Ecommerce SEO Guide

Running an online store and want this applied to your own site rather than read? See ecommerce SEO consultancy.

Organic search remains one of the most important acquisition channels for successful eCommerce businesses, while products can now be discovered across traditional search results, Google Images, Google Lens, the Shopping tab and AI-assisted search experiences. This is why it is important to ensure your eCommerce site is SEO-optimised. In all the retail brands I have worked for, SEO is one of the best-performing digital marketing channels, followed by PPC and email. Despite SEO often delivering a strong return, many brands still underinvest in the technical, content and product-data foundations needed to maximise it. Check out my SEO best practices for eCommerce websites aimed at improving the SEO visibility of your brand.

Search visibility now extends well beyond the traditional list of blue links, making SEO critical to how customers discover, compare and buy products. The objectives of this eCommerce SEO guide are to:

• Increase qualified visibility and traffic to support sales and revenue.
• Improve user experience through clearer navigation, a more efficient site structure and stronger web performance.
• Build a cost-efficient, sustainable acquisition channel that complements paid media, email and other marketing activity.

E-commerce SEO Tips to Boost Traffic In 2026

I'll be covering the following areas to optimise your eCommerce site;

Create a Site Structure that will Enhance SEO

Laying a solid foundation with your eCommerce site structure is crucial for SEO success and resonates with user intent. It's a strategic first step that sets the tone for your organic online footprint. Effective eCommerce keyword research is key, revealing insights into buyer behaviour and search patterns. This knowledge shapes your website design and product placement, enhancing visibility and user engagement. Now, let's dive into how a well-planned site structure can significantly boost your SEO efforts.

eCommerce Keyword Research

Keyword research should be one of your initial steps and a core part of your eCommerce SEO strategy. It enables you to attract buyers at every step of the customer’s purchase process. You have to know what buyers are searching for and how many times it's being searched to inform how to structure your site and position your products better. It is an always-on part of your SEO process where you never stop researching new and existing products, manufacturers and competitors. Never stuff your content with keywords. Use them naturally within all the content you create.

Keyword Research Tools

To help you create your seed list of keywords to use within your categories, products or blog content, I have put together a list of keyword research tools to help you do this fast, easily and efficiently. You can use one or more of the following to generate thousands of keyword ideas ordered by search volume, keyword difficulty and other advanced metrics such as CTR, CPCs, competition data, etc. These tools also expose your competitors' most profitable keywords that you could go after.

• Google Keyword Planner, Search Console & Google Trends
• SEMRush
• Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
• Soovle
• KWFinder
• LongTailPro
• SpyFU
• Keywords Everywhere

When creating a seed list of keywords, you could group them based on the following criteria: keyword search volumes, relevance, low difficulty, long-tail keywords, transactional, misspelt, seasonal or semantically related keywords.

Do not prioritise keywords on search volume alone. Map each keyword or query cluster to its likely intent, the most suitable page type and the search surface where it appears. Combine keyword tools with first-party data from Google Search Console, paid search, internal site search, customer-service questions and Google Merchant Center. For eCommerce, inventory depth, margin, conversion rate, seasonality and trade priority should influence the final roadmap alongside demand and ranking difficulty.

Review Current Performance against your Target keyword list

Evaluate performance by query, landing page and page type rather than relying on one headline ranking:

• For queries already in strong positions, review click-through rate, title links, snippets, rich-result eligibility and whether the landing page satisfies the dominant intent.
• For queries around positions 11-30, assess content quality, internal links, competing URLs, inventory depth, technical signals and SERP features that may be suppressing clicks.
• For weaker or declining visibility, confirm that the correct page is indexed and canonical, then investigate relevance, cannibalisation, demand changes, competitor improvements and sitewide technical issues.

Navigation and Site Structure

Getting your site structure right from the start is critical for eCommerce-based websites because it is very easy for pages to cannibalise each other due to the crossover of products in multiple categories and facet pages.

For instance, a sports retailer might have a category for football boots, etc. With a large inventory, this categorisation is likely to be too broad on its own. Adding sub-categories such as astroturf football boots, soft ground football boots, etc., will make it easier for customers to discover the products they’re interested in. The aim is to create enough categories to make products easy to find, but not so many that you end up with low-value categories listing just a handful of products.

As a general rule, your upper funnel keywords, such as dresses, coats & jackets, football boots, etc., should be captured by your category pages. Your products should be targeting long-tail keywords.

Here are some essential strategies for eCommerce website navigation and site structure:

• Use a Hierarchical Site Architecture: Keep priority categories and products within a small number of useful clicks from strong hub pages. Three clicks can be a helpful benchmark, but do not force an arbitrary limit if it harms navigation or creates unnecessary categories.

• Crawler-Friendly Navigation: Use real <a href> links and ensure important navigation is present in the server-rendered or pre-rendered HTML. Google can render JavaScript, but links and core content should not depend on clicks, swipes or other user interactions that crawlers may not trigger.
• Limit Menu Choices: Restrict the number of choices on your menu to the most important links.
• Use breadcrumb navigation: The breadcrumb anchors should work for users and bots, and you should use breadcrumb markup (schema.org).
• Don't Forget Internal or Cross-Linking: This helps in providing additional context, crawl paths, and shopping ideas.

