17-Step A–Z Guide for Ecommerce SEO

An elaborate ecommerce SEO strategy is the backbone of your online store's long-term success.

In this guide, I'll share the most effective tips for getting your products to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).

What you will learn

• What ecommerce SEO is and what its main goal is
• Why SEO matters for ecommerce websites
• How to develop a comprehensive ecommerce SEO strategy
• 5 Ecommerce SEO tools

What is ecommerce SEO?

Ecommerce SEO is a set of practices aimed at ranking your online store high in search engine results like Google.

Its goal is to increase the visibility of your ecommerce website to help you draw in organic traffic and buyers, mainly by boosting the performance of your product and category pages.

Unlike Google Ads or other paid traffic sources, ecommerce SEO isn't pay-to-play.

Once you optimize a page, it can enjoy consistent organic traffic with minimal maintenance and investments. This improves your business's online presence and its long-term viability and growth.

Ecommmerce SEO is different to content-led SEO because it primarily deals with users in the commercial and transactional stage of their buying journey.

That means that instead of ranking blog posts, ecommerce SEO best practices are concered with ranking product and category pages where users can find items they're looking to buy.

Why is SEO important for ecommerce stores?

Ecommerce SEO is important to help your products appear higher in search results, so search engine results show your online store before a competitor's. If you can secure one of the top SERP positions, you can enjoy a massive competitive advantage and stand out in even the most crowded niches.

Specifically, recent research by FirstPageSage showed that the #1 organic search result grabs 39.8% of all the clicks for the given keyword, followed by 18.7% and 10.2% for the second and third positions.

This means the top three results get three-quarters of the entire traffic for a search term.

Now, a high SERP rank isn't just about visibility—all this traffic directly impacts your bottom line. Let's use an example and crunch some numbers to show this impact in practice.

If you Google "men's leather jackets," you'll see that Buffalo Jackson's page ranks first (as of this writing).

A quick traffic analysis shows the page got around 26.3k monthly visits in January 2025, which was as high as 39.7k in September 2024 (which makes sense considering that leather jackets are more searched for during fall).

If we know that the average conversion rate for retail is 1.9%, those 26.3k visits should have resulted in around 500 purchases from the page.

Seeing as the brand's jackets sell for around $300–$800+, we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars from organic search alone.

Of course, these are only estimates, but they speak volumes about the tangible value of a successful ecommerce SEO strategy—so let's see how to develop it.

How to create an e-commerce SEO strategy in 17 steps

Yep, seventeen... Ecommerce SEO is a multi-faceted process, and I want to cover everything you should do to maximize the chances of climbing SERPs as quickly as possible.

Besides the basics applicable to all websites, I'll show you some steps ecommerce pages can particularly benefit from.

1. Optimize your pages for important keywords

Keywords are the lifeblood of SEO, so you need an effective ecommerce keyword research strategy to build a solid foundation for most other search engine optimization efforts. The goal here is to find keywords that check the following boxes:

• Solid search volume
• Low to moderate competition
• High business value (meaning the keyword can directly contribute to conversions)

Now, ecommerce sites often run into an issue here—most keywords they want to target are highly competitive. This doesn't come as a surprise considering that most niches are pretty crowded, and product and category pages often revolve around broad keywords everyone wants to rank for.

That said, you shouldn't avoid a keyword just because it's highly competitive. If you have topical authority, you can still rank for it.

You can use a free tool like Google Keyword Planner to find keyword ideas.

For example, you can search for a keyword like "thick yoga mats," and you'll get useful data alongside additional keyword ideas.

As you can see in the following image, this keyword gets 10k–100k monthly searches and is highly competitive.

Include your keyword in the following places:

• URL—Include the keyword in the corresponding category page's URL without additional text to avoid confusing search engines.

• Title tag and meta description—A title tag defines your page's title in SERPs, while a meta description provides a short overview of the page's contents. Both should include the primary keyword to ensure consistency.

• Headings and body content—Include the keyword in the main heading (H1) and content body (which can include product descriptions or specific content of a category page).

