
Understanding how e-commerce SEO works has become more important than ever for companies that sell products online.
While running a successful e-commerce business requires other essentials – like a top-notch website and, of course, great products – if you don’t have a plan for bringing people to your store, those other investments will never produce returns.
So, with that in mind, let’s jump into discussing all things e-commerce SEO.
What Is E-Commerce SEO?
E-commerce SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of improving an online store to increase its visibility in search engine results. The goal is to drive organic traffic to your website (especially your category and product pages) to increase overall conversions and revenue.
Let’s quickly talk about why this matters for companies and then we’ll dive into the nine essential facets of e-commerce SEO that you’ll need to understand to drive traffic and sales.
Why SEO Is Essential for E-Commerce Companies
So, that’s what e-commerce SEO is, but why has it become essential for serious businesses to invest in this particular marketing channel?
Let’s take a look at the most common reasons.
Customers Still Use Search Engines Before Making a Purchase
After Amazon, search engines are the next most popular destination for shoppers looking to make purchases, which means search engine optimization is absolutely essential for companies that sell products – especially if they don’t sell on Amazon.
And often with thousands of products, e-commerce websites typically have extensive catalogs, usually requiring at least one page per product. Without SEO, these pages are unlikely to rank on search engines, rendering them invisible to potential customers.
E-commerce SEO best practices optimize product and category pages to appear in relevant search results, driving organic traffic without relying solely on paid ads or third-party sites like Amazon.
SEO Attracts Targeted Traffic Who Are Ready to Spend
E-commerce SEO not only increases visibility but also helps attract relevant, high-intent traffic. By optimizing for keywords that potential buyers are searching for, business owners can draw visitors who are already interested in their products, leading to higher conversion rates.
For example, if you create and optimize a page for a specific SEO keyword like “iPhone lightning charger”, you’re much more likely to see traffic and conversions than if you have some generic page that wasn’t designed with specific search queries in mind.
Search Engine Optimization Is Extremely Cost-Effective
Business owners spend significant amounts to develop and host websites with thousands of product pages. Without SEO, these investments might be wasted, as many of those pages may never attract a single visitor.
Fortunately, according to this report on SEO from Conductor, 82% of marketers report that their efforts to win over search engines have had a positive impact on their marketing goals.
And again, that’s because SEO best practices ensure that product and category pages are optimized with relevant keywords, proper metadata, and user-friendly design, which helps search engines rank them higher and attract more traffic.
Scalability Means You Can Start Small but Grow, Grow, Grow
As businesses grow, they usually add more products to their online inventories – which, in turn, requires more webpages.
The good news is that a solid e-commerce SEO strategy makes this growth sustainable. Well-structured SEO allows websites to rank for more keywords as their product catalog expands, ensuring that even new product pages can start attracting visitors relatively quickly. This scalability is essential for long-term growth.
And this is also another reason why SEO is so cost-effective. Your strategy can grow with your business, meaning you can start small with a reasonable budget and grow as your operation expands.
User Experience and Trust
Good SEO also improves the user experience, making the site easier to navigate, faster to load, and more mobile-friendly – factors that search engines use to rank websites. Websites that offer a seamless, user-friendly experience not only perform better in search results but also build trust with users, leading to more purchases and repeat customers.
And, again, this is what makes SEO so cost-effective for companies that sell products. Effective SEO prioritizes sound UX. The result of gaining more traffic and offering a user-friendly experience is more trust, more conversions, and more return customers – all of which improves the ROI of e-commerce SEO.
Your Competition Has Invested in SEO
Selling products online has never been more competitive, so even if you don’t have a sound strategy for attracting qualified customers, rest assured that most of your competitors do.
The e-commerce space is highly competitive, and SEO remains one of the most effective ways to gain a competitive edge. Competitors who are ranking well in search engines are capturing organic traffic and potential customers. Without an SEO strategy, your business risks falling behind competitors who are investing in it, potentially losing out on a significant share of the market.
9 Essential Aspects of SEO for E-Commerce Websites
SEO has evolved into a marketing practice that entails a number of different elements – many of which are important for any company, no matter their industry or market.
However, if you want to succeed at drawing traffic to your website, these are the nine facets of SEO that you have to understand and prioritize.
