With an online store, what I'm trying to do with SEO is get the right shoppers onto your category and product pages, and then make sure those pages give them what they need to buy. Generally speaking that means matching searches to the right pages, keeping the store easy to crawl and marking up your products so price and stock show in the results. You might be reading this before you've picked a platform, or you might already be trading, so I've laid it out in roughly the order I'd tackle it myself.
It's worth the effort, as more and more UK shopping happens online. According to the Office for National Statistics, online sales made up 28.7% of all UK retail sales in March 2026, which was up from 28.2% the month before. Compare that to 2008, when online spending averaged just 4.9% of UK retail sales a month. If you'd rather have someone put a plan together for your store, my ecommerce SEO service covers everything and more in this guide.
What Is an Ecommerce SEO Strategy?
An ecommerce SEO strategy is a plan for getting your store's category and product pages found by shoppers in search, and then turning that traffic into sales. It covers keyword research, site structure, on-page optimisation, technical SEO, structured data, content and the platform your store runs on.
For me what matters at the end of all this is revenue, which is why I'll never promise rankings for a handful of keywords. A store that ranks for fewer terms, with each one matched to a page that actually converts, will usually do better than a store that's chasing traffic for the sake of it.
Keyword and Search Intent Research for Ecommerce
When I research keywords for a store I tend to sort them into a few broad groups, because each group belongs on a different type of page.
- Category-level keywords are the broad, commercial searches such as "oak dining tables", where the shopper hasn't settled on a product yet, so I'd put these on your category pages.
- Product-level and long-tail keywords are much more specific, such as "6 seater extending oak dining table". The volume is lower, but the chances are the shopper is a lot closer to buying, so these go on your product pages.
- Informational keywords are questions, such as "how to care for an oak table", and these suit buying guides, FAQs and blog posts that link through to the relevant category.
Matching search intent to the right type of page is the step I find easiest to miss. If a category page and a blog post both target "oak dining tables" then they end up competing, and neither performs as well as it could. So I like to map every priority keyword to one page before any copy gets written, which gives each page a clear job.
I'd also give long-tail keywords more attention than their search volumes suggest, as across a catalogue of hundreds of products they quickly add up. My SEO services page explains how this fits into a wider plan.
Site Architecture and Internal Linking
With site structure I aim for a flat architecture, which just means your important category and product pages sit only a few clicks from the homepage so shoppers and search engines can find them easily.
A clear hierarchy does most of the work for you, with your menu linking to categories, categories linking to subcategories and subcategories linking to every product. Google's ecommerce navigation guidance recommends linking to every product page you want indexed, and for any pages you can't link to directly it suggests using a sitemap or a Merchant Center feed. Bear in mind that Google also asks for standard HTML links in your navigation, because menus built on JavaScript events can end up hiding pages from Googlebot.
A few other habits I'd recommend:
- Breadcrumbs show shoppers where they are and give search engines a clear path to crawl back up through your categories.
- Linking to your bestsellers from the homepage helps signal which products matter most, and Google's guidance suggests linking to featured products from the homepage and relevant blog posts.
- Related product links keep shoppers browsing and spread internal links across the catalogue, so fewer products end up orphaned.
On-Page Optimisation for Category and Product Pages
Every category and product page needs its own title tag, meta description and H1, and templates make this very easy to get wrong. If hundreds of products share the same boilerplate copy with only the product name swapped in, search engines see near-duplicate pages and shoppers get nothing that helps them choose.
When I'm going through a page, these are the things I'd look at:
- The title tag, with the main keyword near the start and written for a person scanning through the results.
- The meta description, saying what makes this product or range worth clicking, such as your delivery options, sizes or materials.
- The H1, which should give the category or product a clear name that matches how shoppers search for it.
- The opening copy, with the keyword in the first sentence and then the details a buyer needs to decide.
It's worth looking at your URLs while you're there too. Google's ecommerce URL structure guidance recommends using descriptive words in your URL paths, and gives /product/black-t-shirt-with-a-white-collar as a better example than /product/3243.
The copy itself is worth proper time too. On a product page for a heritage building materials manufacturer, I A/B tested benefit-led copy over just over three weeks and sales of that product went up by 49%.
Technical SEO for Ecommerce Sites
Technical SEO is the part I enjoy most, and online stores tend to generate far more URLs than most websites. On a small store crawl budget rarely causes trouble, but once filters, sort orders and variants start multiplying your URLs it quickly becomes a real issue. If you're not sure where your store stands, a technical SEO audit is where I'd start.
The first thing I'd look at is faceted navigation, as filters for size, colour, price and brand can create thousands of URL combinations. Google warns that crawling faceted URLs "tends to cost sites large amounts of computing resources", which leaves crawlers with "less time to spend on new, useful URLs". If your filter URLs don't need to show up in search, Google's advice is to block them in robots.txt. If a filtered page should rank, then use the standard & separator for your parameters and return a 404 when a filter combination has no products.