In many cases, including your keyword in the above elements might not be enough to rank for it—especially with competitive keywords like this one.

You can add relevant secondary keywords wherever possible (e.g., product descriptions) to boost your ranking potential. More importantly, you can target related long-tail keywords to capture their traffic without excessive competition.

2. Enhance your product pages

A product page must check two boxes to achieve a high SERP rank:

1. Effective keyword optimization
2. Positive user experience

When it comes to keyword optimization, you have plenty of opportunities to add relevant search terms throughout the page. Besides the elements you saw in the previous step, your product descriptions are particularly important because you can use them to add related secondary keywords for context.

For example, if your primary keyword is "freeze-dried dog food," some related  keywords to add to the description include:

• freeze dried raw food
• free dried diets
• gluten free

You can use Surfer's Terms report to find NLP keywords that are important for your page. Head to Surfer Content Editor.

1. Enter between 1-5 primary keywords
2. Select your country and device preferences
3. Click the Create button

What matters most here is to include keywords naturally and avoid keyword stuffing. Throwing in a bunch of keywords at the cost of useful product information is bound to backfire and hurt your rank.

Instead, focus on valuable information first and SEO second. You need to provide all the relevant information about the product, such as:

• How it's used
• Who it's for
• Features and benefits

Ideally, you'll use separate headings (H2, H3, etc.) for sections like product specifications and benefits.

Besides improving the page's readability, headers provide context for search engines by using relevant keywords in the headings.

Here's an example of a product description with details.

• Compelling visuals are another key component of an effective product page.
• Add high-quality images, videos, product walkthroughs, and other visuals that showcase the product and provide all the necessary information.
• Finally, adding an FAQ section to product pages is an excellent way to boost their SEO performance and provide additional helpful information.

Think about the main questions someone might have about your product, and answer them accurately and concisely (up to 50 words should be enough in most cases).

If you want to know which questions your audience might have, you can Google the main keyword and find the People also ask section.

The queries you'll see here reflect your buyers' key questions and can serve as long-tail keywords worth targeting, so make sure to include them.

3. Build out category pages

Keywords with the highest search volumes typically reflect so-called parent topics. In the ecommerce context, these would be your broad category pages like "Dresses" or "T-shirts."

Despite the high search volume, such keywords aren't enough to help you rank high.

Most people won't simply Google "t-shirts" but more specific keywords like "cotton polo t-shirts." That's why you should go beyond parent topics and create pages that reflect specific parameters.

Build category pages addressing specific categories and attributes.

In the shirt example, that can look something like this:

T-shirts (parent topic) > V-neck t-shirts

where V-neck t-shirts is a category page. This can then link out to subcategories like

• Long Sleeve V-neck T-shirts
• Graphic Print V-neck T-shirts and so on.

Here's an example of a category page about interior doors from HomeDepot. You can see it links out to subcategories of interior doors.

Which brings me to my next point.

4. Link to subcategories within category pages

After creating category pages for each product type, link to corresponding subcategories.

As you do so, pay attention to site structure and connect pages logically according to individual attributes (material, brand, size, etc.)

The easiest way to do this is by adding filters that will link to specific subcategories.

As you can see, the "Men" category page has two additional layers—"Watches" > "Designer watches." The URL reflects this and will further expand as you choose additional categories (brand, strap, etc.).

This clean, filter-based architecture creates a pleasant user experience and lets Google's crawlers index categories and subcategories more easily.

As a result, your site's "crawl budget" is used more efficiently, which makes Google favor it over complex websites with scattered pages.

5. Turn category pages into landing pages

When you think of a category page, you might envision a page with a header and a grid of product thumbnails—but you should go a step further.

Add SEO-friendly text under the category H1. A few sentences should be enough to engage the customer and include target keywords naturally.

Here's an example of how Sennheiser did this for their microphones category:

You can also add more headings and short copy to communicate the benefits, technical features, and other important aspects of your products.

One thing to keep in mind here is that you shouldn't turn landing pages into articles.

Avoid excessive text and only include relevant copy that boosts the page's SEO performance and user experience.

