The E-commerce SEO Checklist: 12 Things to Audit This Week
Product pages that rank are built, not wished for. A twelve-point audit you can run without waiting for a specialist — and what to fix first.
Hamza Malik
AI Practice Lead
Most e-commerce SEO audits find the same dozen problems, in the same order of importance. Fix them in priority sequence and you'll see movement without waiting for a specialist — or hand this list to your agency and hold them to it.
The twelve-point checklist
- Every product page has exactly one H1 and one canonical URL
- Category pages link to their products; products link back to categories
- Titles and meta descriptions are unique and contain the target keyword
- Images have descriptive alt text and lazy loading
- Product pages load in under 2.5 seconds on 4G
- Pagination uses rel attributes or folds into a crawlable tree
- Faceted filters use canonical tags or parameter handling
- Structured data (Product, Offer, Review) is valid on every page
- Internal links from blog content point to money pages with descriptive text
- Old out-of-stock URLs redirect to the nearest live equivalent
- Sitemap includes only indexable URLs and is submitted in Search Console
- Search Console shows no dramatic crawl-error spikes after launches
What moves the needle first
Duplicate canonicals and H1 sprawl are the silent killers — Google has to guess which page to rank, and it usually guesses wrong. Fix those before touching content. Then invest in comparison content and buyer guides, which capture the research traffic that category pages miss.
Google ranks the page you wanted to hide, and the duplicate you forgot about. Canonical discipline is e-commerce SEO.