How to Do a Shopify SEO Audit: A Step-by-Step Checklist

An SEO audit sounds like something you pay an agency $500 for. It isn’t. An audit is just a structured walk through your store, checking the handful of things search engines actually care about and writing down what’s broken. You can do the whole thing yourself in an afternoon — and most of what you’ll find are quick fixes, not rebuilds.

This is the checklist: seven areas to check, what “good” looks like in each, and how to fix what you find. No jargon, no developer required.

What a Shopify SEO audit actually is

The bottom line: an audit is a once-over of your store that finds the gaps costing you rankings — missing meta, slow pages, broken links, thin content — so you can fix them in priority order instead of guessing.

You’re not grading your store for a certificate. You’re making a list. Every store accumulates SEO debt: products imported with no descriptions, pages with blank meta, images that were never compressed, links that broke when you deleted an old collection. An audit surfaces that debt in one pass so you can clear it.

There are two ways to run one. By hand, working through the seven checks below — free, and you’ll learn your store in the process. Or with a tool that scans every page at once and hands you the list. Plug In SEO does exactly that — it crawls your store, flags every issue in the checklist below with a step-by-step fix for each, and re-checks as you go, so the audit and the to-do list are the same thing. If you’ve got more than a few dozen pages, that’s the difference between an afternoon and a week. Either way, here’s what to check.

The 7-point Shopify SEO audit

1. Can Google find and index your store?

The bottom line: if your pages aren’t indexed, nothing else matters — start by confirming Google can see them.

Open Google Search Console (free). Check Pages to see how many of your URLs are indexed versus excluded, and submit your sitemap (yourstore.com/sitemap.xml) if you haven’t. Then check that you’re not accidentally blocking search engines: in Shopify, Online Store → Preferences should not have password protection on, and your important pages shouldn’t be set to noindex. If indexed pages are far fewer than your real page count, that’s your number-one finding.

2. Are your title tags and meta descriptions filled in and unique?

The bottom line: blank or duplicate meta is the most common — and most fixable — issue an audit turns up.

Spot-check your homepage, top collections, and best-selling products. Each should have a unique title tag (keyword first, then store name) and a unique meta description of around 150 characters.

Note every page with a blank or duplicate, then write real ones.

3. Is your content thin or duplicated?

The bottom line: pages with no original words — or supplier copy used everywhere — give Google nothing to rank.

Check your product pages for descriptions imported verbatim from a supplier (they’re duplicated across every store selling that item) and collection pages that are just a grid of products with no intro text.

Flag the pages that need original copy. If that’s hundreds of products, Plug In AI can generate descriptions, titles and alt text in bulk to clear the backlog.

4. Is your store fast enough?

The bottom line: speed is a ranking factor and a conversion factor, and images are usually the culprit.

Run your store through Google PageSpeed Insights (free) and note your scores on mobile especially.

If your scores are low, that’s a finding. Plug In Speed compresses images and optimizes your store if you’d rather not chase it manually.

5. Are your images and URLs clean?

The bottom line: descriptive alt text and tidy URLs are small signals an audit catches in bulk.

Check whether your product images have alt text (most stores leave it blank) and whether your URLs are readable — watch for /products/...-copy handles left behind when you duplicate a product. Note the empty alt text and the messy handles. One caution for the fix stage: never change a URL that already ranks without setting up a redirect.

6. Do you have broken links and 404s?

The bottom line: dead links waste authority and frustrate shoppers — and they pile up invisibly.

Every deleted product or renamed page can leave a broken link behind. Google Search Console flags these under Pages (look for “Not found (404)”), and an SEO app surfaces them automatically. List each one so you can redirect it to the closest live page in the fix stage.

7. Is your structured data in place?

The bottom line: schema is what earns rich results — star ratings, prices — under your listings, and most stores never set it up.

Check whether your product pages output Product schema (you can test any URL in Google’s Rich Results Test). Proper schema is what makes a result show stars and price instead of a plain blue link, and it helps AI search engines understand your pages. Note which page types are missing it.

Short on time? Let the audit run itself

The bottom line: the seven checks above are exactly what Plug In SEO automates — it turns the audit into a live to-do list.

Doing this by hand is genuinely useful the first time. But it doesn’t scale, and it goes stale the moment you add products. Plug In SEO runs all seven checks across every page, flags each issue with a step-by-step fix, edits your meta titles and descriptions in bulk, adds Product schema automatically, and re-audits continuously so new problems get caught as they appear. The manual checklist teaches you what matters; the app keeps it from ever drifting back into debt.

What to do with your findings

The bottom line: fix in order of impact — indexing first, then meta and content, then speed and the rest.

An audit is only useful if it turns into action. Work top-down: make sure Google can index you, fill in your meta, give thin pages real content, then clear the speed, image, link, and schema findings. Most are quick. None need a developer. Re-run the audit in a month and you’ll see the list shrink — that’s your SEO debt getting paid down.

Audit, checklist, or quick wins — which do I need?

The bottom line: these three posts do different jobs — audit to diagnose, quick wins to fix fast, checklist to fix thoroughly.

• This post (audit) — how to find what’s wrong across your store. Start here when you don’t know where you stand.
• Shopify SEO quick wins — the fastest, highest-payoff fixes once you know what’s broken.
• Shopify SEO checklist — the complete, do-everything-once task list when you want to be thorough.

Audit tells you what’s wrong; the other two tell you what to do about it.