When you get to the product section, use compelling visuals and include full product names that correspond with the category page. Here's an example:

As you can see, the term "hooded jacket" repeats in each product name, supporting the category page's relevance to hooded jackets, a term it is trying to rank for.

You can also create pages based on occasions to capture more specific search intent (e.g., "Christmas sweaters").

6. Sign up on Google Merchant Center

Getting on Google Merchant Center benefits your store's exposure and reach. When you sign up, you can get your products to appear directly in search results, like so:

When someone clicks on the result, they'll be taken to your website to continue their purchase.

If you also have a brick-and-mortar store, you can choose to display the Google Maps link so that someone can find directions to it.

You can add products to Google Merchant Center in three ways:

1. Uploading a file with the relevant product details
2. Adding products from your website
3. Linking your ecommerce store (Shopify, Woo, etc.) directly to Google Merchant Center

The first option is primarily reserved for physical businesses, so it's best to choose one of the remaining two if you run an ecommerce store. After adding your products, they'll appear across Google search results and

• Google Maps
• Google Shopping tab
• Google Images
• YouTube

Plus, you'll get useful analytics with metrics like search terms and clicks, which lets you adapt your SEO strategy accordingly.

7. Ensure simple but effective navigation

Your ecommerce site architecture makes a world of difference to the user experience and efficient indexability, so make sure it's as simple as possible without sacrificing usability.

Keep your pages within three clicks from the homepage.

You might think this goes against the layered approach to categories and subcategories, but this doesn't have to be true.

Use drop-down menus for category and product pages. This way, a customer can jump directly to a page. Here's what it looks like in practice.

As for subcategories reflecting specific product attributes (size, material, etc.), you can use filters that append preferences to the same category page instead of taking the user to another one.

8. Implement schema

Schema markup lets you highlight and structure key product information so that Google and other large language models (LLMs) can pick it up and feature it in Search, Google Shopping, and LLM responses.

By using structured data, you're giving Google's crawlers a shortcut for indexing and understanding your products, which increases their chances of ranking high.

There are various types of schema you can use to mark up different elements of your website.

For example, CollectionPage schema is used for category pages, while BreadcrumbList defines a page's position in your site structure, which makes it easier to understand the overall architecture.

Like many aspects of technical SEO, schema markup might call for some coding knowledge. If you don't have it or simply want a no-code way of adding structured data, you can use tools like Google's Structured Data Markup Helper.

You can select the data type corresponding to the element of your site you're marking up.

For product pages, you'll choose Product and add the page's URL. You can then add structured data by highlighting a page's element and choosing the specific schema type.

As you do, the right-hand panel will populate with the selected data—here's what it looks like:

When you're done, click Create HTML to automatically generate the code you'll add to the page.

To test your structured data, you can use tools like Schema Markup Validator. It'll test all your markup types and highlight any issues you should fix.

While schema markup isn't explicitly required to rank high, it's highly beneficial because the Google StoreBot crawler acts as a shopper when checking your page's information.

Adding structured data makes it much easier to do this, boosting your chances of ranking high.

9. Use pagination

You've probably run into pagination many times so far.

It's the practice of splitting content into several pages so that no page is overcrowded. While all ecommerce sites should do it, it's especially important for those that offer plenty of products.

The most common type of pagination involves numbered or Next/Previous buttons (or a combination of both that sites like HeadAmp use).

Besides breaking down listing pages into digestible chunks, pagination gives the user insights into the number of results, which further improves the user experience.

Still, you can choose two additional patterns:

• Infinite scroll—Shows more results as the user scrolls down. While it offers intuitive browsing, this option doesn't inform on the result size and can cause scroll fatigue.
• Load more—Lets you use one page for all your content by adding a Load more button at the bottom. While simple, this method can't support a high number of results because everything is kept on the same page.

While you can use the pattern according to your preferences, traditional pagination is the most popular choice. If you implement it, make sure to link pages sequentially by adding an <a href> tag leading to each following page.

Doing so helps Google's crawlers navigate pages more efficiently.