1. E-Commerce Website Architecture
Generally speaking, e-commerce websites are made up of three main types of pages that play critical roles in both user experience and SEO:
- Main Pages
- Category Pages
- Product Pages
Let’s take a look at each.
Main Pages
Main Pages include the Homepage, About Us page, Contact Us pages, an FAQ page, and other core content. Aside from the homepage, most “main pages” don’t play a major role where SEO is concerned. They’re still important to have from a UX perspective, though.
On the one hand, the homepage is usually the most linked-to page and carries significant weight in terms of SEO. Typically, the main keywords your homepage will target are your branded terms (i.e., the name of your company, other terms related to it, etc.).
But where UX is concerned, your homepage must offer helpful navigation. This kind of effective internal linking is essential for moving your customers from the homepage – or anywhere else they arrive – to the pages where you sell products.
However, they’re also important for spreading the authority you’ve gained from those all-important backlinks. In short, if someone links to a page on your site, that page has a better chance of ranking well. At the same time, you can also link internally from that page to spread around the “link equity” it received from that backlink.
Put another way, backlinks from other sites + internal linking throughout your own = better ranking for more pages. As your homepage usually gets the most backlinks, this type of strategic internal linking is vital for your e-commerce site’s SEO.
Category Pages
Category pages group related e-commerce products and act as a bridge between the main site navigation and individual product pages. They are essential for organizing the site’s structure and making products easier for both users and search engines to find.
For example, if you sell shoes, you’re not going to have one page that just lists every single shoe you offer. That wouldn’t be very helpful and definitely wouldn’t do much for SEO.
Instead, you’d want to use a category page structure to organize your entire inventory so it’s easier for your customers – and search engines – to understand what you have to offer.
This is why category pages are typically optimized for mid-level, short-tail keywords that attract users searching for broader product ranges rather than specific items, such as “running shoes” instead of “Nike Air Max 90s.”
These pages also play a crucial role in the internal linking structure, helping distribute link equity to individual product pages. They should be well-connected to other parts of the website, often through proper breadcrumb navigation, which aids both users and search engines in understanding the site’s hierarchy.
On top of that, category pages should enhance the user experience by allowing easy filtering and navigation of products. If the user experience is poor, it can lead to higher bounce rates, negatively affecting SEO.
Finally, we usually recommend that business owners add content to their category pages. This text can help users better understand the content of the page, but it’s also a powerful strategy for increasing the keywords you get impressions for from Google and other search engines. And adding this kind of content also provides the perfect opportunity to include those all-important internal links we just mentioned. I think this topic is so important that I recently wrote an entire blog post on e-commerce category page SEO, so definitely check that out for A LOT more advice about how to do this effectively.
Product Pages
Finally, there are the most obvious pages of your e-commerce website: the ones where you sell actual products.
As you could probably guess, product pages are dedicated to individual items and are crucial for capturing long-tail search traffic, as users often search for very specific products, like “Nike Air Max 90 white size 10.”
Product pages target precise, long-tail keywords that align with detailed product names, product descriptions, model numbers, and SKUS, which attract highly targeted traffic that is likely ready to convert.
Effective product pages need to include rich snippets, as well, that make it easy for Google to understand relevant data like:
- Price
- Availability
- Reviews
- Delivery Options and Price
By using structured data to include this kind of helpful information, you make it extremely easy for Google to show this information to users in their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), which can increase your clickthrough rate and conversions.
We always recommend e-commerce site owners do plenty of internal linking from their product pages, too. Once again, this helps to spread around link equity, but it can also increase conversions or average order value as your customers find more products they’re interested in buying.
For a MUCH larger breakdown of how to handle these pages, check out our blog post on how to do product page SEO.
2. Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to a number of strategies used to optimize a website’s backend and infrastructure to ensure that search engines can efficiently crawl, index, and understand its content. As the name suggests, this approach focuses on improving the technical aspects of a site, such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, security, structured data, and internal linking, among other factors. In essence, technical SEO makes a website function optimally for both users and search engines.
