SEO audit for a small online store: getting found without a team
Written for the person who packs the orders and also runs the website.
This page is for a shop run by one or two people, not a catalogue of fifty thousand products with a team behind it. If that is you, the large-scale e-commerce advice about faceted navigation and crawl budget is mostly noise — you have a different, shorter list.
Bigger catalogues have their own page: the technical side of scale is covered in our e-commerce SEO audit. What follows is the small-store version, ordered by what actually earns an order.
What goes wrong on Online store sites
Product descriptions copied from the supplier
Every other shop selling the item has the same words. You will not win that, and you do not need to: two or three sentences in your own voice about who it suits and what to watch for is enough to be the better result.
Photos straight off the camera
A 4MB photo on a product page is the most common reason a small store feels slow on a phone. Resizing to what the page actually displays usually halves the load time with no visible change.
Products only reachable through search
If a product is not linked from a collection, a category or another product, it is effectively invisible — to customers and to search engines. Every product needs a path to it from the homepage.
No reviews on the page or in the markup
Reviews earn the stars in a search result, which is most of why one result gets clicked over another. They need to be on the page and marked up, not only on a platform.
Titles that are just the product name
"Blue Ceramic Mug" competes with everyone. "Blue Ceramic Mug — Handmade, Dishwasher Safe, 350ml" answers what someone is actually deciding, and it costs one line.
Shipping and returns hidden
Not a ranking problem, but it is why the traffic doesn't convert. A visible shipping cost and returns policy on the product page is worth more than most SEO changes on a small store.
What an AuditOpti crawl looks for
- Product pages with duplicated or supplier-written descriptions
- Image weight and mobile Core Web Vitals on a real product page
- Products with no internal links pointing at them
- Titles and descriptions across the catalogue
- Product and review structured data
- Broken links, which small stores accumulate as products come and go
Check part of it right now, free
These read a live page and tell you what a search engine sees. No signup, no email.
Image alt text checker
Every image on the page, and what a screen reader would say about it.
SEO score checker
Score one page against the checks that actually move rankings.
Broken link checker
Every link on the page, followed, with the status code it returns.
The issues behind this
Each has a full entry in the issue library: what it is, what it costs a business, and step-by-step fixes for WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and custom builds.
Thin content
The page has too little text to be useful.
Oversized images
Images are far larger than they need to be.
Orphan page
No other page on the site links to it.
Missing meta description
No summary text for the search result snippet.
Questions
Related
E-commerce
Catalogue sites don't have SEO problems. They have SEO problems multiplied by the catalogue.
Shopify
Most Shopify SEO problems are the platform's defaults, not your mistakes.
WooCommerce
Every WordPress problem, plus a catalogue that multiplies them.
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