After that I'd move on to duplicate content and canonicalisation. Google's crawl budget documentation says to consolidate duplicate content "to focus crawling on unique content rather than unique URLs". With product variants, Google's URL guidance recommends giving each variant its own URL and using the parameter-free URL as the canonical. Use that same URL in your internal links, sitemaps and canonical tags too, so Google gets one consistent signal.
Pagination is the other one I'd check. Google's pagination guidance recommends giving each page in a series its own unique URL, such as ?page=2, with each page carrying its own canonical, and it advises against using page one as the canonical for the whole series. As long as each page links to the next with a standard <a href> link, Googlebot can follow the sequence.
Structured Data and Schema Markup
Structured data is a bit of code that tells search engines what a product is, what it costs and whether it's in stock. The main types you'll come across are:
- Product schema, which describes the item itself, including its name, image, brand and identifiers such as a GTIN or SKU.
- Offer schema, which sits inside it and carries the price, currency and stock status.
- Review and aggregate rating schema, which carries your star ratings and review counts.
Google's Product structured data documentation confirms this markup lets the price, availability, review ratings and shipping information show directly in the search results, including in Google Images and Google Lens. Google splits it into merchant listing markup for pages where someone can buy, and product snippet markup for pages such as reviews where they can't. It also recommends using on-page structured data and a Merchant Center feed together, as that gives you the best chance of being eligible.
AI Overviews now sit at the top of the results for searches like "ecommerce SEO strategy". Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode have no additional requirements and need no special schema, so a page just needs to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, which is the same bar as ordinary search. My own view is that accurate structured data carries more weight than it used to, as AI answers are built from clear facts that can be checked. So if the price in your schema doesn't match the price on the page, I'd fix that straight away.
Content and Authority Building
Your product and category pages answer "what is this and how much is it", while your supporting content answers the questions shoppers have before they get that far. For most online stores I'd expect that to include:
- Buying guides that help someone choose between different materials, sizes or price points, and then link them through to the relevant category.
- FAQs on your category and product pages that cover delivery, returns, sizing and compatibility.
- Blog posts that answer genuine buyer questions, which you'll usually find in your customer service inbox, reviews and search data.
Content like this builds topical authority, so search engines can see that your store covers a subject in depth. It also gives you natural reasons to link to your categories and gives other sites something worth linking to, which is often how smaller stores earn backlinks.
It can help with AI visibility too. Google explains that AI Overviews and AI Mode use a "query fan-out" technique, running several related searches across subtopics to build an answer. If you've got clear answers to the smaller questions around a product, your store has more chances of being one of the pages those searches pick up.
Choosing the Right Ecommerce Platform for SEO
Search for the best ecommerce platform for SEO and you'll find strong opinions in every direction. Going by the platforms' own documentation, though, it comes down to how much you want the platform to handle for you against how much control you'd like.
Shopify is a hosted platform that automates a lot of the technical SEO, so it suits stores that want to move quickly without much technical overhead. Shopify's SEO documentation says it automatically adds canonical tags, generates your sitemap.xml and robots.txt files, builds schema markup into its themes and turns on SSL by default. You can still edit the title tags, meta descriptions and URLs for your products, collections, pages and blog posts.
WooCommerce runs on WordPress, which you host yourself, so you get a lot more control but the hosting, security, updates and plugins are down to you. WooCommerce's own ecommerce SEO guide points out that WordPress creates a default sitemap at /wp-sitemap.xml, and it walks you through switching on a fuller XML sitemap in the Yoast plugin. It also flags the "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" setting, which can keep Google out without you noticing if it's been left ticked.
Neither company claims in its documentation that its platform is better for SEO, and both can rank well once you've got the fundamentals from this guide in place. Which one suits you depends on your team, your budget and how much control you need.
I've done ecommerce SEO on Shopify stores including Clemsons Vintage and a London mobility equipment retailer, and I've also done WooCommerce development for a UK building materials supplier. You can read more about my background on my about page.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Are Effective SEO Strategies for Ecommerce?
For an online store I'd work through six things. Research your keywords and match each one to the right type of page, build a flat site structure with clear internal links, and write unique titles, descriptions and copy for every category and product. Then fix technical issues such as faceted navigation, duplicates and pagination, add accurate Product structured data and publish content that answers the questions your buyers are really asking.
Is AI Changing Ecommerce SEO?
AI has raised the bar, but the fundamentals are still the same. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on its normal Search index and don't need any special markup, so crawlable pages, useful content and accurate structured data still decide whether you show up. The difference is that clear, factual content that answers the question early on now feeds AI answers as well as the traditional rankings.
What Is the 80/20 Rule in SEO?
The 80/20 rule in SEO is a rule of thumb that a small share of your pages and fixes will drive most of your results. For an online store that usually means I'd start with your top category and product pages and the main technical issues affecting them, before spreading out across the rest of the catalogue.
Getting Started With Your Ecommerce SEO Strategy
You don't need to do all of this at once. If you'd like some help working out where the biggest gains are for your store, just drop me a message. Every project starts with a free discovery call, where we can have a chat about your goals, budget and timeframes.
If you're running a Shopify store specifically, I go into the platform's quirks in more depth on my Shopify SEO page.