For e-commerce websites, technical SEO is especially important because they often have thousands of pages, each corresponding to a product or category. Without proper technical SEO, search engines may have difficulty crawling and indexing such a large number of pages, leading to poor visibility in search results. Here are key reasons why technical SEO is critical:
- Efficient Crawling and Indexing: Search engines need to crawl and index vast product catalogs efficiently. Optimizing for crawlability ensures that search engines can access all important product and category pages, preventing issues like orphaned pages or wasted crawl budget.
- Site Speed: Websites with slow-loading pages can suffer from higher bounce rates and lower search rankings. Technical SEO optimizes site speed through techniques like image compression, caching, and minimizing code, which can lead to better user experience and, of course, improved rankings.
- Mobile-Friendliness: With more users shopping on mobile devices, ensuring that a site is responsive and works smoothly across different screen sizes is essential. This is very important for good UX as more people now use mobile devices to access the Internet than traditional devices with larger screens. For this reason, mobile-friendliness is essential for ranking in Google, so it’s definitely important to prioritize.
- Secure and User-Friendly URLs: Technical SEO ensures that a site uses secure HTTPS protocols and well-structured, clean URLs. This not only improves security but also enhances the site’s trustworthiness and usability, both of which contribute to better SEO performance.
- Fixing Duplicate Content Issues: E-commerce sites often face challenges with duplicate content, such as when the same product is listed under multiple categories. Technical SEO can resolve these issues by implementing canonical tags or managing URL parameters properly, helping avoid penalties from search engines by making it clear that you know the content is “duplicate”, but that you’re not trying to rank identical pages at the same time.
- Structured Data Implementation: Proper technical SEO includes implementing structured data (like schema markup) to help search engines understand and display product-related information in rich snippets, enhancing visibility in search results.
Though technical SEO focuses on aspects of your website that are “behind the scenes” and not things your customers would notice (as opposed to the content in your blogs or the images on your product pages), their impact can definitely affect customer satisfaction with your site.
3. User Experience
We already talked about user experience quite a bit, but it’s important to consider this facet of SEO in the context of a website that sells products. As we just touched on, UX and SEO go hand-in-hand, especially when it comes to e-commerce sites that usually have customers with very specific expectations.
One of the most important elements of UX for e-commerce websites is Core Web Vitals, which are a set of metrics defined by Google that measure the quality of a website’s user experience. Among others, Google focuses on three key aspects:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

These factors are especially important because they directly influence search engine rankings and user experience. No customer wants to wait around for a page to load when all they want to do is give you their money.
So, with that in mind, let’s quickly look at Core Web Vitals in a bit more detail:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the time it takes for the largest content element, like an image or block of text, to load and be visible within the user’s viewport. It reflects the loading performance of a webpage, with an optimal LCP occurring within 2.5 seconds to ensure the main content appears quickly and enhances user experience.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) tracks the time between a user’s interaction (such as clicking a button or typing) and the browser rendering the next frame in response. It highlights how responsive a site is, with a low INP (below 200 milliseconds) indicating smooth interactions and a better user experience.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the unexpected shifting of elements during page load, such as images or buttons moving unexpectedly. A low CLS score (below 0.1) ensures visual stability, preventing frustrating layout shifts that can hinder the user experience.
In many ways, Core Web Vitals and other important elements of UX fall under Technical SEO. If you fix your LCP time, for example, users may not “see” the result, but they’ll definitely experience it. And if the result is a positive one, that will result in better engagement and more sales, which should improve rankings and traffic, too.
At the same time, it’s important to keep CWVs in context. As you can see from the screenshot above, Nike’s website’s Core Web Vitals actually fail. And yet, they don’t seem to be hurting for satisfied customers and plenty of revenue. So, keep an eye on your Core Web Vitals, but don’t forget all of the other essential factors that make e-commerce websites user-friendly.
4. Keyword Research: Understanding Search Intent for E-Commerce
Keyword research is the cornerstone of any SEO strategy because, ultimately, it’s all about understanding what your customers want when they turn to search engines for help.
However, companies need to take a very specific approach to their keyword research strategies. It’s not enough to know what people are searching for. It’s essential to understand the “why” behind that search – what is often referred to as “search intent.”
Other companies may be able to take their customers search intent for granted but business owners need to understand when a customer is turning to Google because they want to learn something (i.e., “how much do golf clubs cost?”) vs. when they want to buy something (i.e., “Callaway Rogue ST MAX irons”).
