SEO audit for small online stores: a checklist you can run in an afternoon

Carla is about to spend more on getting found.

She runs a boutique in Austin, and a few years after opening her online store, online sales now pass foot traffic in some months. Two part-time staff help her run both. (Carla is a composite of the sellers I talk to, not a real client.)

Next on her list is SEO and AI search, then paid ads. Before she spends a dollar on either, she wants to know one thing: is the store itself holding her back?

That’s what an ecommerce SEO audit answers. It sounds like agency work, but a small shop can run one in an afternoon with free tools.

Block out three or four hours and work through ten checks in order. You’ll probably find a few problems that matter and plenty that don’t.

Here are the three words to know, the tools you’ll need, the ten checks, and how to decide what to fix first.

Before you start

Two things first: three words that come up in almost every check, and the free tools you’ll need.

Three SEO terms: crawl, index, rank

Google Search works in three stages, and not every page makes it through all three. Here’s what each one means for your shop.

1. Crawl

Crawling is Google visiting a page and reading it. Its program, Googlebot, finds pages by following links, much like a shopper clicking through your menu.

For example, Carla adds a cream cable-knit sweater and links it from her Knitwear category. The next time Googlebot visits that category, it follows the link and reads the sweater’s page.

2. Index

Indexing is Google storing what it read in the Google index, a huge database of pages. Only indexed pages can show up in search results.

Once Google has read the sweater’s page, it decides whether to keep it. If it does, the page can appear when someone searches. If the page is set to noindex (a setting that tells Google to leave it out), or looks like a copy of another page, Google may skip it.

3. Rank

Ranking is the order Google shows indexed pages in. When someone searches, Google picks the pages that best answer that search and puts them in order. Google calls this stage serving results.

Say a shopper searches “cream cable knit sweater”. Carla’s page might show fourth, below two big brands and a marketplace listing.

Checks 1 to 3 below make sure Google can crawl and index your shop. Most of the rest help it rank.

Gather tools you’ll need

Everything here is free. Set aside three to four hours for a shop with up to a few hundred products. Bigger shops can split the checks across two sessions.

1. Your shop’s admin login

You’ll check and change settings as you go, so keep it open in another tab.

2. Your phone

For the speed and layout checks, so you see your shop the way phone shoppers do.

3. Google Search Console access

Search Console is Google’s free tool that shows how Google sees your site. If you haven’t set it up yet, it takes a few minutes.

How to set up Search Console

Already set up? Skip to the checks. If not, Google first needs proof that the shop is yours.

On a WordPress shop, the easiest proof is a short code your SEO plugin (an add-on like Rank Math or Yoast that handles your shop’s search settings) adds to every page for you.

1. Open Google Search Console and sign in with the Google account you want to keep your shop’s data under.
2. Choose Add property, then URL prefix. Type your shop’s full address, including https:// (for example, https://carlasboutique.com/), and click Continue.
3. In the “Verify ownership” box, open HTML tag under Other verification methods and click Copy. The tag starts with <meta name="google-site-verification".
4. Paste it into your SEO plugin and save. In Rank Math, it goes in the Google Search Console field under Rank Math SEO, General Settings, Webmaster Tools. In Yoast, it goes in the Google field under Yoast SEO, Settings, Site connections.
5. Back in Search Console, click Verify.

Leave the code in place afterwards. Search Console checks from time to time that it’s still there, and you lose access to your shop’s data if it’s gone.

Why URL prefix? Google also offers a Domain property, which covers every version of your address, but it can only be verified with a DNS record (a setting at the company that manages your domain name). A URL prefix property can be verified from inside WordPress, and it covers every page an audit needs.

Using a different plugin, or none? Google lists other ways to verify your site.

Get the printable checklist

All ten checks and the fix-first order on one page of tick boxes, so you can print it and work through your shop. Add your first name and email, and I’ll send it straight to your inbox.

First name

Email address

Also send me occasional tips by email.I’ll email you once to confirm.

Website

Email me the checklist

One email with the checklist. You only join my tips list if you tick the box and confirm. How I handle your details: Privacy Policy.

Your ecommerce SEO audit, in 10 checks

The checks are in the order that saves the most time. Start with whether Google can see your shop at all, because nothing else matters until it can.

