Ecommerce SEO is a different beast to a standard brochure site. You are not optimising ten pages. You might be optimising ten thousand, most of them built from the same template. Get the template right and you win at scale. Get it wrong and you lose at scale too.

This post is about the on-page fundamentals for ecommerce specifically: category pages, product pages, filters, and the content that search engines actually read. We will skip the generic advice and focus on what breaks on real shops.

Category pages do most of the heavy lifting

Most shop owners obsess over product pages. But category and collection pages are usually the stronger ranking opportunity. Someone searching "waterproof walking boots" wants a list, not a single product. That intent maps to a category, not a product detail page.

So treat category pages as proper landing pages:

• Give each one a unique H1 that matches the search term people use, not your internal naming. "Men's Waterproof Walking Boots" beats "Footwear - Outdoor".
• Add a short block of useful intro copy above or below the grid. Two or three sentences that help a buyer choose, not keyword mush.
• Write a unique meta title and description. The default "Shop | Store Name" on every category is wasted real estate.

The trap here is thin, duplicated category copy spun out across hundreds of pages. Google spots it instantly. If you cannot write something genuinely useful for a category, the category probably should not be indexed.

Product pages: unique beats copied

The single biggest on-page problem we see on ecommerce sites is manufacturer description copy pasted verbatim across your site and fifty competitors. If your product text is identical to everyone else selling the same SKU, you have given Google no reason to rank you over a bigger store.

Rewrite the descriptions. You do not need an essay. You need:

• A first paragraph that answers "is this right for me?" in plain language.
• The specs that matter to a buyer, formatted so they are scannable.
• A unique title tag with the product name plus a useful qualifier (size, colour, key feature).

For shops with thousands of SKUs this feels impossible. Prioritise. Rewrite the bestsellers and the highest-margin lines first, then work down. A templated structure with hand-written key sections gets you most of the way without rewriting every word.

Handle out-of-stock and discontinued products properly

Ecommerce has a problem brochure sites never face: products disappear. How you handle that affects rankings and crawl budget.

• For a temporarily out-of-stock item that is coming back, keep the page live, keep it indexed, and tell the shopper when it returns. Killing it loses the ranking you built.
• For a permanently discontinued product, 301 redirect to the closest equivalent or the parent category. Do not leave a wall of soft 404s.
• Never redirect everything to the homepage. That signals a soft 404 to Google and helps nobody.

Faceted navigation: the silent index killer

Filters are brilliant for shoppers and dangerous for SEO. Every filter combination can generate a unique URL: colour, size, price, brand, sort order. Multiply those and you get hundreds of thousands of near-identical pages competing with each other and burning crawl budget.

You need a deliberate plan:

• Decide which filtered views are worth indexing. "Red dresses" might be a real search; "red dresses sorted by price low to high" is not.
• Use canonical tags to point filter combinations back to the clean category URL where appropriate.
• Keep sort-order and pagination parameters out of the index.

This is where ecommerce SEO is as much engineering as content. If your platform generates messy URLs by default, that is a build decision worth revisiting. Our engineering team treats URL structure as part of the foundation, not an afterthought.

Image optimisation actually matters here

Shops are image-heavy by nature. That creates two jobs.

First, performance. Large unoptimised product images are the most common cause of a slow shop, and slow shops convert worse and rank worse. Serve modern formats, size images correctly, and lazy-load below the fold.

Second, discoverability. Google Images drives real traffic for product searches. Give every image a descriptive alt attribute and a sensible filename. "navy-merino-crew-jumper.jpg" tells Google something; "IMG_4471.jpg" tells it nothing.

Internal linking tells Google what matters

On a large shop, Google cannot guess which pages you care about. You tell it through internal links. Link from your high-authority pages (homepage, popular categories) down to the categories and products you most want to rank.

Related-product blocks, "shop the look" sections, and curated collection links all pass relevance around your site. Done well, this is one of the cheapest ranking improvements available. We go deeper on this in our piece on internal linking as the quiet ranking win.

Structured data for products

Product schema lets Google show price, availability, and review stars directly in search results. For ecommerce this is close to essential: a listing with a star rating and a price stands out against plain blue links.

Mark up product name, price, availability, and aggregate rating where you have genuine reviews. Keep it accurate. Marking up a price that does not match the page, or reviews you do not have, is the fast route to a manual penalty.

Avoid the classic duplicate-content traps

A few patterns quietly damage ecommerce sites:

• The same product sitting under multiple categories with different URLs. Pick one canonical URL per product.
• HTTP and HTTPS, or www and non-www, both resolving. Redirect to one version.
• Pagination creating thin "page 2, page 3" versions of a category. Handle these with sensible pagination signals.

None of these are glamorous. All of them compound across a large catalogue.

Where to start

If you run a shop and this feels like a lot, it is. But the order of work is clear. Fix the category and product templates first, because they affect every page. Sort out faceted navigation and canonicals next, because they stop the catalogue fighting itself. Then work through content and schema on your priority products.

If you want a hand auditing an existing shop or building the structure in properly from day one, our SEO work is built around exactly this kind of scaled on-page foundation.

Lewis, Technical Director