SEO - Full technical audit of e-commerce website

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Technical Audit

The website is an e-commerce website that specializes in women’s clothing. The website was developed on a Magento platform. During the first few months after going live, the functionality of the website was continuously amended and improved to ensure it was user friendly and working efficiently.

Unfortunately, search engine optimisation was not at the forefront of the sites developmental stages and it now requires a thorough SEO technical audit. The requirements of the audit, set out below, are not considered an exhaustive list of items to be included in the audit report, but merely the starting point from my limited SEO knowledge. I would appreciate any further audit areas being added where your experienced eye deems them necessary to complete a comprehensive audit report:

• A crawl of the entire site simulating a Google search ( googlebot ), disabling cookies, Javascript and CSS during the crawl.

• Use of Google webmaster tools to consult the search engine and gain input from the websites visitors via site analytics. This analysis to provide information on the following points:

• Accessibility – ensure no robots.txt files are inadvertently blocking sections of the website and to identify where any robots meta tags are inadvertently blocking crawlers. Report on HTTP status codes for URL's that return errors (including 404 errors). Ensure the site is using 301 redirects and not 302 redirects or, meta refresh redirects or Javascript based redirects, as we understand that the 301 redirects are googles preferred option.

• Report on the sites XML site map – Is the site map a well formed XML document that follows the site map protocol? Report on pages in the site crawl that do not appear on the site map and pages that appear on the site map but not on the site crawl.

• Flash and Javascript navigation – perform two site crawls, one with Javascript disabled and one with it enabled to identify any parts of the site that are inaccessible without Javascript.

• Indexability – How many of the sites pages are being indexed by the search engine? Compare the site crawl results with the Google Site: command results and report on any duplicate content issues.

• On page ranking factors – URL's are the URL's follwing best practice or are they poorly optimised? Investigate the existence of URL-based duplicate content on the site, hopefully, these will be discovered during the site crawl.

• HTML markup – Report on Titles (Relevancy? and length, 55 characters or more? Targeted keyword?)

• Meta descriptions – Report on (Relevancy? And length, 150 characters or more? )


• Other tags – Are any pages using meta keywords? (remove) Do any pages contain rel=”canonical” link – ensure they are being used correctly to avoid duplicate content issues. Are any pages in a paginated series? Are they using rel=”next” and rel=”prev” link elements?

• Images – Are images using alt text and file names with relevant descriptions of the image and targeted keywords.

• Links – report on any internal and external links. Ensure the most important pages of the site receive the most internal backlinks.


Please can you give me an indication of cost for you to perform this kind of audit?

I am looking for a freelancer with the necessary skills to complete this level of technical audit.
If done to the correct standard we will be looking to achieve a long term relationship with much more continued work available.

Please send your proposals along with some case study examples of SEO audits you have performed in the past.

All proposals will be considered so please feel free to apply for this job.

Thanks,
Holly