to B to C), internal links to 404 pages, old URLs from a previous version of the site that no longer redirect. This is especially common after a redesign done without a redirect plan.
8. Conversion tracking
Strictly speaking this isn’t SEO, but without it there’s no way to know whether the rest is working. We check that Google Analytics 4 receives e-commerce events (product view, add to cart, begin checkout, purchase) and that cash-on-delivery orders are counted. This is often where the numbers are wrong.
What we deliver at the end
Not a 60-page PDF. A short list, sorted by impact on sales and by effort, with, for each item: what’s wrong, why it matters, and how to fix it on your platform. The most profitable fixes often take only a few days of work.
If you want to know where your store stands, request a free audit: we’ll send you the three priority fixes.