How to apply SEO techniques to your ecommerce or online store

Do you have an online store and want people to find you on Google without relying only on advertising? Ecommerce SEO has its own rules: lots of similar pages, products that sell out, filters that multiply URLs and fierce competition. Here are the techniques we apply in the stores we design.

Updated in 2026. We've expanded the guide with what has changed most since we wrote it: product structured data, the chance to appear for free on Google Shopping, and how to handle filters and out-of-stock products without losing rankings.

First things first: analyze your online store

Before optimizing anything, decide where to focus your effort. Go through your sales data and Google Analytics and note down:

• The categories and products that sell most or bring in the most margin.
• The ones with demand on Google where you can compete on price.
• The ones that barely interest anyone.

With that list you'll know which pages deserve the most work. There's no point spending hours ranking a product that sells two units a year while your star category is only half optimized.

Do proper keyword research

Look for the words your customers use to search for your products, and pay attention to three things: how many people search for them, how much competition they have and, above all, the intent behind them (we explain this in search intent). For a store, the searches that matter most are those with purchase intent.

Generic keywords ("trainers") are almost impossible for a small store. Long-tail keywords, which are more specific, get fewer searches but have far less competition and more decided buyers:

• Generic: running shoes.
• Long tail: women's running shoes for overpronation.

Each important keyword should have a single page targeting it: generic ones on categories and more specific ones on subcategories and product pages.

How to structure your online store

A good structure helps Google understand your catalogue and helps your customers find what they're looking for. The golden rule: any product should be three clicks or fewer from the home page.

• Home → categories → subcategories → products, in that order.
• Organize categories the way your customers search (what your keyword research told you), not the way your warehouse is organized.
• Use breadcrumbs (Home > Women > Trainers) so that Google and people always know where they are.
• Link from the home page to your most important categories and products, because it's the page with the most authority in the store.

Optimizing categories improves ecommerce SEO

Category pages are usually the ones that rank for the most valuable searches, and they're often just a grid of products with no text. To improve them:

• Title and H1 with the category keyword ("Women's running shoes").
• Short, useful text: a sentence or two at the top; more information further down to help people choose (types, sizes, who each model is for). Written for people, not filler for Google.
• Links to related subcategories.
• Fast loading, even with lots of products.

What to do with each product page

The product page is where the sale is decided, and there's plenty of room for SEO there too:

• Your own descriptions. If you copy the manufacturer's, your page will be identical to hundreds of other stores' and Google will have no reason to pick yours.
• A title with the product name and its key details (brand, model, colour, material).
• Several lightweight photos, with alt text describing them.
• Customer reviews: they add unique content and trust.
• Price, availability and shipping costs clearly visible.

Product structured data

Structured data is invisible code that tells Google exactly the price, availability, brand and rating of each product. With it, your products can appear on Google with the price, the stars and whether they're in stock, which makes them stand out and get more clicks.

Platforms such as Shopify or WooCommerce largely generate it on their own, but it's worth checking with Google's Rich Results Test, because data is often missing or out of date.

What's more, if you add your products to Google Merchant Center, they can appear for free in the Shopping tab. We explain it step by step in our Google Shopping guide.

Out-of-stock and discontinued products

What you do with a product you can no longer sell affects your rankings:

• Temporarily out of stock: keep the page live, say clearly that it's out of stock and offer an email alert when it's back. If you delete it, you lose whatever rankings it had.
• Discontinued for good: redirect its URL (301) to the most similar product or to its category. If there's nothing equivalent, let it return a 404 error, but don't send everything to the home page.

Be careful with filters

Filters by size, colour or price are very useful for shopping, but every combination can create a different URL (?colour=blue&size=38&sort=price). A mid-sized store can end up with thousands of near-identical pages that Google wastes time crawling.

The usual approach is for only a few combinations with real search demand to have their own indexable page ("women's blue running shoes"), and for the rest to point Google to the main page with a canonical tag, or not be indexed. It's a technical setting worth reviewing with whoever built your store.

Speed and mobile

Most purchases start on a phone, and a slow store loses sales and rankings at the same time. Optimized photos, few unnecessary apps and extensions, and good hosting make all the difference. To learn how to measure it, read our article on Core Web Vitals.

Don't forget content marketing

A blog in your store lets you reach people who are still researching ("how to choose running shoes") and then take them to your products. It attracts visits that categories can't capture, builds trust and earns you links from other websites.

The key is for every article to link to the related categories and products, so that blog visitors end up in the store.