SEO Due Diligence for Ecommerce Stores: A Practical Guide
If you’re buying an e-commerce store and the seller says that SEO drives most of the sales, that changes everything! You need to take a deep dive into understanding how the website SEO looks like. And most importantly, you should know: is the organic traffic stable?
SEO due diligence for ecommerce stores helps you answer that question. It shows you where traffic comes from, how stable rankings are, and how much risk you take on after the deal. Organic search drives 53% of all website traffic, according to a 2023 report from BrightEdge. If SEO breaks, revenue often drops fast.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to review ecommerce store SEO in 7 simple steps. You will also learn what to check, why it matters, and what to fix before closing a deal.
1. Check Traffic Sources and Trends
The first you should start with when evaluating a store’s SEO is the Google Analytics and Google Search Console. These tools will help you get answers to these three basic questions:
#1. How much traffic comes from organic search?
#2. Which pages drive that traffic?
#3. Has traffic grown, stayed flat, or dropped?
Organic search means visitors who find the store through unpaid Google results. If organic traffic drives 60% or more of total sessions, SEO plays a major role in revenue.
Look at traffic trends over the past 24 to 36 months. A steady upward trend shows stable growth. A sharp drop often signals a Google update hit. Google releases core updates several times per year. Many sites lose traffic after these updates.
According to Semrush Sensor data, major Google updates often cause ranking shifts across many industries. If traffic dropped during a known update period, you need to understand why.
Action step: Export monthly organic traffic for three years. Mark dates of traffic drops. Cross-check those dates with known Google updates. Ask the seller for an explanation.
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2. Review Keyword Rankings and Intent
Traffic numbers alone do not tell the full story. As such, you must review which keywords drive that traffic. Open Google Search Console. Sort queries by clicks and impressions. Identify the top 20 keywords.
Now check intent. Intent means the reason behind a search. Ecommerce stores depend on commercial and transactional intent. For example:
“buy running shoes size 10”
“best noise cancelling headphones”
Informational keywords like “how to clean shoes” bring traffic but may not drive sales.
According to a 2023 study by Backlinko, the first result in Google gets about 27.6% of clicks. If most revenue keywords rank in positions 1–3, the store has strong visibility. If they rank in positions 6–10, traffic may drop with small ranking shifts.
Action step: List the top revenue-generating products. Check their main keywords. Confirm those keywords rank on page one. If rankings depend on one or two keywords, risk increases.
3. Analyze Revenue by Landing Page
True SEO due diligence for e-commerce stores must connect traffic to revenue. Open your analytics tool and check revenue by landing page. A landing page is the first page a visitor sees from search results.
You want to see:
Which pages drive the most organic revenue?
Is revenue spread across many products or concentrated in a few?
If 70% of organic revenue comes from five product pages, the business has concentration risk. If one page loses ranking, revenue drops fast.
According to Shopify data, ecommerce conversion rates often range between 2% and 4%, depending on industry. If organic traffic converts at 0.5%, traffic may be low quality or poorly matched to intent.
Action step: Calculate organic conversion rate. Divide organic transactions by organic sessions. Compare it with industry averages. Investigate pages with low conversion but high traffic.
4. Audit Backlinks and Link Quality
Backlinks remain a strong ranking factor for SEO and Google has severally confirmed this in their Search documentation.
Backlinks are links from other websites to the store. High-quality backlinks come from trusted sites in related niches. Low-quality backlinks come from spammy directories or link farms.
Use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to review:
Total number of referring domains
Growth trend of backlinks
Anchor text distribution
If backlinks grew very fast in a short period, risk increases. If many links use exact-match commercial anchor text like “cheap protein powder,” Google may view that as manipulation.
According to a 2022 study by Ahrefs, 66% of pages have zero backlinks. That means strong backlink profiles still provide an advantage. However, toxic links can cause penalties.
Action step: Export the backlink profile. Look for spam domains, foreign-language sites, and unrelated niches. Ask the seller how they built links.