1. Check what Google has indexed

Start with a plain Google search. Type site: and your shop’s address, with no space, into Google:

site:carlasboutique.com

Google lists pages from your shop that it has indexed. Scroll through and look for anything that looks wrong:

• No results at all. Google may not have reached your shop yet, or something is blocking it (check 2 covers the usual causes).
• Missing pages that matter, such as your best-sellers or main categories.
• Pages you didn’t expect, such as test products, an old sale page or a copy of your shop on a test address.

Don’t count the results. Google says a site: search doesn’t necessarily show every page it has indexed, so a short list isn’t a problem on its own. Use it for a quick look, then check the pages that matter one at a time.

When a page is missing

Paste the page’s full address into the search bar at the top of Search Console. That’s the URL Inspection tool, and it tells you in plain words whether Google has the page:

• URL is on Google: the page is indexed and can show in search results. Nothing to fix.
• URL is not on Google: the page can’t show in search yet. The Page indexing section underneath says why, such as a noindex setting (check 2) or a page Google knows about but hasn’t crawled yet.

Once you’ve fixed the cause, click Request indexing to ask Google to crawl the page again. Google limits how many inspections you can run each day, so save them for the pages that matter.

Bigger shop? Checking pages one at a time gets slow past a few dozen. Search Console’s Page indexing report lists every page Google hasn’t indexed and the reason, so you can work through them in batches.

2. Make sure nothing important is blocked

Three settings can hide a whole shop from Google, and any of them can be switched on by accident:

• WordPress’s search engine setting. In Settings, then Reading, make sure “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is unticked. It can be left ticked from when the shop was being built, and it’s easy to miss at launch.
• Your robots.txt file (a short file that tells search engines which parts of your site to skip). Visit yourshop.com/robots.txt. If you see “Disallow: /” on its own, Google can’t crawl anything.
• Noindex from your SEO plugin. Check that products and product categories are set to index. A single toggle in Rank Math or Yoast can hide every product.

3. Submit and check your sitemap

Your SEO plugin makes a sitemap (a list of your pages for search engines) for you. With Rank Math or Yoast, it’s at yourshop.com/sitemap_index.xml. Submit it in Search Console under Sitemaps and check it reports no errors.

A sitemap should list only the pages you want found. If it includes thank-you pages, test products or tag pages with one product each, tidy those in your SEO plugin.

4. Test speed on a phone

Run one product page and one category page through PageSpeed Insights, and read the mobile results. It’s Google’s free speed test, and it works on any public page with no sign-in or Search Console setup.

Core Web Vitals are Google’s three measures of how fast and steady a page feels. Google’s “good” thresholds are: the main content loads within 2.5 seconds, the page reacts to a tap within 200 milliseconds, and the layout barely shifts as it loads (a score of 0.1 or less).

Oversized photos, too many plugins and slow hosting can all hold a small shop back. Photos are the easiest to fix yourself: resize and compress them before you upload. Here’s how to resize and compress product photos with free tools.

Reshooting your photos anyway? Here’s how to shoot product photos with just a phone.

5. Check product page titles and descriptions

Each product needs a unique title that matches what buyers type, and a meta description (the short summary under your title in search results) that makes someone want to click. Google doesn’t set a length limit, but it cuts long titles to fit the screen, so put the words buyers search first.

Here are three of Carla’s products, before and after:

Check your best-sellers first. They’re the pages most likely to rank, so they’re where a better title pays off fastest.

6. Find duplicate pages from tags and filters

WooCommerce shops can make extra archive pages (pages that list products automatically, one per tag or attribute) without you noticing:

• Product tag pages. Every tag gets its own page at /product-tag/. A tag used on one or two products makes a thin page Google may ignore or index instead of your category.
• Attribute pages. If “Enable archives” is ticked for an attribute like size or colour, each value gets a page too.
• Filter URLs. Size, colour and price filters can create thousands of URL combinations.

For a small shop, the fix is simple. Set tag and attribute pages to noindex in your SEO plugin, and if you use filters, block the filter URLs in robots.txt. That’s Google’s own recommendation for filters you don’t need in search.

One worry you can drop: in WooCommerce, a product in two categories still has one URL under /product/ with WooCommerce’s default permalinks, so it doesn’t create a duplicate.

7. Decide what happens to sold-out pieces

This matters most for vintage, preloved and consignment shops, where a sold piece never comes back.

• Coming back in stock: keep the page live and mark it out of stock.
• Gone for good, but people still visit: keep it as a “sold” page with links to similar pieces. Search Console’s Performance report shows which pages still get clicks.
• Gone for good, and nobody visits: redirect it to its category page.

