Most online store audits I see are a list of technical warnings exported from a crawler, sorted by colour. Useful as a starting point, hopeless as a plan, because it puts a missing image description on the same footing as a category structure that stops half the catalogue from being found at all.
So here is the audit in the order the fixes actually pay, written for a Canadian store owner with a few hours rather than an agency retainer. Work top to bottom and stop when you run out of evening. If you have never run any kind of audit before, the free website audit any owner can run is the shorter version and a good hour to spend first.
1. Can a person tell what the product is from the page alone?
Start with your five best-selling products and read each page as a stranger. Not for keywords. For whether the page answers the questions that would stop you buying: what it is, what size, what material or specification, what it costs in Canadian dollars, what shipping costs, how long it takes, and what happens if it is wrong.
Manufacturer description copied verbatim is the most common single problem, because it puts your page in a set of forty identical ones and gives a search engine no reason to prefer yours. Two honest sentences about who the thing suits and who it does not will do more than four hundred words of specification.
2. Fix the category and filter structure before touching product pages
This is the one with the largest effect and the one people skip because it is dull.
Every category a customer would search for should be a real, linkable page with its own heading and a paragraph of its own, not just a filtered view of everything.
Filter and sort combinations should not create indexable pages. A store with four filters can generate thousands of near-identical URLs, which spends crawl attention on nothing.
Nothing important should be more than three clicks from the homepage, and your bestsellers should be linked from somewhere other than a category listing.
Out-of-stock and discontinued products need a decision, not a default. Keep the page if the product returns, redirect it to the nearest live equivalent if it does not, and never delete it into a 404 while links still point at it.
3. Get the product markup right, and expect nothing from it
Structured data is how you tell a search engine what is on the page in a form it does not have to guess at. For a product, the properties that matter are the product name, an image, and a nested offer carrying the price and the priceCurrency in three-letter format, which for a Canadian store means CAD where you sell in Canadian dollars (sourced from Google's merchant listing structured data documentation).
Two cautions worth taking seriously. Google says it may attempt to verify merchant listing product data before showing the information in search results, so markup that disagrees with the visible price or availability on the page is worse than no markup. And rich results are not something you earn by adding code: Google's own wording is that search result enhancements are shown at the discretion of each experience, and may change over time (sourced from Google's product structured data documentation). Add it because it is accurate, not because it is a lever.
On review markup specifically: if you do not have real reviews on the page, do not add rating markup. That is not a grey area.
4. Images: the boring pass that pays twice
Product images are usually the largest thing on the page and the reason it is slow, and they are also the thing a shopper is actually looking at.
Export at the size the page displays, not at the size the photographer delivered.
Use a modern format and let the page serve a smaller version to phones.
Write image descriptions that describe the product as you would to someone over the phone. This is an accessibility requirement first and a search benefit second.
Name the files something readable before you upload them.
5. Measure speed on the three numbers that exist now
The speed of your website (how quickly it opens when someone visits the website) is measured through three numbers collectively called the Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals has changed and a lot of advice has not caught up. The three current metrics and their good thresholds are Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less. Interaction to Next Paint replaced First Input Delay, becoming a stable metric in 2024 (sourced from web.dev's Core Web Vitals guide).
Test a product page and a category page, on mobile, not the homepage. The homepage is usually the fastest page on the site and the least likely to be the one a search result lands on, and why the mobile version is the one that counts is the longer argument behind that.
Layout shift deserves a special mention for stores, because it is usually caused by exactly the things stores add: a promotion bar that loads late, an image without dimensions set, a font swap that reflows the price. A customer who taps the wrong thing because the page moved does not come back to try again.
6. The Google Business Profile question, answered briefly
If you have a physical location people can visit, claim and complete the profile, because it is free distribution and it feeds the map. If you are a pure online seller shipping across Canada from a room you do not want strangers visiting, a Business Profile is not the lever it is described as, and the effort belongs in the five sections above.
How far local search is worth pushing for a nationwide shipper is a bigger argument and it gets its own piece rather than a paragraph here.
What to do with what you find
Write down every problem in one list and sort it into two columns: things that are a content decision and things that are a build problem. The content column is yours this month. The build column, the template that ships an unsized image on every product page, or the filter system generating ten thousand URLs, is where a store usually needs help, and what a build or template fix actually involves is set out rather than quoted vaguely.
If you only get through the first two sections, you will still have done more than most audits deliver. Which of your six bestsellers has a description you did not write?