URL Structure

SEO-friendly URLs help search engines understand the site architecture and the structure of the content. It also helps users understand the topic of the page. Let's look into some of the best practices for URL structure below;

Best Practices for SEO-friendly URL Structure

• Avoid meaningless URLs. User-friendly URLs help the consumer know where they are, as well as help engines know what they’re reading. Make sure you optimise this with your focus keywords.
  • Do this: https://www.houseoffraser.co.uk/women/dresses (clean URL)
  • Not this: https://www.brooksbrothers.com/womens/dresses/0489,en_GB,sc.html (URL has special characters like commas and underscores).
• URLs should be human-readable. The directories represent a hierarchical site architecture from broad to narrow. https://www.domain.com/category/subcategory/product
  • Do this: https://www.houseoffraser.co.uk/men/mens-t-shirts/11-degrees. The URL accurately describes the content of the page, i.e. men’s 11 Degrees brand t-shirts.
  • Not this: https://www.lorealparisusa.com/products/skin-care/products/eye-creams.aspx
• Stick to lowercase characters and use a hyphen to separate your keywords within URLs.
• Keep URLs concise, stable and descriptive. There is no useful SEO rule that limits a URL to 512 pixels; focus instead on avoiding unnecessary folders, repeated parameters, session IDs and tracking values in internal links.
• Avoid using dates within eCommerce URLs. There could be times when you need to set up evergreen pages that you may want to reuse every year. On such pages, especially, it's best to avoid dates. For example, the Christmas landing page on House of Fraser is https://www.houseoffraser.co.uk/christmas and not https://www.houseoffraser.co.uk/christmas-2026  because the same URL is reused each year, which helps retain link equity over time and increases the authority of a page.
• Do not rely on URL fragments such as #colour=blue to create separately indexable content. Google generally treats fragment variations as the same page. Use stable path or query-parameter URLs when a variant or filtered view genuinely needs its own crawlable URL.
• Avoid potential duplication issues common in eCommerce platforms, which are caused by URL inconsistency, as they are treated as different URLs with the exact copy. An example of inconsistencies is – www. versus non-www URLs, lowercase versus upper-case versions of the same URL, and trailing versus non-trailing slashes within the URL. These can be fixed by implementing 301 redirects from the non-preferred to the preferred URL or canonicalising the duplicate URLs. Also, ensure your HTTP redirects are in place to the HTTPS site-wide.
• If you alter a URL due to category modifications, ensure you implement a permanent redirect from the old URL to the modified URL.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs improve usability and help with SEO. You need to implement breadcrumbs on your eCommerce product and category pages. These breadcrumbs show the hierarchy of the visited page and reduce bounce rates. Ensure your breadcrumbs are displayed on desktop and mobile devices so customers can easily navigate your online store. Use visible breadcrumb links on both mobile and desktop and add BreadcrumbList structured data that accurately reflects the page hierarchy. Breadcrumbs should link to canonical, indexable category URLs rather than tracking, sorting or faceted duplicates.

Building E-E-A-T with Strategic Content Optimisation

Building the site's experience, expertise, authority and trust should be central to your e-commerce strategy. E-E-A-T - Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness - is not a single direct ranking factor. It is a useful framework for assessing whether content and a business demonstrate the qualities that Google's quality systems seek to reward. Build topical authority across the site by developing quality, helpful content on both commercial and informational pages. A keen focus on the detailed optimisation of all elements, from page titles to product details, brings user experience and SEO together. Start by establishing your domain authority in your niche by creating cluster content with this five-step approach:

1. Optimise the content across key transactional pages for maximum effectiveness.
2. Create strong pillar content that establishes your experience on a particular topic.
3. Develop supporting cluster content that answers popular search queries.
4. Create a solid internal linking strategy between informational and commercial content.
5. Boost authority and trust in your content with top-tier and relevant backlinks.

First-Hand Experience, Expert Input and Trust Signals

For buying guides, comparison pages and advice content, make it clear who created or reviewed the content, how the recommendations were produced and why the page exists. Useful trust signals include:

• Named authors and reviewers with relevant biographies, qualifications or hands-on retail experience.
• Original product testing, measurements, photographs, videos, comparisons and clear explanations of benefits and drawbacks.
• Quotes from genuine subject-matter experts, designers, buyers, craftspeople, technicians or customers. Attribute every quote to a real person and explain why their experience is relevant.
• Visible publication and meaningful update dates, an editorial or testing methodology, and links to reliable supporting sources.
• Clear contact, delivery, returns, warranty, payment, privacy and customer-service information, supported by genuine reviews and an accurate About page.
• User-Generated Content (UGC): Encourage and proudly display customer-uploaded photos and Q&A on your product pages. Peer validation is one of the strongest Trust and Experience signals you can provide.

AI can support research, drafting and large-scale product enrichment, but every output should be checked for factual accuracy, duplication, unsupported claims and genuine usefulness. Publishing large volumes of unoriginal or low-value pages primarily to manipulate rankings may breach Google's scaled content abuse policy.

Header Content Optimisation

Ensure the page titles and meta descriptions are optimised for target keywords. Do this at scale by automation and then manually start optimising, prioritising the most important pages based on trade, stock levels, Google average search volume, etc. Create unique, keyword-rich meta for your category and product pages. Include offers in your meta descriptions to increase CTRs and set you apart from the rest of the competition. Google may generate title links and snippets from several on-page sources, so keep the title element, H1, visible content and internal anchor text consistent. Only include offers, prices or delivery claims that are accurate and likely to remain valid; stale promotional messaging can reduce trust even if Google rewrites the snippet.

Category & Product Pages On-Page SEO Optimisation

Your website product and category pages are vital and need to be optimised to rank high on SERPs for your target terms. Ensure your pages have enough content to give customers appropriate information about the products to help them with their buying decisions. Create unique, keyword-rich SEO content for eCommerce categories and product pages which usually receive a lot of visits.

For a category page, elements such as the Page Title, meta description, category page heading and page copy are areas that need to be optimised from an on-page SEO perspective.

On a product page, optimising elements such as the Page Title, meta description, product title, and alt text for images is key to enhancing SEO. When it comes to product descriptions (avoid the manufacturer's standard description), add every small relevant detail about the product, such as colour, fabric, manufacturer part numbers, fit, etc. Implement a clear out-of-stock strategy that keeps temporary out-of-stock pages indexed, and be sure to optimise images by scaling and compressing for faster loading. Optimising these data points will not only improve your rankings for these specific searches on Google but also help customers understand the product better.

