Most stores that come to me aren’t broken. They’re stuck. Impressions creep up, clicks don’t, and every agency report says things are improving. The catalogue grew and the apps piled up. Then someone changed the theme, and nobody went back to check what Google actually indexes now.

I’m Ram Kr Shukla. I’ve worked in search for over 20 years, with 50+ brands, and I ran SEO across 11 countries as OLX Group’s Global Head of SEO. Think of this as the store version of my general SEO audit. It has the same fixed scope and fee model, but every check here is about your catalogue: collections, products, variants, filters, plus the tracking that’s supposed to prove any of it worked. Don’t sell online? Then that general page is the one you want.

Who This Audit Is For

You’ll probably recognise at least two of these.

One honest exception. If your store launched a few months ago, it isn’t a fit yet: there’s not enough Search Console history to audit, and the free 40-point checklist will cover you for now.

What the Ecommerce SEO Audit Checks

Thirteen areas. These are where stores lose rankings without anything on the page looking broken, which is exactly why a generic site audit tends to skim them.

I check each area on your templates first, then on the URLs that carry revenue. Why templates? A store with 4,000 products usually has five or six of them, and that’s where the faults live.

Shopify SEO Audits, and the Other Platforms I Cover

Shopify is the platform I audit most, and its defaults create the same faults on almost every store. You’ll usually find product URLs reachable through collection paths, ?variant= links and old handles that never got redirected. Then there’s the theme that cuts every title tag at a fixed length, the collection template that skips the H1, and app scripts nobody remembers installing. The full list is in Shopify’s built-in SEO traps, and the ongoing work sits on my Shopify SEO page.

Shopify also rate-limits crawlers. Run Screaming Frog at its default speed and a big share of your collection and product pages come back as 429 errors, which look exactly like broken pages in an export. I’ve seen almost every collection on one store reported as dead for that reason alone. So every Shopify audit I do starts with a crawler access signature and a throttled crawl. If a crawl has a 429 in it, nothing from it goes into the report.

Here are the other platforms I’ve done real projects on, and what changes in the audit for each:

Here’s why the platform matters. On a Squarespace to WordPress move for a US fitness studio, all 16 URLs were mirrored one to one. Fine, you’d think. But staging QA still turned up no meta descriptions, no analytics, no LocalBusiness schema and a staging site Google could index. You don’t see any of that unless someone checks before launch. Planning a move? My rebuild and migration work covers it.

What You Get

Three things, all written so your team can act on them.

Template-level tickets matter more on a store than anywhere else, in my experience. On one of my Shopify audits, a tool had listed missing H1s as dozens of separate page tasks, and the developer was about to quote a week. The actual fix? One edit to one Liquid file. I’ve written that one up on my Shopify SEO page, along with the other faults I keep finding.

How the Audit Runs, Step by Step

Turnaround is agreed at kickoff. It depends on catalogue size, how many templates and markets you run, and how quickly access comes through. A store waiting a week for GA4 access waits a week for the audit.

Are Ecommerce SEO Audits Worth It When Traffic Is Flat?

Sometimes. Flat traffic has four usual causes, and an audit is built for two of them.

My honest answer? If you’ve got a catalogue of a few dozen products on a clean theme, Search Console shows no indexing trouble and the free checks pass, you probably don’t need a paid audit yet. Hundreds of products, filters, more than one market, or a GA4 setup nobody trusts is a different story, because then flat traffic is usually structural. Finding the cause costs far less than six months spent fixing the wrong thing.

One more condition. If nobody on your side can ship template changes in the next quarter, wait. The audit will still be right in three months, and sitting in a folder it’s wasted.

Free Tools That Do Parts of the Audit

Rather check some of this yourself first? These run in your browser on your own exports, and nothing gets uploaded. They’re the same checks I use, minus the joining up. The full set is on the free SEO tools page.

Why Me for an Ecommerce Audit

I’ve spent 20+ years in search, mostly on sites where templates generate the pages. That’s the part that carries over to a store.

The rest comes from Shopify audits on D2C stores, written up with the numbers and without the brand names. There’s a crawl that reported almost every collection as broken because Shopify was throttling it. A GA4 property recording more purchases than cart adds. Shades built as separate products, all fighting over one head term. And a theme cutting every product title tag mid-word. Start with the Shopify crawl guide and the GA4 funnel audit. For the wider strategy, see my ecommerce SEO service.

What an Ecommerce SEO Audit Costs

Audits start at $1,100. That’s a fixed fee for a fixed scope, confirmed in writing after the scoping call. You won’t get a surprise invoice for extra hours.

What moves your store above the starting point:

Implementation and ongoing retainers get quoted after the audit, once we both know how long the fix list is. Some clients hand the tickets to their own developer and never need me again. Honestly, that’s a fine outcome. Want to compare pricing models first? I’ve written about what SEO costs in general.

Ecommerce SEO Audit Questions