I recently had to SEO audit a site which migrated to Magento 2 e-commerce platform. It was part of an interview and here is what I found running a quick inspection.
It was a cosmetic brand. I didn’t have access to their CMS and any internal data. This basic SEO audit took me a decent amount of time.
1. I found that HTTPS non-www version of the site was 302 redirecting to the site’s preferred version
2. site:sigmabeauty.* -inurl:www Google search operator revealed some pages which the site owner or the development team may want to review carefully
3. I found some URLs with trailing slash in their sitemap. For instance this one in the image
Both versions (with and without trailing slash) were giving 200 HTTP status, and I didn’t see any canonical tag
4. site:sigmabeauty.com/shop/b
5. The logo didn’t have an ALT tag. There were issues with the ALT tag of the other images and the URL status of them. I also didn’t find any sitemap for the images
6. I was failed to browse important pages javaScript being disabled. This is something they may want to check carefully as JS and SEO get complicated these days. Also, JS in Magento 2 is complex
7. The following Google advanced operators were displaying some results which the store management team may want to take a look
site:*.sigmabeauty.* -inurl:https
site:sigmabeauty.com inurl:http
site:sigmabeauty.com -inurl:content -inurl:enews -inurl:www
8. The content duplication issue was massive. Please see how many other sites were using the same meta description
The following Google advanced operator was used to find it
-site:sigmabeauty.com -site:pinterest.* “Makeup brushes and cosmetics for beauty enthusiasts and makeup artists. Shop Sigma’s award-winning brushes for the best in beauty!”
9. Desktop page speed was not good
10. Main site and the help section has a different robots.txt file. The team need to analyze those files carefully
11. I also found issues with duplicate product URL and the canonical tag. The following two URLs were displaying the same product
https://www.sigmabeauty.com/f66-angledbuffconcealer.html
https://www.sigmabeauty.com/shop/brushes/f66-angledbuffconcealer.html
They both were open for the search engines to index and follow. The URLs were giving 200 HTTP status and there was no presence of a canonical tag
There are chances to find more problems Using other third-party tools and proper access to their resources. SEO issues associated with e-commerce sites are usually not very easy to fix. It takes time and costs money.
This article is not to discuss the solutions, but a lot of them could be easily avoided if the team had taken an SEO conscious approach from the early stage of the migration to Magento 2.
You may find my other Magento SEO audit helpful as well, please check it out. Also, here is a resourceful SEO guide on Magento 2.
Lastly, if you need Magento web development and SEO services, please contact me.
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