Modern category and product optimisation should also cover the following:

• Category pages: Use concise introductory copy where it helps customers, then add useful supporting content such as buying guidance, size or fit advice, material explanations, popular subcategories and internal links. Do not add long generic copy purely to meet a word count.
• Product pages: Provide complete and accurate product data, including brand, identifiers, colour, material, dimensions, compatibility, fit, care, delivery, returns, availability and variant-specific information.
• Variants: Give crawlable URLs to variants when they have meaningful differences or search demand, and use ProductGroup/Product structured data to describe how variants relate.
• Reviews and questions: Display genuine customer reviews and answer real pre-purchase questions. FAQs can improve usefulness, but most commercial sites should not expect regular Google FAQ rich results because these are now largely limited to authoritative government and health websites.
• Quality control at scale: Automated copy should be grounded in reliable product attributes and reviewed for hallucinations, repetitive phrasing, prohibited claims and contradictions with the product feed or visible specifications.

Targeting Long Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are the large number of individually less-common queries that collectively make up substantial demand. They are often specific and lower volume, but they are not defined by having three or more words: a short query can still be part of the long tail. Their value comes from matching a precise need, product attribute or buying situation, which can lead to stronger conversion when the landing page genuinely satisfies that intent.

Note: The search-volume figures in the example below are historical and should be refreshed in Keyword Planner or another current data source before republishing. Using an example here for 'wedding guest dresses' as the head term. 'Wedding guest dresses' has a very high search volume of 201k average monthly searches. If you then add a qualifier, summer, to the wedding guest dress keyword (summer wedding guest dress), it is still quite a high search volume keyword with 9900 average monthly searches. These are typically referred to as mid-tail keywords. Then, if you search for 'summer cocktail dresses for weddings' or 'summer dress for a beach wedding guest', this is where the search volume decreases quite a lot. That's not just because the search volume has decreased; that's making this keyword a long-tail keyword, but it's also because it is such a specific type of keyword.

Guide to Long-Tail Keyword Research for E-commerce Sites

For e-commerce sites seeking long-tail keyword opportunities, a combination of tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Keyword.io can be invaluable.

SEMrush's Keyword Magic tool and Ahrefs offer insights into keyword difficulty and competition, while Keyword.io taps into Google's Autocomplete data, and Answer The Public focuses on question-formatted keywords.

Your own Google Search Console data can reveal which long-tail keywords are driving traffic to your site. Additionally, Google's "Related searches," autocomplete suggestions, and Google Trends can guide you to emerging keywords.

Internal Link Optimisation

Internal linking is vital for SEO. It is the practice of linking pages or content together within a website. This means that when a user clicks on a link within a page, they are taken to another page within the same website. Internal linking is important for on-site content for a few reasons. It not only enhances the user experience by making it easier to find related content but also boosts organic search by showcasing the relationship between pages and passing authority across the site.

Effective internal linking spreads value from central pages to more specific categories and products, with optimised anchor texts pointing to indexable canonical URLs. This strengthens navigation and supports key SEO content. Additionally, a well-structured site with clear internal pathways, such as breadcrumbs and related product links, aids in smooth navigation and potential cross-selling. Sections like 'You may also like' can link related pages or products, ensuring relevance and enhancing the user's journey. Use crawlable HTML links rather than click-only JavaScript elements, and audit orphaned products, newly launched categories and high-value pages that receive too few internal links. Editorial guides should link naturally into relevant categories and products, while commercial pages can link back to useful buying advice.

Duplicate Content - Index Control

Duplicate content is not automatically a Google penalty, but uncontrolled duplicates can waste crawling, split signals and cause Google to select a different canonical URL from the one you prefer. It is important to ensure that only useful, intended pages are indexable.

• Create unique product & category descriptions and header optimisations.
• Noindex when appropriate: Add this within the <head> section of your page if you want the page to be non-indexable - <meta name="robots" content="noindex">.
  • Another alternative is to use the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header in your Apache .htaccess file to noindex pages. Very common in handling PDF indexation. <FilesMatch ".pdf$"> Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow" </FilesMatch>
• Use canonical signals consistently for duplicate or very similar pages. A canonical is a strong hint rather than an absolute directive, so align the rel="canonical" tag with internal links, redirects and XML sitemaps. Example: <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/preferred-url/" />.
• Use proper pagination.
• Choose a deliberate variant strategy. If size or colour selections use parameter URLs that are not intended to rank independently, canonicalise them to the main product URL. If variants have distinct demand, imagery, price or availability and deserve separate URLs, make each one crawlable and accurate, then describe the relationship with product variant structured data.
• www versus non-www, trailing slash resolution: If you have a preferred version (either URL with www or non-www), 301 redirects the duplicate to the preferred version. Similarly, if you have a preferred URL version between the non-trailing slash and the trailing slash version of the URL, 301 redirects the duplicate to the preferred version.

Elevating E-Commerce with Strategic Technical SEO

E-commerce sites looking to enhance their organic search presence need to focus on key technical SEO areas. The focal areas include optimising Page Speed, Image Optimisation, Site Pagination, Faceted Navigation, Crawl Budget and more. Fine-tuning these elements is critical for creating an e-commerce experience that meets user expectations and search engines effectively.

JavaScript and Headless Commerce SEO

Modern eCommerce platforms often use client-side rendering, headless architecture and JavaScript-powered filters or product selectors. Google can process JavaScript, but crawling, rendering and indexing are separate stages, and delayed or failed rendering can still hide important content.

• Prefer server-side rendering, static generation or reliable pre-rendering for indexable templates.
• Return the correct HTTP status code from the server. Do not rely on JavaScript to turn an error page into a 404 after load.
• Place the title, meta robots, canonical, hreflang and essential product structured data in the initial HTML where possible, particularly for fast-changing price and availability data.
• Ensure products, pagination and category links use genuine <a href> elements. Googlebot generally does not click “Load more” buttons or trigger user interactions.
• Compare view-source HTML, rendered HTML and what Google sees in URL Inspection. Monitor failed JavaScript resources, hydration errors, blocked APIs and content that appears only after consent or personalisation.