Also, make sure that each page has a unique URL because they're all treated separately by GoogleBot. The easiest way to do this is to add the ?page=n tag to each page (where n is the page's number).

10. Use faceted navigation and breadcrumbs

Faceted navigation helps users refine large product categories or search results to zero in on the products that meet all their criteria.

It's a common ecommerce SEO best practice that is usually implemented through sidebars with relevant filters, like so:

If implemented correctly, faceted navigation not only simplifies the browsing experience but can also get you quite some SEO points.

Specific "facets" can be picked up by the search algorithm and matched with more targeted queries, increasing your exposure and conversion potential.

Take for example HomeDepot's page for "interior glass doors."

The page is dynamically created when you add a glass type filter for "clear glass."

For best results, you should pair faceted navigation with breadcrumbs, which I already mentioned in the structured data section.

A page's breadcrumbs should link to its parent categories and home page, facilitating crawlability and helping the user navigate the site more easily.

Here's what  breadcrumbs look like in practice:

These are so-called hierarchy-based breadcrumbs, but you can also go with attribute-based ones (e.g., women's bags > leather > red) or forward-looking breadcrumbs like dropdown menus with categories and subcategories.

Now, implementing faceted navigation requires a careful approach because too many facets can create an issue known as overcrawling.

It happens when Google's crawlers need to check out a large number of faceted navigation URLs to determine their value, which wastes your crawl budget by making crawlers spend too much time on useless URLs.

Luckily, there's a way around this issue, which I'll discuss next.

11. Give each page its own canonical tag

The more categories, filters, and other attributes you add, the more unique URLs you need. At some point, you might end up with thousands of individual pages, which causes index bloat and the aforementioned overcrawling issues.

Plus, broad filters can cause duplicate content because several pages will show many of the same results, and Google will typically choose just one page.

To avoid all of the above issues, you can set canonical tags on pages you want to rank high. By using a rel="canonical" tag on a filtered page, you specify it as the main version of duplicate or similar pages.

This way, Google's bots will know they should crawl that specific page and won't waste time on the non-canonical ones.

Here's an example of a canonical tag implemented on a filtered page:

Besides adding canonical tags, you can save your crawl budget by disallowing the crawling of specific filtered pages through the robots.txt file, which tells Google's crawlers which pages to visit.

Alternatively, you can set a noindex tag, which completely blocks crawlers' access to a page.

12. Convert readers into buyers

Your ecommerce store shouldn't only be a collection of product pages. To maximize your marketing funnel, create a comprehensive blog that will educate, entertain, and convert visitors into buyers.

Each blog post should help position you as an expert and boost your authority in the eyes of both users and search engines.

But you don't want users to just read your blog posts. Embed related products withing your blog posts so interested readers can turn into customers.

A good example is the Asian Beauty Essentials blog, which is jam-packed with content that its target audience in the beauty industry are looking for.

Here's an example of them nudging readers to a purchase.

Depending on your product specifics, you can write all sorts of content, such as:

• How to's
• Listicles
• Industry trends
• Data-driven content (statistics, research, etc.)

A particularly effective content type is "alternatives" content, where you'll create listicles discussing your competitors. There are two ways to approach such content:

1. Writing about alternatives to a competitor's product—This is known as "brandjacking," and it aims at capturing a competitor's traffic by leveraging their brand name.
2. Writing about alternatives to your product—As unintuitive as it may seem to suggest alternatives to your product, doing so lets you position yourself above the competitors when users search for them.

Not to toot our own horn, but we've done a pretty good job with the second option.

As of this writing, our article on Surfer alternatives ranks #1 for the corresponding keyword, which gives us the most traffic for it.

13. Use the reverse silo linking method for authority

Including related products in your blog posts can also direct the link equity of your posts to specific pages, helping their ranking.

This so-called reverse silo strategy works like this:

1. Choose the target page (e.g., a product page)
2. Create blog posts you can feature the product page in
3. Add internal links to the blog posts sending users to the product page

Ideally, each blog post will focus on a specific product or two instead of sending users to many of them.