Again, we’ll cover the challenges – and opportunities – of product pages in more detail below, but sufficed to say, keyword research isn’t just about forcing search terms into every corner of every page of your website. It’s about understanding the reasons behind these searches so you can build the perfect pages for converting customers.
5. Blog (Possibly)
Not every company needs a blog to consistently draw traffic with SEO.
However, many companies absolutely do and plenty of others would simply enjoy a massive competitive edge if they knew how to create the kinds of blogs that force search engines to see them as the obvious authority in their respective industries.
Win that kind of trust from Google and other search engines and they will reward you with traffic to all of your pages – including the ones where you actually sell products.
So, while it’s not a bad idea to use your blog to engage with your shoppers and earn their trust with valuable information, you absolutely must follow SEO best practices to gain Google’s respect, too. Otherwise, very few people are going to see those blogs you spend so much time on and they definitely won’t help improve the rankings of your most important product pages.
And once you’ve created this kind of content, make sure you leverage the power of internal linking to associate these amazing blogs with your amazing products.
Speaking of which…
6. Internal Linking
This next tactic may be one of the most underestimated strategies for creating e-commerce websites that have great SEO.
Internal linking refers to the practice of creating hyperlinks within a website that connects one page to another.
When it comes to websites that sell products, internal links are used to guide users and search engines through the various sections of the site, from high-level pages (like the homepage) to category pages, and down to individual product pages. These links help create a clear structure and hierarchy within the website, making navigation easier and improving SEO.
· Improved Crawlability: Internal links help search engine bots navigate a website. By linking from one page to another, you make sure that bots can efficiently crawl and index important pages, especially on large websites with hundreds or thousands of products. A well-structured internal linking strategy ensures that no critical pages (like product or category pages) are overlooked or under-indexed by search engines.
· Link Equity Distribution: Internal links distribute “link equity” (also known as “link juice”) throughout the website. If a high-authority page (such as the homepage) links to other pages (again, like those for your products or categories), it passes along some of its SEO value, helping those linked pages rank higher in search results.
· Improved UX: Internal linking improves UX by helping visitors reach the content or products they’re most interested in. For example, linking from a category page (like “Men’s Running Shoes”) to pages for specific products helps users find what they’re looking for quickly, reducing bounce rates and increasing the likelihood of conversions.
And as we just mentioned, internal linking is actually REALLY important for getting the most out of your blogs. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that, if you’re not executing effective internal linking, your blog is probably a waste of money. It’s that important for e-commerce websites.
7. Structured Data
As we touched on above, structured data is vital to websites because it helps search engines understand and display key information about products more effectively, improving both visibility and user engagement.
By properly implementing structured data, websites can communicate detailed product information such as prices, availability, reviews, and ratings directly to search engines in a standardized format. This structured information can then be displayed in search results as rich snippets, making listings more attractive and informative to users.
For businesses, the use of structured data enhances search visibility by making product pages eligible for special features like product carousels, price drop notifications, and star ratings in search engine results pages (SERPs). This increased visibility can lead to higher click-through rates as users are more likely to engage with listings that provide useful details upfront.
Additionally, structured data helps improve the accuracy and relevance of the information shown in Google Shopping results or voice search results, where users rely on quick, clear answers.
8. Backlinks
You’ve most likely heard of backlinks before.
For years, they were the SEO investment for e-commerce companies that wanted to increase their traffic as much as possible as fast as possible. In fact, for many e-commerce SEOs, procuring backlinks was almost the entirety of their jobs.
This is because Google uses backlinks to create their PageRank, which they explain is:
“…one of our core ranking systems used when Google first launched…How PageRank works has evolved a lot since then, and it continues to be part of our core ranking systems.”
Backlinks still matter for SEO, but the extent to which they make a difference comes down to a number of factors – some of which may be unique to your industry or market. If you want to read more about how PageRank still affects SEO, check out this PageRank explainer by Semrush.
But the important point to remember is that more backlinks don’t necessarily equal better rankings. This is a costly misunderstanding for many companies that spend lots of money on backlinks that never produce any kind of ROI.
Worse, plenty of business owners learn the hard way that quickly getting lots and lots of links from websites – especially low-quality websites – is a great way to earn the wrong kind of attention from Google.