Page Speed Optimisation

Page experience matters for customers and can contribute to search performance, but relevance and content quality remain more important than chasing a perfect laboratory score. Use real-user field data and aim for good Core Web Vitals at the 75th percentile: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) under 200 milliseconds and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) below 0.1.

For eCommerce sites, pay particular attention to large hero and product images, JavaScript-heavy personalisation, consent-management platforms, review widgets, tag managers, chat tools and shifting promotional banners. Server responsiveness can also affect how efficiently very large sites are crawled, but improving Core Web Vitals alone does not automatically increase crawl budget. A few important things to consider are:

• Reduce unnecessary JavaScript and third-party scripts, split bundles, defer non-critical code and avoid shipping the same functionality through multiple tags. JavaScript is not inherently bad, but excessive execution can damage INP and delay rendering.
• Serve correctly sized, compressed images in modern formats such as WebP or AVIF, and prioritise the main LCP image rather than lazy-loading it.
• Focus on reducing the Time to First Byte.
• Using caching and compression techniques.
• If you are targeting multiple locations, using a CDN helps.
  • Improves the user’s experience with faster loading times.
  • Reduces server load.
  • Reduces latency
  • Quickly scalable during times of heavy surges in traffic.
• Purchase high-quality hosting.

I have listed some helpful tools to analyse a website's page speed performance to run free website speed tests. These tools also provide detailed site speed optimisation recommendations.

• WebPageTest.org
• GTmetrix
• PageSpeed Insights
• Pingdom

Image Optimisation

E-commerce websites have this habit of creating flashy landing pages for some of their categories filled with many images, videos and lots of scripts to make it fun & interactive. Although images are certainly needed to spruce up designs and draw attention to the content on your page, too many of these images could negatively impact page load, which in turn would impact the rankings of the page. Some other considerations when it comes to handling images are;

• Write concise, descriptive alt text for informative images and use an empty alt="" for decorative images. Alt text primarily supports accessibility and image understanding; do not stuff keywords. Example: <img src="/red-maxi-dress.webp" alt="Red satin maxi dress with halter neckline" width="800" height="1000" />.
• Avoid representing key content as part of the image.
• Use responsive images with srcset and sizes, specify width and height to reduce layout shifts, and serve WebP or AVIF where browser support and image quality make sense.
• Use SEO-friendly file names. Example: Use red-maxi-dress.jpg instead of dressphoto1.jpg.
• Create image sitemaps to help Google find images otherwise not found via traditional links. Sometimes images could be hidden behind JavaScript. Image sitemaps help in these cases. Similar to image sitemaps, you can create video sitemaps for your self-hosted videos to help Google find and index videos on your site.
• Lazy-load below-the-fold imagery, but load the hero or main product image eagerly and consider fetchpriority="high" when it is the LCP element. Provide multiple high-resolution angles and keep key product images consistent with the Merchant Center feed.

Site Pagination

Typically seen on e-commerce websites, pagination is used to divide a large number of products belonging to a specific category into a series of pages. Forums, blogs, and news publishers are other types of sites that typically use pagination to divide their articles into multiple pages.

When implementing pagination, there are a few things that need to be taken into account for SEO. A lot can go wrong (especially massive crawl waste) if pagination is not handled properly on eCommerce product lister pages.

Best Practices for SEO-friendly Pagination

• Choose a sensible number of products per page based on performance and user experience. Loading too many products at once can worsen Core Web Vitals, so do not remove pagination purely for SEO.
• Crawlable anchor links must be used for pagination series to enable crawlers to find and crawl new content.
• Ensure each page within the paginated series uses a self-referencing canonical, as each page of a pagination series will have unique content. A common mistake seen on most eCommerce websites is all the paginated pages canonicalise to the first page. This will be ignored by Google.
• Sitemaps should contain canonical, indexable URLs that you want Google to know about. Paginated URLs do not need to be your primary discovery method, but including an indexable page in a sitemap is not inherently wrong. Crawlable sequential links remain essential.

Here is an example of how to implement pagination. On page 1 of the series, we have a crawlable anchor link that points to page 2 containing a self-referencing canonical tag. We follow the same setup on the second page. On page 2, however, we need to point back to page 1 using a crawlable anchor link. We also specify a crawlable anchor link that points to page 3. Again, we use a self-referencing canonical tag for page 2. Page 3 follows the same approach by linking to the previous and the next steps.

As an alternative to traditional pagination, some sites implement an infinite scroll. If not properly handled, infinite scroll can cause issues for Googlebot. With infinite scroll, users can view more page content by simply scrolling down without having to click, providing a great user experience. Googlebot generally does not scroll, click “Load more” buttons or trigger interactions. Every product batch must therefore be accessible through a unique URL and linked in HTML, even when customers experience a continuous infinite-scroll interface.

Infinite scroll can pose problems with crawling. There are a few steps we need to follow when implementing infinite scroll to make the setup SEO friendly.

1. Divide the infinite scroll page content into component pages that can be accessed within the HTML, ensuring there is no overlap of content within component pages.
2. We need to ensure that each component page contains a full URL so that the content can be accessed.
3. We need to use the HTML History API to implement 'pushState' on the infinite scroll page for any user action that resembles a click or turning of the page. As a user crawls, the URL should update to reference the correct version of the page.

For the current implementation guidance, review Google's pagination and incremental page-loading documentation.