5. Check Technical SEO Health
Technical SEO ensures search engines can crawl and index the pages of a website. When doing a site’s technical SEO audit, you should check:
Index coverage in Google Search Console
Crawl errors
Duplicate content
Site speed
Mobile usability
Google uses mobile-first indexing. This means Google primarily uses the mobile version of content for ranking. According to Statista, mobile devices accounted for over 58% of global website traffic in 2023. If the mobile site loads slowly or breaks, rankings may suffer.
Run a crawl with Screaming Frog and check for the following:
Broken links (404 errors)
Redirect chains
Missing title tags
Duplicate meta descriptions
Action step: Fix critical crawl errors before closing the deal. Estimate cost and time for major technical fixes. Use this data in price negotiations.
We Help You Buy / Build, Manage and Scale E-commerce Brands for an EXIT
E-commerce Simplified for Busy Individuals – We handle the buying, building, and scaling, so you can focus on what matters.
Growth-Focused Strategies – From sourcing to marketing, we drive growth and prepare you for a profitable exit.
Expertly Managed Exits – We build a high-value brand designed for a Lucrative exit.
6. Evaluate Content Depth and Structure
Strong ecommerce SEO depends on more than product pages. Check the website’s category pages. These pages often rank for high-volume keywords. You should review:
Word count
Internal links
Unique descriptions
Structured data markup
Thin content means short or copied descriptions and that’s BAD for long-term SEO. Google’s helpful content system favors useful and original content.
Compare this:
Weak page: 50-word product description from manufacturer.
Strong page: 400-word unique description with FAQs and internal links.
The strong page gives Google more context and gives users more trust.
Action step: Review the 10 top category and product pages of the online store. Check if their descriptions are unique. Use Copyscape or similar tools to help you detect duplicate content (i.e., for copied descriptions).
7. Identify The Brand Dependency on Paid Ads
Some sellers mix paid and organic traffic and they may brand paid traffic as organic growth. To avoid falling for this trick, we advise you to check branded keyword trends. If most traffic comes from branded searches, brand demand drives results. That is good but may depend on ads.
Action step: Compare total brand searches over time using Google Trends. If brand searches spike during ad campaigns, SEO may rely on paid awareness.
The Gap Most Buyers Miss in SEO Data
You already know how to review traffic, rankings, backlinks, and technical health. The next step is to measure the gap between current performance and realistic performance.
But how do you do this? For most buyers (both beginners and experienced), SEO can be a hard task. And knowing how to run the 7 steps we discussed above, let alone measuring the gap, can be a hard task.
That’s why it’s important to consider hiring experts to help ensure you’re making a sound investment.
At TrendHijacking, we specialize in helping serious buyers acquire established e-commerce businesses at below the market price. We also perform forensic-level due diligence to ensure you’re making a risk-free acquisition and even help you scale the business afterward for a premium exit.
For the SEO-drive e-commerce stores, we treat SEO gaps as valuation leverage. Our team audits ranking positions that sit between four and eight. We map internal links to push authority into high-margin categories. We rewrite thin product and category content based on actual search intent data. We clean toxic backlinks and rebuild link equity with niche-relevant domains.
These actions often move revenue-driving keywords into the top three positions. Higher rankings increase traffic. Higher traffic increases revenue. Higher revenue increases exit multiples.
Most buyers see current numbers. We measure the upside, price the store based on today’s performance, and scale it based on clear SEO gains.
If you’re ready to see how we can help you own a profitable existing e-commerce business, check out our Smart Acquisition framework today!
Conclusion
SEO due diligence for ecommerce stores is a crucial step if you’re looking to buy a Shopify store that heavily relies on SEO for its revenue. You must review traffic trends, keyword rankings, revenue concentration, backlinks, technical health, content quality, and brand dependency. Take your time to pull all the data, connect traffic to revenue, and remember to ask direct questions. With this knowledge at hand, you’ll be able to price the store based on its actual SEO strength instead of just some surface metrics.
REMEMBER: If you do this work before you buy, you reduce risk and gain leverage at negotiations. That alone can save you thousands!
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