While it’s often tempting to build backlinks right to your product pages – or even category pages – because these are the pages that lead to sales, this is often how many companies spend money on backlinks without ever seeing any returns in exchange.
For example, why would another website link to your category pages for something like “Nike basketball shoes”? Maybe there’s a perfectly good reason, but if this type of link isn’t very common in your industry, Google probably won’t view it as very valuable.
And again, a lot of these uncommon types of links may actually convince Google to take a closer look at your website. Though it’s a widespread practice, buying backlinks is actually against Google’s policies, which is why it remains a controversial strategy – one that often goes awry.
9. Indexing
Indexing refers to the process by which search engines add your webpages to their indexes after they have been crawled. Once a page is indexed, it becomes eligible to appear in search engine results when users search for related keywords.
Therefore, indexing is extremely important to SEO for e-commerce websites. No indexing, no organic traffic.
Proper indexing is the foundation of driving organic traffic to your site and is crucial for improving your search rankings. If your most important pages – like the product or category pages where you make sales – are not indexed, they won’t appear in search results, making it difficult for potential customers to find them.
For larger sites with thousands of pages, indexing also helps search engines understand the site’s structure, making it easier to prioritize important pages and crawl them efficiently.
This is particularly important when launching new products or updating existing ones, as indexing ensures those pages are discoverable by potential customers without delays. Managing duplicate content, which is common on e-commerce sites due to product variations or filtering options, also relies on proper indexing to ensure that search engines focus on the right versions of your pages, avoiding penalties or diluted search rankings.
Fortunately, Google offers a great indexing tool in Search Console that makes it easy to understand which pages on your site are indexed and which aren’t – and why.

With that said, there’s still a lot about page indexing that you’ll need to understand to use this kind of information.
Let’s look at seven vital aspects.
Crawlability
Search engines use crawlers (like Google’s bots) to discover and index webpages. Ensuring that your site is easily crawlable is essential. In order to make this as easy as possible for Google, you’ll need a well-structured XML sitemap that lists all key pages (product, category, main pages, and blogs) that you want to rank.
You also need a clean robots.txt file that explains to Google how to crawl your website, including which pages you actually don’t want indexed. Creating a robots.txt file also means being careful not to accidentally block important pages from being crawled.
Duplicate Content
As we’ve touched on a couple times now, duplicate content is a common issue for e-commerce sites, often because of paginated product pages, filters, or variations of the same product. While this might not be a big deal for customers, duplicate content can confuse search engines, leading to indexing problems.
To avoid this, you need to use canonical tags to point to the preferred version of a page and ensure only unique content gets indexed.
Indexing Priority
Not all pages on your site need to be indexed. Focus on important pages, such as product and category pages. While you can use your robots.txt file to prevent categories of pages from getting crawled and indexed, it’s better to use the noindex tag for individual pages like login screens, thank-you pages, or filters to prevent search engines from indexing irrelevant or low-value content.
Mobile Indexing
As we mentioned earlier when talking about technical SEO, Google primarily uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it prioritizes the mobile version of your site for indexing. Ensuring your site is mobile-friendly is critical for both indexing and rankings.
Page Speed
Slow-loading pages can negatively impact your site’s crawl rate and indexing. Optimizing your site’s performance ensures search engines can crawl and index pages efficiently, and users have a better experience.
Structured Data
Implementing structured data (like Product schema) helps search engines better understand your content. It also increases the chances of showing rich results (e.g., price, reviews), which can boost visibility in search results.
Orphan Pages
Orphan Pages are pages that aren’t linked to from other pages on your site that can be hard for search engines to find and index.
This usually doesn’t happen to category or product pages, but the issue can definitely affect your blog posts.
Once again, internal linking comes to the rescue. Internal links to these pages ensure that every key product and category page is linked within the internal navigation structure to facilitate indexing.
For pages that really matter to the success of your website, being “orphaned” is bad, but only having one or two internal links pointing at them isn’t great, either. So, aside from making sure these vital pages are in your sitemap and making sure they aren’t orphaned, I highly recommend you build at least 5-10 unique internal links to these important pages to improve your e-commerce SEO.