Faceted Navigation SEO

Handling faceted navigation is one of the most complex parts of eCommerce SEO. Filter options (or refinements) such as brand, style, colour, size, and price are the most common on e-commerce websites. There are several benefits of faceted navigation. Firstly, it improves the user experience. Secondly, it improves the conversion rate because it improves the user's findability of a product by creating clear and easy-to-navigate internal linking. Thirdly, it helps with targeting additional product-related keywords for SEO. My experience working with several eCommerce brands and helping them unlock product filters that customers search for (especially important for Fast Fashion) has resulted in a significant uplift in their ROI.

Faceted Navigation could have a significant negative impact on SEO performance if not handled correctly. Some of the potential pitfalls could be duplication of content, crawl budget wastage, indexation of all filter combinations leading to low-quality pages getting indexed in SERPs, creation and indexation of thin content pages and link equity being diluted across a large number of internal pages.

There are some key SEO considerations to be taken when deciding on your faceted navigation strategy. Let's look at some of the ways eCommerce sites handle faceted navigation.

• A noindex tag can keep selected filter pages out of results, but Google must be allowed to crawl the URL to see the directive. It does not stop crawling immediately, and pages kept noindex for a long time should not be relied upon to pass internal signals.
• Some sites canonicalise their faceted pages back to the main category (product lister) page. In most cases, this will prevent the indexation of these filter pages on the SERPs. But in some cases, when Google does not deem filter page content similar to the main category, the canonical tags may be ignored.
• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of filter spaces that have no search value and can generate near-infinite combinations. A disallowed URL may still be discovered and appear as a URL-only result if it is linked elsewhere, but Google will not crawl the blocked content. Do not block a page when you need Google to see a noindex directive on it.
• rel="nofollow" on facet links can reduce discovery only when it is applied consistently to every link to those URLs, and Google describes it as less effective over time than robust URL design or crawl controls. It should not be the main governance mechanism.

In the approaches mentioned above, this could be seen as excessive blocking of filters for some sites, leading to the absence of dedicated pages for long-tail keywords. This reduces the site's ranking potential for specific search terms (long tails) that could potentially have a high search volume.

One thing to note is that it is important to establish a consistent URL ordering when handling filter types. Not doing this could create duplicate content issues.  Choosing the same combination of filters in a different order should not generate unique URLs. Whatever the order of selecting a combination of filters, the URLs generated must be the same because the content does not change.

For example, let's say, on the Dresses page, selecting the style filter "maxi dresses" first and then selecting the colour "blue" generates the following URL - /women/dresses/maxi-dresses/blue. Now, if I reverse the selection by selecting the colour "blue" first and then the style "maxi dresses", it should generate the same URL - /women/dresses/maxi-dresses/blue, as the content of the pages is the same.

Crawl Budget Optimisation

Google describes crawl budget in terms of crawl capacity and crawl demand. Most small and medium sites do not need to manage it actively, but very large or rapidly changing eCommerce sites can slow product discovery when faceted URLs, duplicate pages, errors or weak server performance consume crawling resources.

Negatively Impacting Factors: Duplicate content and low-quality content can harm your crawl budget. Using tools like the URL inspection tool within the Search Console, you can check when a page was last crawled for insights into crawl budget issues. You can also use the new Google crawl stats report within your Search Console to spot Googlebot sitewide issues.

How do we optimise the Crawl Budget?

• Manage Crawled Pages: Larger e-commerce sites can generate many low-value pages. Control access to these to avoid wasting crawl resources on unimportant pages.
• Remove Low-Quality Content: Merge or remove content that adds no value.
• Utilise robots.txt: Disallow low-value pages, such as certain filter groups or sorting parameters.
• Update sitemap.xml: Ensure it only contains 200 status codes and indexable URLs.
• Improve Page Speed: Faster response times let bots crawl more pages. Site-wide events such as website migrations and content updates can increase the crawl demand of your pages.
• Monitor Search Console: Regularly review and resolve index coverage issues.
• Control URL generation and discovery: Do not use internal nofollow as a general crawl-budget tool. Prevent unnecessary parameter combinations, link consistently to canonical URLs, remove crawl traps and make valuable URLs easy to reach with normal 200-status HTML links.

Robots.txt Optimisation to Save Crawl Budget Wastage

Use robots.txt to manage crawler access to low-value or infinite URL spaces, such as selected internal-search, sorting, tracking and faceted parameters. It is a crawl-control file, not an indexing-control file: blocked HTML URLs can still appear in results without a snippet if Google discovers them elsewhere. Use noindex, authentication or removal when the objective is to prevent indexation. Add one or more Sitemap: declarations where useful. Each host or subdomain has its own robots.txt file, so international or platform subdomains must be configured and tested separately. Do not block CSS, JavaScript or API resources required for Google to render and understand indexable pages.

Improper use of robots.txt can damage crawling and rendering. After any change, check the robots.txt report in Google Search Console and use URL Inspection to confirm whether important URLs and resources are accessible to Googlebot.

Handling of Internal Search URLs

On eCommerce sites, unmanaged internal-search URLs can create large volumes of low-value, duplicate or even spam-generated pages. Do not combine robots.txt blocking and noindex without a plan, because a blocked URL cannot be crawled to discover the noindex tag. Where URLs are already indexed, allow crawling while Google processes noindex; after deindexation, broader crawl blocking may be appropriate if the URL space remains a crawl trap. Keep search results out of XML sitemaps and avoid linking to arbitrary user-generated searches.

While blocking search engines can save headaches, understanding what users search for is essential. Set up internal site search tracking to identify top searches and improve user experience by adding relevant categories, facets, or filters. Repeated high-value searches with adequate inventory may justify a governed, indexable category or facet page rather than leaving customers on an internal-search result.

XML Sitemap Optimisation

E-commerce sites would benefit from sitemaps because they typically have a larger number of URLs than standard static sites. A sitemap (more importantly, the XML version of the sitemap) helps Google discover the canonical URLs you consider important. Use <lastmod> only when it accurately reflects a significant page update. Google ignores sitemap <changefreq> and <priority> values, so do not spend time maintaining them. For International SEO, you also have the option of adding the alternate country or language versions of the site pages to your XML sitemap. You can set up dedicated sitemaps for standard URLs, your site images, videos and news. XML sitemaps for images and videos help with the indexation of your media content.