While you can go down the traditional road and add internal links through relevant anchor text within the body content, you should go beyond this and do the following:

• Add links to above-the-fold elements: Add an internal link to content visible without scrolling.
• Use image links: Instead of textual links, you can make a product image a clickable link to the corresponding product.

This blog post by Boulies is an excellent example of both link placements. When you open the page, you'll see the link to a product category above the fold:

As you scroll down, you'll notice that the first image is a clickable link leading to the chair shown in it:

The more internal links you add to a specific page, the more link juice it can receive—especially if you rank the linking pages high in SERPs.

14. Find ideas from reviews

Reviews don't only reflect product quality and your store's reputation—they can also be useful for blog post ideas.

If you find a repetitive theme that users are discussing, address it in a blog post.

You can find negative reviews of competitors' products to proactively fix common issues. For example, you can go to Amazon and search for a specific product, and then select negative reviews to see the main concerns.

You can use this to find gaps in competitor products and users' experience with them, which you can use to improve your offer and content.

Besides using reviews to inform your decisions and content, make sure to highlight them in SERPs by using review schema.

By adding it to product pages, you'll let Google pull product reviews to display them in SERP features, like so:

15. Create dynamic pages with scripts

To create a more cohesive user experience, you can replace multiple pages containing similar content with dynamic pages that change as the user selects different parameters.

This is the same concept as faceted navigation that we discussed earlier.

The perfect example of this is a product listing page—instead of taking a user to a new page each time they choose a new product attribute (size, color, etc.), you can have one page that displays different products accordingly.

The URL on this listing page for slab doors for example will append the filter attributes to show users what they select.

This is typically done through JavaScript, so this step is mainly reserved for those with a bit of coding knowledge. If you don't have it, it's better to find an expert than experiment by yourself because improper scripts can cause various issues, such as:

• Indexing problems
• Cloaking (which is when a Google crawler sees different content than the user)
• Low page speed

Besides these problems, dynamic pages can cause issues like keyword cannibalization and duplicate content because multiple URLs show similar results, which can harm your SEO potential.

Luckily, you can prevent this through:

• Proper URL structures—Use simple, clean URLs without extensive parameters
• Canonical tags—Define canonical URLs for dynamic pages to prevent duplication
• Schema markup—Implement schema to mark up to help crawlers understand the content of a dynamic page even if it shifts

16. Identify high-margin products

Use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to identify product pages that drive significant conversions for your business. Filter these for products that you have the highest margins on.

Before you do this, you'll have to configure events as conversions.

In GA4, you can find conversions using the following steps:

1. Navigate to Reports in the left sidebar.
2. Click Engagement, then select Conversions.

Here, you'll see an overview of all conversion events and their counts.

You can also track conversions by visiting Reports → Engagement → Events: Look for events you've marked as conversions.

You can use this data to build category pages and write blog posts around these products. They can also give you ideas to expand your product line and include related items.

Bundling complementary products—such as "also bought," "goes with," or related categories—on the high-margin product pages can increase your average order values

17. Optimize your images

Image SEO can help your products show up in Google Images.

Debatably the most important box to check is the file size, as heavy visuals can slow down your pages and increase the bounce rate.

To avoid this, upload images in SEO-friendly formats like WebP. Google highly recommends it because it makes visuals lightweight without sacrificing their quality.

You can find plenty of free WebP converters on the web, so use them to convert as many images as possible, especially on product pages that rely heavily on visuals.

Another way to make images SEO-friendly is to add alt text. It appears if the image can't load properly to describe its content, and it's an important accessibility feature that supports visually impaired users.

When you add alt text, it will appear in your HTML like so:

Luckily, you don't need to add alt text manually in HTML—most content management systems let you do it through a user-friendly interface when you add an image.

When writing alt text, make sure it's concise and accurately represents the image. While you can include keywords if the opportunity presents itself, don't force them in at the cost of description accuracy.

Finally, name your images in a way that lets Google's crawlers understand what they represent.

