Assessing marketplace and e-commerce website quality with SEO score

Purpose: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) covers processes aimed at improving website quality. SEO audits can be used to conduct comparative and competitive analyses to identify good practices employed by other online platforms. The article scores selected marketplace and e-commerce websites in terms of search engine optimisation. Design/methodology/approach: We analyse the quality of selected marketplace and e-commerce websites with synthetic aggregate metrics, so-called SEO Score. The first stage involved exploratory quality tests, whereby the home page source code was analysed for every website. The second stage was algorithmic tests using selected online tools. Findings: The websites scored 2,126 out of 3,000 points in total. It is 71% of the maximum score. This means that, according to the test applications, not many attributes require SEO effort under the employed research design. Four out of the five tested websites had their names (brands) in the meta description tag. All the portals had the title tag. However, only one site had the meta keywords tag. Originality/value: The research apparatus employed is sufficient to identify basic design flaws, which makes it useful for competitive analysis. Our algorithmic analysis pinpointed differences in the quality of leading marketplace and e-commerce websites in Poland. The exploratory research revealed certain good practices regarding meta information on marketplace and e-commerce websites, which may affect SEO.