Some considerations for Sitemaps;

• Set the XML map to automatically update.
• XML sitemaps are the most common choice for complete URL inventories. RSS/Atom feeds can still be useful for recent updates, but they are not a replacement for a comprehensive sitemap on a large store.
• Multiple Sitemaps: Your large sitemaps should be broken into smaller sitemaps if the sitemap XML file size exceeds 50 MB or is greater than 50,000 URLs and linked from a sitemap index file. With eCommerce sites, it's common to have dedicated sitemaps for different sections of the site, such as a dedicated XML sitemap for each.
  • Products
  • Stores
  • Categories
  • Brands
  • Help Centre pages
  • Image sitemap
• The sitemaps should list the absolute URL.
• Sitemaps must only contain 200 status codes and indexable URLs. All URLs in your XML sitemap should be final canonical URLs only.
• Include a link to your sitemap (or sitemap index file) on your robots.txt.
• Submit your XML sitemaps (or sitemap index file) within the sitemaps section of your Google Search Console.
• When new pages are added to the site and you want them indexed, they should be automatically added to your XML sitemap. Similarly, deleting a page or updating a page to noIndex, or if a page is broken, it should get automatically removed from the XML sitemap. Most eCommerce platforms dynamically update the sitemap.
• Monitor the Page Indexing and Sitemaps reports in Search Console, and compare submitted URLs with indexed canonical URLs by page type. Investigate sudden changes in discovered, crawled or indexed product counts.

Video & Visual Commerce Optimisation

In 2026, buyers expect immersive product experiences. Videos have become a central pillar of product discovery.

• Incorporate Short-Form Video: Use compressed, highly relevant product demonstration videos (or embed YouTube Shorts/TikToks) directly onto the product page to improve dwell time and conversion.
• Video Structured Data: Ensure all self-hosted videos or embedded videos use VideoObject structured data so that they can surface on Google Search's dedicated Video tab and mixed SERPs.
• Optimise Video Thumbnails: Google will only index videos if it can easily crawl and fetch the video thumbnail. Ensure it is accessible, high-quality, and clearly displays the product.

Product Structured Data

Product structured data helps Google understand product information and makes pages eligible for richer shopping appearances. Distinguish between product snippets, which can support editorial product pages, and merchant listings, which are designed for pages where customers can buy directly. Mark up visible, accurate information such as name, image, brand, SKU or GTIN, price, currency, availability, reviews, shipping and returns. JSON-LD is Google's recommended format when practical. For merchants, place essential Product/Offer data in the initial HTML where possible, because JavaScript-generated price and availability markup can be less reliable for fast-changing Shopping crawls.

There are benefits to adding valid product structured data, but rich results are not guaranteed. Genuine product reviews can add useful first-party content, and eligible review, price, availability, delivery or return information may improve how a result is presented. Remove the unsupported fixed CTR estimate and measure the impact on your own templates in Search Console.

The product structured data also helps products to be featured within Google image searches.

2026 Additions to Structured Data:

• Sustainability and ItemCondition: With the boom in second-hand marketplaces and sustainable shopping, ensure you are utilising the ItemCondition attribute if you sell refurbished or pre-owned goods.
• LocalInventory: If you operate omnichannel with physical stores, linking your structured data and Merchant Center via Local Inventory (for BOPIS - Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store) is critical to capturing "near me" local search intent.

Review Google's current Product structured data documentation, including the separate guidance for merchant listings and product variants. Use ProductGroup, hasVariant, variesBy and productGroupID where relevant. Standard business-wide return and shipping policies can be nested under Organization, with product-level overrides only where needed. Validate eligible Google features with the Rich Results Test, use the Schema.org validator for broader vocabulary checks, and inspect representative URLs in Search Console. The marked-up values must match the visible page and the Merchant Center feed.

Google Merchant Center and Product Feeds

A major gap in older eCommerce SEO guides is the product feed. Google recommends using both on-page product structured data and a Google Merchant Center feed to improve product understanding and eligibility across Shopping experiences.

• Keep titles, descriptions, landing-page URLs, images, price, sale price, currency and availability aligned across the page, structured data and feed.
• Submit accurate identifiers such as brand, GTIN and MPN where they exist. Use item_group_id and variant attributes such as colour, size, material and pattern consistently.
• Add shipping, returns, condition, product type and Google product category data where relevant, and resolve Merchant Center diagnostics rather than treating the feed as a paid-media-only asset.
• Use frequent feed or API updates for fast-changing stock and price. Enable automatic item updates as a safeguard, not as a substitute for reliable source data.
• Ensure feed URLs resolve to canonical, crawlable landing pages where the advertised product and selected variant can be purchased without unexpected redirects or mismatched pricing.

Free listings can surface products across Google Search, Shopping, Images, Lens, Maps, YouTube, Gemini and other supported experiences, so feed quality is now part of organic product discoverability.

Crawling your site and identifying Issues - Useful SEO Tools

I have listed a few popular SEO tools that you could use to perform site crawls to pull out useful insights to improve your site from a technical point of view. We can use the knowledge from the crawled data to inform the SEO strategy for e-commerce websites and find the biggest opportunities available.

