.“An eCommerce audit portrays the true and fair statement of your online business covering every area to evaluate so that you can make improvements for further success.”
Every organization requires an audit to analyze its performance and give a true and fair statement about the firm. Just like that, your online business requires an audit too. It gives you the scope to make improvements. An audit has a focused objective and always tends to optimize your business operations.
What is an e-Commerce audit?
An eCommerce audit can be described as the perfect opportunity to analyze, evaluate and portray a true and fair statement of your online business operations covering all the areas such as-
- Website design
- Website performance
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
- Supply chain management
- Platform analysis
After evaluating all these business areas, the results will help you to optimize your brand and business by mapping out the areas where further improvement is required.
It is solely focused on the present scenario of your business to figure out the opportunities and issues to be fixed. Thereby, you can measure the findings with your standard or stated business objectives.
Why e-Commerce audit is essential?
The different types of audit reports are designed to make your business and brand a boon in the digital realm.
There are different benefits of doing an audit report for your eCommerce business and they can be stated as follows-
- It ensures the stability of the platform on which you are doing your online business.
- It boosts the website performance by optimizing different key elements that jump the traffic flow and conversions
- It improves the website’s core vitals by enhancing the website speed, loading time, and purchasing journey.
- It prioritizes the user experience and optimizes it so that it can influence more audiences at once.
- It makes effective use of third-party integrations seamless.
- You can choose a cost-effective and time-saving eCommerce development company to invest in.
- You can enjoy a secured website with zero vulnerabilities and loopholes on a budget.
The Major Types Of E-Commerce Audit That Every Organization Should Perform
Platform Audit
Platform Audit is the most important auditing for your online business. You need to choose the right eCommerce platform and see whether it is delivering the expected results or not.
This auditing helps to figure out whether you need to change your eCommerce platform or not. You can understand it from the low sales rate, dropping off customers, no new visitors/customers, and so on. This will drop you a hint that you need to change your platform and check out others.
Platform audit is not only required to boost your site’s performance to land new clients but also to boost the performance in the below areas so that you can enjoy the following-
- It will help you to enhance your navigational flow by providing a seamless user experience. A better user experience will make your web vital healthy, faster to load, and easy to check out process. You can check the quality of the site by going through the images, videos, new features, and other content and optimizing them so that your SEO and CRO are pumped up.
- A fluid user experience helps the website to load faster taking less time to load, thus reducing the bounce rates.
- It also improves your website’s mobile responsiveness so that it delivers optimized performance no matter the device.
- It evolves the digital market conditions by providing multi-platform accessibility and synchronization, thus boosting the UX/UI of the website.
- Makes the website more scalable with the digital shifts and technical advancements.
- Choose a platform that is more cost-effective without compromising the quality of your current website.
You can curate your website by getting in touch with top-brass UX design service providers to optimize all these areas so that your UX audit report is positively aligned with your business goals.
Website Design Audit
Website design audits help in evaluating your website’s design so that it stays on-trend and in style with the current market space. This audit helps in getting the real business environmental upgrades in your eCommerce website so that it is more intuitive, user-friendly, and enticing enough for the present crowd in the digital market.
A website design helps in the following areas-
- It fixes all the errors, glitches, and vulnerabilities in the website to improve the visual consistency of the content layouts, typography, fonts, style guide, etc.
- It helps in evaluating the different dimensions of an eCommerce website’s features and customizing them to reconstruct the whole visual appeal.
- It provides an actual factual method to boost the customer experience
- It helps in identifying and bridging the design gaps to make the user journey empowering and seamless
- It improves the outlay for seamless user navigation and accessibility
- It analyses all the functionalities of the website so that the overall visual presentation and browsing are enticing
- It powers the conversion metrics and makes the design more responsive.
- It finds out different strategies to fix cart abandonment issues and lower bounce rates.
Content Audit
Content audits are primarily focused on optimizing the key contents of your websites like product descriptions, blog posts, press releases, FAQs, social media posts, and so on.
This type of audit assesses the effectiveness of the website content that you have put up and whether it is helping your business thrive.
- It looks into the usage of keywords and their effectiveness by connecting the search terms with your result contents.
- It also looks into the internal links, the overall quality of the visuals and copies, etc.
- The content audit evaluates all of these and proofreads whether all the content addresses to maximize user engagement, improves your brand awareness, boosts incoming traffic, is SEO-friendly, and so on.
- It values seamless communication between your brand and target audience including necessary information.
User Experience (UX) Audit
User Experience (UX) audit helps in optimizing the customer experience and interaction between your products/services with the audience engaging and seamless. The audit report analyzes how you can as a site owner make the customer come back to your site again and again. This report mainly assesses the navigational flow, website browsing experience, and customer interaction with your site.
The UX audit reports look for these key areas and focus on them while preparing the report statement-
- How the target demographic can navigate easily without any hassle?
- How are the product listings arranged?
- How can you improve and fix the browsing errors?
- How to make the website more accessible?
- Are the CTA buttons prominent and actionable?
- Is the browsing and purchase journey flawless and quick?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Audit
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) audit helps to find out how you can improve your sales by making it easier for the search engines to locate you easily. For SEO audit, you need to prioritize that your products/services are visible to all the search engines and users as well.
You should also check for any duplicate content, 404 errors, poor internal linking, and other areas where the situation can lead to a negative impact on your SEO score.
Therefore, it is highly recommended for all site owners hire top-notch SEO services that will help them to do the audit properly.
During an SEO audit, here are some things that you should highlight in your SEO audit report-
- How to stir SEO for new products?
- How you are using internal linking?
- How to handle SEO for seasonal products?
- How to handle redirects with expired/out-of-stock products and link them to related products?
- How are you managing content on your product pages?
- How are related products organized?
- How to include high-quality images on your product pages?
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Audit
A conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) audit helps in determining how the website can convert traffic into loyal customers. This area also includes PPC campaigns that are designed specifically to drive conversion and increase revenue.
The CRO audit is primarily beneficial for boosting the overall conversions of viewers to customers, sales, and revenue.
Here is the list of other different areas that the CRO audit that can hugely benefit in the long run the online businesses-
- You review your ineffective call-to-action(CTA) buttons and optimize them to make them more desirable and clickable for your audience.
- You can also optimize your landing pages and homepage to decrease bounce rates. To make quick conversions, you should always keep in mind that the landing page or home page should be enticing and quick to load.
- You can review your opt-in forms and remove the areas where it is asking for unnecessary information. Thereby, you can generate quality leads and push proper sales in the future.
- The sign-ups or registration should not be made mandatory for your website so that you do not lose a chunk of customers. They should be able to go to your product page as a guest and checkout easily.
- The checkout process should be simple, quick, and hassle-free. You can see your products in your cart whenever you go to the page so in the future your card abandonment is lesser as well as your CRO.
- Your product pages should always be simple so that your customer can buy easily without breaking a sweat. The options and choices should be simple and to the point so that you do get your audience frustrated and leave the page.
Conclusion
The audit report is only to help you understand what works for your online business and what does not. You must figure out the most cost-effective, time-saving, and optimized way to make it easier for your audience to interact with your products/services.
After you are done with all the audits, you can go to Google Analytics to measure your performance and improvements. You can track the key areas of your audit report and focus on those areas thereby adjusting them to your business goals.