Ecommerce SEO: a practical guide for online stores

Site structure

• Home > category > subcategory > product, each reachable through normal links.
• Category pages target broad searches ("running shoes"); product pages target specific ones ("Brand Model 5 men's size 10").
• Breadcrumbs with BreadcrumbList markup.
• Internal links from popular categories and from content to key products.

Category and product pages

1. Unique titles and meta descriptions for every category and product.
2. Original product descriptions, not the manufacturer's text that appears on every other store.
3. Specs, sizes, materials and other details shoppers compare.
4. Real photos with alt text; several angles.
5. Price, availability and shipping information on the page and in Product markup.
6. Reviews, ideally with review markup.

Faceted navigation and duplicates

Filters for size, colour and price can create thousands of URL combinations. Google's ecommerce guidance and its faceted navigation documentation suggest keeping filter combinations that nobody searches for out of the crawl, for example with robots.txt rules or by not linking them, and using canonicals for variants. Index only filtered pages with real search demand, such as "black running shoes".

Structured data and Merchant Center

Add Product structured data with offers (price, currency, availability) and, where you have them, reviews and shipping details. Connect Google Merchant Center to appear in Shopping results and free listings. See how products get into ChatGPT shopping and Google AI Mode.

Out-of-stock and discontinued products

• Temporarily out of stock: keep the page, mark availability as out of stock.
• Permanently discontinued: redirect to the closest replacement or the category, or return 404 if there's nothing comparable.

Ecommerce and AI shopping

AI assistants increasingly answer shopping questions and recommend products. They need to be able to crawl your product pages (check robots.txt and bot protection for OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot) and read prices and details in the HTML, not only in JavaScript widgets.

Hiring help: what to ask an SEO company for ecommerce stores

• Examples of work for similar businesses, with results you can check.
• Whether they follow Google Search Essentials, and how they get links. Bought links put you at risk.
• Exactly what they'll do each month, and how you'll see it.
• That your Business Profile, Search Console and analytics stay in your name.
• No guaranteed rankings: Google says no one can guarantee a number one position.

More: how to choose an SEO agency and SEO pricing.