Don’t redirect every sold item to your home page. Google’s John Mueller has said Google mostly treats that like a missing page, so you lose the link value instead of passing it on.

Pick the rule once, write it down, and apply it every time a piece sells.

8. Fix broken links and redirects

In Search Console, open Indexing, then Pages, and look for “Not found (404)”. It lists pages Google tried to visit that no longer exist. Check where the links come from: your menu, old blog posts or social posts.

Redirect each one (send visitors and Google from the old address to a new one) to the closest live page. If you’ve renamed categories, check for redirect chains, where one old link redirects to another redirect before it lands.

9. Validate your product structured data

Structured data tells Google a product’s name, price and stock status in a form it can read. Your shop plugin or SEO plugin can add it for you.

Paste one product URL into the Rich Results Test, Google’s free checker for structured data. Like PageSpeed Insights, it works on any public page with no sign-in or setup. It should show a valid product result with no errors.

Then check the details match the page. Google requires structured data to reflect what visitors see. One slip to watch for: a sale has ended on the page, but the markup still shows the sale price.

10. Read Search Console’s Performance report

The Performance report shows the searches that bring people to your shop. Three things to look for:

• Searches with lots of impressions (times your page appeared in results) but few clicks. Your page shows up but doesn’t get chosen. Rewrite its title and description.
• Pages ranking roughly 5 to 20. They’re close to page one. Improve these before anything else.
• Two pages competing for one search. If a category and a product swap places for the same search, make it clearer which page is the answer.

What about AI search?

AI search reads the same pages as Google Search, so most of the fixes above help both. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode need no special optimisation: a page just has to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet.

Two extra checks are worth five minutes:

• Consistent product details everywhere. Prices, sizes and stock should match across your shop, Google Merchant Center and any marketplaces you sell on. Merchant Center rejects products whose price doesn’t match your page.
• Easy-to-find trust pages. Your About page, contact details, and shipping and returns policies should be one click from every page.

What to fix first

You’ll find more than you can fix in a week. Sort it before you start, so the fixes that matter most happen first.

Work top to bottom, and re-run checks 1 and 10 a month later to see what changed.

When a DIY audit isn’t enough

You can fix most of what this audit finds yourself. Get help when:

• Pages keep dropping out of the index and you can’t see why.
• The shop is still slow after you’ve resized photos and removed plugins you don’t use.
• You’re about to spend real money on SEO or ads, and want to know the store is ready for the traffic.

That last one is Carla’s situation. A full store review checks more than SEO: plugins and theme, checkout and payments, backups and speed.

It also tells you honestly when a store would be cheaper to rebuild than to patch. Here’s how the store review works.

One case where you should wait: if your shop is under three months old, Google may simply not have caught up yet. Run checks 1 to 3 now, then the rest in a couple of months.

Ready to run your audit?

Here’s the whole afternoon, in order:

• Check what Google has indexed.
• Make sure nothing important is blocked.
• Submit and check your sitemap.
• Test speed on a phone.
• Check product titles and descriptions.
• Tidy duplicate tag and filter pages.
• Set your sold-out page rule.
• Fix broken links and redirects.
• Validate product structured data.
• Read the Performance report.

Then fix what you found in order: anything blocking indexing today, speed and titles this week, the rest as you go.

If you’d rather have someone run the checks, fix what they find and keep your shop easy to find on Google and in AI search, that’s what my marketing service does. See how online store marketing works.

FAQ

Quick answers about auditing a small shop’s SEO.

How often should a small shop run an SEO audit?

Once or twice a year, and after a redesign, a platform move or a traffic drop you can’t explain.

Can I audit my shop’s SEO without paid tools?

Yes. Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and the Rich Results Test cover what a small shop needs. Google Search itself helps too: search for your products and see what ranks above you.

What should I do with product pages for sold items?

If the item will come back, keep the page and mark it out of stock. If it’s gone for good, keep useful pages as “sold” pages linking to similar pieces, and redirect the rest to their category, not your home page.

How long until fixes show up in Google?

Google says some changes take effect within hours and others take months. Give fixes a few weeks before you judge them, and recheck the pages you fixed with URL Inspection first.

What’s the difference between an SEO audit and a store review?

An SEO audit checks how Google sees your shop. A store review also checks plugins, theme, checkout and payments, backups and speed, so you know the whole store is sound before you send more people to it.