Replace the default, unintelligible filenames with a few words that summarize the image's contents to ensure alignment with the product name or other content related to the image.

5 ecommerce SEO tools to use

You can leverage plenty of tools to streamline your SEO strategy and get results faster. Here are some of the best ones:

1. Surfer for ecommerce

Surfer helps you identify pages with the highest SEO potential and optimize them in minutes instead of hours.

Surfer's Content Audit tool gives you a bird's-eye view of all pages and key metrics like SERP position, impressions, and CTR. This way, you can uncover SEO opportunities and double down on the pages that work best.

The Recommendations tab is especially useful in finding pages that can be improved to rank better.

Surfer allows you to make produt pages and articles SEO-friendly by adding relevant keywords and filling in content gaps to make sure you've covered everything you need.

2. Google Analytics

I already mentioned some useful Google Analytics features, but the tool comes with plenty more that help ecommerce businesses scale.

You get granular insights into how users reach your website from different paid and organic sources, which helps you leverage the best-performing channels.

Google Analytics also offers some ecommerce-specific features, such as purchase activity monitoring. You can see metrics like product views and average purchase revenue (per user and in total) so that you can tailor your strategy accordingly.

3. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a staple SEO tool that offers comprehensive website performance data. While Google Analytics is mainly focused on audience data, Search Console looks inward and provides insights on:

• Queries for which your pages appear
• Most and least effective pages (according to CTR and similar metrics)
• Average SERP position over time

The platform also offers a page indexing report that lets you see whether your pages can be picked up by the search algorithm and fix any potential errors.

4. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog's SEO Spider is a third-party tool that mimics Google's crawlers to tell you virtually everything you should know about your website's performance in search. It lets you complete many SEO tasks, such as:

• Finding broken links
• Reviewing page metadata
• Finding duplicate content
• Generating XML sitemaps (which tell Google what pages to index)

You can perform some of these tasks for free, while others require a paid subscription. If you're new to SEO, it's best to start with the free version and upgrade when you need advanced features.

5. ChatGPT

We all know ChatGPT for its writing capabilities—but it can do much more.

You can use it for various SEO activities, from content outlines to sitemap creation. So while it's not an SEO tool per se, it can be a valuable addition to your tech stack.

ChatGPT seamlessly integrates with Surfer through a simple extension, which lets you use the two platforms without jumping between tabs. By combining them, you can get plenty of SEO work done without the need for additional tools.

Key takeaways

• Ecommerce SEO is a comprehensive strategy that helps your online store rank high in organic search results. It offers a long-term, cost-effective way of ensuring consistent purchases and growing your business.
• Keyword research and optimization is essential for successful SEO. Find commercial keywords and other search terms related to your business, and then use them strategically across your product pages and other elements of your website (homepage, blog, etc.)
• Besides broad category pages, you need pages dedicated to subcategories that reflect different product attributes. Connect category and subcategory pages using internal links, and ensure a clean website architecture that enables efficient indexing.
• Category pages can offer plenty of SEO potential if you turn them into effective landing pages. Use SEO-friendly copy, headings, and compelling visuals to maximize the pages' SEO value and conversions.
• Sign up for Google Merchant Center to feature your products directly in SERPs. Besides increased visibility, you'll get useful tools and analytics for improving your online store's performance.
• Schema markup is essential for SEO because it simplifies crawling and clearly outlines a page's structure and content. Leverage user-friendly tools to implement different types of schema and increase your ranking potential.
• Use faceted navigation and breadcrumbs to link between the homepage and all relevant category/subcategory pages. Doing so contributes to a positive user experience and easier crawlability.
• Your website might have hundreds or thousands of pages with similar content, which might lead to duplication issues. Use canonical tags to highlight the main versions of pages and simplify indexing.
• Building a robust blog lets you target all the relevant keywords and write valuable content that will position you as an authority. It also lets you execute effective internal linking strategies like reverse silos, which can pass link juice to the most important pages.
• SEO-friendly visuals can drastically improve your rank. Use lightweight file formats, write descriptive alt text, and name your images according to what they represent.