• Screaming Frog
• Botify
• Lumar (formerly DeepCrawl)
• Sitebulb

Let's look at some of the most common issues in large eCommerce sites that can be detected using these technical SEO tools;

• Non-200 status response code errors - 3xx status codes, 4xx error pages or server-other errors.
• Internal linking issues such as broken internal links, orphan links or links with a high crawl depth. Broken links are harmful to any website, but the possibility of broken links in an e-commerce site is generally higher.
• Issues with the content on the site, such as under-optimised or missing meta titles, meta descriptions, page headings (H1S, H2S, etc.) or page copy issues.
• Severe content issues, such as duplication of pages or thin content issues.
• Problematic redirects/redirect chains issues.
• International site URL issues, such as hreflang issues.
• Canonical issues such as missing canonicals, chaining canonicals, non-indexable canonicals or issues related to canonicals implemented on paginated pages.
• Issues with breadcrumbs?
• JavaScript issues - view source versus rendered source code discrepancies.
• Issues with the XML sitemap, such as the inclusion of non-indexable/non-200 status code URLs or if any valuable URLs are missing from the sitemap.
• Mobile & desktop site differences, if any.
• Legacy URL issues.
• Schema or structured data-related issues, such as pages with incorrect or missing structured data implementations.
• Pagination-related issues, such as unlinked or non-indexable pages within the pagination.
• Blocked URLs by robots.txt.
• Image optimisation-related issues, such as images with missing alt text or large-sized images.
• Some enterprise tools have an integrated backlink checker. It's quite common to find a large number of broken backlinks on eCommerce websites, especially links to out-of-stock products, generating a broken link.
• Logfile analysis of your server logs can help you identify crawl waste.
• Compare raw and rendered HTML for JavaScript templates, and monitor Core Web Vitals field data, Merchant Center diagnostics, product feed coverage and structured-data errors alongside crawl findings.
• The list is not exhaustive and will vary by platform, rendering model and crawler.

SEO for AI-Assisted Search and Product Discovery

AI Overviews, AI Mode, and other assistant-led shopping journeys have expanded the ways customers research products. For Google, there is no separate technical shortcut or special AI schema: strong SEO remains the foundation.

• Publish original, expert-led content that adds information beyond manufacturer copy, including comparisons, use cases, measurements, fit guidance, care advice, images, videos and genuine expert or customer input.
• Keep important pages crawlable, indexable and eligible to show a snippet. Clear headings, concise answers and well-structured supporting detail make content easier for both people and retrieval systems to use.
• Maintain accurate product structured data and Merchant Center feeds so product facts, availability, price, shipping and returns are machine-readable and consistent.
• Strengthen brand and entity trust through consistent organisation details, author information, policies, reviews, citations and reputable third-party coverage.
• Do not create hundreds of thin pages for every possible conversational query, and do not assume files such as llms.txt improve Google visibility. Focus on differentiated information and real customer value.

For a deeper commerce-specific view, see my Agentic Commerce SEO 101.

Measure eCommerce SEO Performance

Measure outcomes by page type, market and search surface rather than reporting only total organic traffic. A practical scorecard should include:

• Clicks, impressions, CTR and average position for branded and non-branded queries.
• Organic sessions, revenue, conversion rate and assisted conversions for categories, products, brands and editorial content.
• Free-listing and Merchant Center performance, product approvals, feed coverage and price or availability mismatches.
• Indexed canonical URLs versus submitted products and categories, crawl patterns, server errors and time to discover new or restocked products.
• Core Web Vitals by template and device, plus rich-result and structured-data validity.
• Visibility and referral traffic from AI-assisted search where reporting is available, while recognising that measurement methods and interfaces will continue to evolve.

Annotate releases, migrations, template changes and major content deployments so gains and losses can be connected to actual work.

Targeted Link Building

Digital PR is a great way to drive your topical authority and boost the overall trustworthiness of your site. Ensuring your blog content is compelling enough to earn links, alongside crafting content that homes in on pertinent topics, keywords, and publications, will align your digital PR strategy with your onsite content approach.

When it comes to link building, you should aim to earn quality inbound links to rank higher. Because inbound linking demonstrates authority and relevance, Google considers it a ranking factor.

For most e-commerce sites, it's the homepage that earns the most links. Product pages get a lot of links because of newness and seasonality, and bloggers or media coverage. Category pages rarely get links. Try to build links to your category and product pages to distribute link juice effectively around the site. Link value needs to be spread out - pass link equity to other profitable pages by linking internally to them. Avoid building all your backlinks to the homepage

A few ways eCommerce websites earn links are via product reviews, competitions & giveaways, press mentions, broken link building, creating good content that is link-worthy (link bait) gets automatically linked to, etc. When products, samples, payment or other benefits are provided in exchange for coverage, links should be qualified with rel="sponsored" or nofollow. Avoid paid-link schemes, automated outreach and low-quality placements that exist primarily to manipulate ranking signals. Also, take inspiration from competitor backlinks to develop your SEO backlink campaigns & link-building strategies. Not only can you take inspiration from authoritative competitor backlinks, but you can also reach out to the source if you find a broken page linking to your competitor's site.

Link building is one of the hardest areas of SEO because of the amount of time you need to dedicate to a campaign. That's the reason why many e-commerce brands prefer to outsource link building to a specialist agency. But you must always double-check the links that have been built if outsourced, both from a site quality and relevance point of view.

I have listed some of my favourite tools to check your backlinks and also explore competitor backlinks. You can also use these tools to research & analyse your backlinks to see if they are relevant & authoritative.

• Ahrefs
• Majestic
• Link Research Tools
• SpyFu
• MOZ Link Explorer

I have listed some examples of content that Brands do well.

Size Finder by Summersalt.com

DIY How-To's by HomeDepot.com

Mobile SEO

Google completed the move to mobile-first indexing, and Googlebot Smartphone is now the primary crawler. A page that is not accessible on mobile may not be indexable, so mobile is no longer a separate SEO workstream: it is the version of the site Google mainly evaluates. Other common problems I encounter when auditing eCommerce websites are:

• Unexpected redirects to the desktop site for some pages.
• Important copy, links, images, video, metadata and structured data are missing or materially different on mobile.
• The use of large images impacts performance.
• The checkout process is not optimised.