The Unique Challenge for E-Commerce Websites: Product Pages
While helpful aspects like Structured Data and Rich Snippets are easy enough to implement and can help these pages gain more traffic, the ease at which you can add them means they don’t necessarily provide a HUGE competitive advantage. When all of your competitors are doing something, doing the same is “table stakes.”
They’re still important, but they’re not enough.
The challenge of your product pages is one of the most unique aspects of e-commerce SEO that you need to fully understand to maximize your traffic.
Not All Product Pages Have Traffic Potential
This can sometimes be a tough pill to swallow, but it’s likely that a lot of your products – maybe even most of them – don’t have a lot of people searching for them every single month. It doesn’t mean they’re not good products. They might even be popular and sell really well once someone is already on your website.
It’s just that many customers often use general terms (i.e., “running shoes”) to find the right site for their needs before using the site’s navigation tools to find the specific products they want – one more reason that UX and internal linking are so important.
Unfortunately, a lot of SEOs don’t understand this aspect of e-commerce SEO, so they go through entire inventories one product-at-a-time trying to optimize each one as they go. The problem is that this process could easily take 30-60 minutes per page, so even if you could afford someone to do this all day, every day, it could still take a year or more to get through every single product in your inventory – and that’s only if you don’t decide to add anymore while they’re working.
And even then, SEO is an ongoing process that involves going back to revise pages as Google updates its algorithm or customers change their preferences. This is one more reason that trying to optimize every single aspect of every single product page is just too unrealistic to attempt.
Instead, it’s usually best to prioritize the most important product pages in your e-commerce store – either because of their profit margins or how much traffic potential they have – and then take a “programmatic” approach to the rest.
Programmatic SEO involves improving large numbers of webpages at scale using automated processes. You can leverage templates, structured data, and automation to generate hundreds or even thousands of pages, each targeting specific keywords or topics. While you might not be able to optimize 100% of 100% of your pages, taking a programmatic approach means you can still significantly improve the majority of your inventory and then take your time with the products that matter most.
Thin Content
Many product pages, especially for large catalogs, suffer from “thin content.” These pages often have product descriptions with minimal text, typically just a short line or two and some technical specifications. This makes it difficult for search engines to determine the page’s relevance and value.
Adding thorough, unique content that goes beyond basic descriptions – such as user reviews, FAQs, and detailed product usage guides – can help improve rankings.
But, ultimately, there’s often not a lot you can do about thin content. For reasons we covered in the last section, it may simply be too unrealistic to add lots of unique content to every single page on your website. And even if you could, many of these products may not get enough sales to justify this kind of investment.
Duplicate Content
Similarly, duplicate content is a common issue for e-commerce sites.
Products with variations (e.g., color, size, etc.) or paginated categories can generate multiple URLs with similar or identical content, which search engines may struggle with because they can’t determine which version to prioritize.
Using canonical tags and structured data will avoid this problem, though, by ensuring that the correct pages are the ones getting regularly crawled and indexed.
Product Variability and Stock Issues
Products that go in and out of stock can create challenges for maintaining rankings. Pages for out-of-stock or discontinued products often lose visibility, even if similar products are available. Proper internal linking, creating related products sections, or adding permanent content like product guides can help retain relevance for these pages, but far too many business owners don’t know about these tactics. As a result, being out-of-stock doesn’t just hurt your profits. It can potentially hurt your SEO, too.
Highly Competitive Keywords
Product pages typically target very specific keywords, often highly competitive in nature.
Competing against major retailers or marketplaces like Amazon, which dominate search results, makes ranking for these keywords difficult. Smaller companies may need to focus on long-tail keywords or less competitive niche terms to drive targeted traffic. This is also another reason we recommend using blogs to boost the SEO of these important product pages. Amazon and other big retailers generally don’t have these kinds of blogs, which creates an opportunity for smaller stores.
But many online stores also sell other companies’ products, which makes it virtually impossible to rank in the top spot for those specific branded search terms. In these cases, it can still be worth ranking in the second spot or to focus on the kinds of nonbranded keywords where the first position doesn’t automatically go to any one brand.
Pagination and Crawlability
Pagination is the process of dividing up the inventory on your website into individual pages. For example, if you have 1000 running shoes in your online inventory, you might want to divide it up into pages of 25 for better user experiences. The separation of these pages into Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, etc. is “pagination.”