Be excellent to your mobile users. My recommendations are;

• To go responsive.
• Optimise the checkout process for mobile.
• Compress images to improve page speed
• Test representative templates with PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, Chrome DevTools device emulation and real iOS and Android devices. Use Search Console Core Web Vitals and analytics to identify issues by device, template and market rather than relying on a single mobile-friendly score.

Handling Out-of-Stock Products

Handling out-of-stock products effectively is crucial to eCommerce SEO performance. Failing to do so can lead to poor user experience, loss of revenue, and issues like 404s and broken links.

Some eCommerce websites highlight that the product is not in stock with a message on the product detail page and return a 200 status code.

Impact on SEO and User Experience

• Google Crawl Budget: Continuously crawling low-value out-of-stock pages wastes resources.
• User Experience: Landing on out-of-stock pages creates frustration, pushing users back to the SERPs in search.

Page Strategy for Out-of-Stock Products

If a product is permanently discontinued, redirect only when there is a genuinely close replacement or a useful successor page. Avoid bulk-redirecting unrelated products to a broad category, as this can create soft 404s and frustrate users. If there is no equivalent, return a real 404 or 410, remove the URL from internal links and XML sitemaps, and preserve any useful support information elsewhere before removal. Review backlinks, traffic, warranty needs and recurring demand before making the decision.

If a product is temporarily out of stock, keep the page live with a 200 status when it remains useful and is expected to return. Clearly state availability, offer a back-in-stock alert and relevant alternatives, and update the visible page. Offer structured data and Merchant Center feed to OutOfStock, BackOrder or PreOrder as appropriate. Do not leave an active add-to-basket action or an in-stock feed value when the product cannot be purchased.

Maintain Seasonal Pages

If your products are seasonal, it's essential to retain seasonal pages year after year and keep them indexable. Rather than removing and re-creating these pages annually, use a URL that isn’t date-specific (e.g., /black-friday, not /black-friday-2023) and remove it from your main navigation when not in use, but ensure it remains accessible (at least via an HTML sitemap) and indexable.

By maintaining these pages, you can build up link equity and authority over time, avoiding the need to start optimisation from scratch each year. When out of season, make slight changes to the copy to inform users when products will return. Start updates early, allowing pages time to rank, and consider building links ahead of time.

This approach allows you to make the most of seasonal pages like Black Friday or Christmas, preserving the benefits without needing to rebuild them every year.

International SEO for eCommerce Sites

eCommerce International SEO success depends on having the right strategy from the start. To target your eCommerce site to rank in major search engines in your target markets, there are a few things you need to consider for International SEO.

1. Choose the right website structure: eCommerce sites with a global presence targeting multiple countries or languages typically use either of the following website structures;
   • Country-specific top-level domains (ccTLD): These provide a clear country signal and can build local trust, but they split authority and operational effort across separate domains. They are not universally the “recommended” solution; choose them when the business can support separate sites, content, feeds, links and governance.
     domain.fr domain.co.uk and so on...
   • Subdomains: These can keep markets technically separate, but require strong cross-market governance and their own crawl, indexation and performance monitoring. Server IP location is not a reason to choose this structure.
     gb.domain.com us.domain.com and so on...
     
   • Sub-Directories: This is the most common implementation because of the ease of implementation, and it's less expensive to maintain. The root domain can capitalise more on all inbound links built on the various country sites. Use the official ISO country & language codes for your sub-directories to make it easy to understand what locations (and languages) your URLs are targeting.
     domain.com/gb (to target the UK) domain.com/de (to target Germany) domain.com/fr-de (to target French-speaking customers in Germany) domain.com/en-de (to target English-speaking customers in Germany) and so on...
     
2. Automate and validate hreflang: Implement hreflang in the HTML <head>, HTTP headers or XML sitemaps. Each language or region version must include itself and reciprocal return links to the other versions. Use valid language-region codes, add x-default for a selector or fallback page, and keep each page canonical to the same-language version.
3. HTML language attribute: Use the lang attribute for accessibility and browser behaviour, but do not rely on it as a replacement for visible localisation or hreflang.
4. Localise your website content for the target market. Optimise (localise) the following fields to improve SEO ranking. Simple page translation is not enough in some cases. The same language can have different words for a product type. It is important to understand these differences to optimise for the local market. Examples are Trainers vs. Sneakers, Nappy vs. Diaper, Soother vs. Pacifier, etc.
   • Page title & meta descriptions
   • Headings (H1, H2, etc.).
   • Page copy.
   • URL
   • Image alt text.
5. Monitor international performance: Google retired the Search Console International Targeting report and its country-targeting setting in 2022. Verify relevant properties, analyse performance and indexation by market, and validate hreflang with crawlers or specialist tools. Do not force automatic IP-based redirects that prevent users or crawlers from accessing alternative country versions; provide a clear, persistent country and language selector.
6. Gain backlinks from local sites: Outreach should be executed on a local level. Need to approach sites in the local language for better results.

Develop a localised content strategy: Create global blog content that can be localised for target markets. Also, create content at the local level that is specific to and popular in the relevant market. A tip to stay organised is to set up a global content calendar and keep it up to date. Localise the full commerce experience, not only page copy: product titles, attributes, sizing, currency, tax, availability, delivery promises, returns, payment methods, imagery and Merchant Center feeds should match the target market.

FURTHER GUIDES TO SEO FOR E-COMMERCE WEBSITES

If you own a Jewellery business or work for a Jewellery brand, check the SEO eCommerce strategy for the jewellery industry post.

If you own a beauty business or work for a Beauty brand, check the SEO eCommerce strategy for the beauty industry post.

If you own a Furniture store business or work for a Furniture brand, check the SEO eCommerce strategy for the furniture industry post.

For specific ecommerce problems, see how to get featured in Google's 'People also buy from' section, how to optimise landing pages for brands, launches and seasonal campaigns, and how to fix 429 errors when crawling a Shopify store.