While you still want to use filters to make this large inventory even easier for customers to navigate, pagination is a first step in the right direction.
Furthermore, by optimizing pagination, you’ll ensure that search engines can efficiently crawl and index all the important pages on your site without missing out on valuable products.
At the same time, pagination can present some issues, too.
When poorly implemented, pagination can actually prevent search engines from accessing product pages beyond the first few, leading to lower visibility for a large portion of the catalog. This can easily create hundreds – or even thousands – of those “orphan pages” we mentioned earlier.
Limited Backlink Opportunities
We covered this earlier, but product pages often struggle to attract backlinks compared to content-heavy pages like blogs or guides.
Without sufficient external linking, product pages may fail to build the authority needed to rank well. Companies can combat this by creating engaging content, like reviews or buying guides, that link back to product pages and encourage inbound links.
None of these points are meant to dissuade your from using search engine optimization to drive traffic to your e-commerce website, but these are the unique challenges you need to be aware of when you start implementing the aforementioned tactics.
Does the E-Commerce Platform You Use Affect SEO?
At Crimson Agility, we got our start as a web development company, so we’re all too familiar with how much e-commerce platforms can affect the trajectory of a business’s online store.
And this can apply to your search engine optimization efforts, too.
1. Magento/Adobe
Whether you still call it Magento or Adobe, this robust e-commerce platform supports a wide range of SEO features, including customizable URLs, comprehensive metadata management, and advanced product management capabilities.
Magento is extremely scalable, too, which makes it a very popular platform for large e-commerce sites with extensive inventories. Scaling up is easy at no risk to your SEO efforts.
On the downside, Magento has a steeper learning curve and may require significant resources for hosting and maintenance, which could be a barrier for smaller businesses. Most companies will need to outsource Magento development work if they don’t have their own internal experts.
2. Shopify
On the other hand, Shopify is extremely user-friendly and includes many SEO-friendly features, such as customizable title tags, meta descriptions, and alt text for images. It also offers a variety of apps specifically designed for SEO optimization, making it easier for users to enhance their site’s visibility in search engines. This means that many business owners can depend on Shopify without becoming dependent on outside experts.
However, some advanced SEO functionalities, such as URL structure changes and full control over redirects, are limited compared to other platforms. This can restrict users who need more flexibility in optimizing their site.
3. WooCommerce
As a plugin for WordPress, WooCommerce benefits from the extensive SEO capabilities of the WordPress ecosystem. It allows for full control over on-page SEO, customizable permalinks, and access to numerous SEO plugins, like Yoast SEO, which can significantly enhance optimization efforts.
WooCommerce does require more technical knowledge for optimal setup and performance, especially when managing larger product catalogs. While WordPress’s success has largely been built on how user-friendly it is – even for people with no technical experience – WooCommerce introduces new challenges. Users without this kind of technical expertise may find it challenging to fully utilize its potential.
4. BigCommerce
BigCommerce is another e-commerce platform that provides strong built-in SEO features, such as customizable URLs, meta tags, and structured data support. Its fast-loading architecture is particularly advantageous for maintaining good SEO performance.
Customization can be more limited compared to WooCommerce, especially regarding certain URL structures. Users looking for extensive customization options may find this restrictive.
5. Squarespace
Squarespace offers basic SEO tools and is known for its user-friendly interface. It’s particularly beneficial for small to medium-sized sites that prioritize design aesthetics alongside functionality.
However, it is more limited in terms of advanced SEO features, such as in-depth customization of URLs and meta data. This can hinder more extensive SEO strategies, which is why we wouldn’t recommend it if you have a large, diverse inventory that requires customizations to support UX and SEO requirements.
6. Wix
Wix has made significant improvements in its SEO capabilities, including customizable meta data and alt text options. It remains beginner-friendly and provides various templates to help users get started quickly.
That being said, it still has its limitations.
Historically, Wix has always had a lot of limitations where SEO is concerned. Although these important aspects are improving, advanced users may still find it lacks the depth of control offered by other platforms. Like Squarespace, the same things that make it user-friendly also limit its potential for e-commerce companies with larger inventories.
Choosing the Best E-Commerce Platform for Your Site’s SEO Needs
When choosing an e-commerce platform, consider the level of customization available for SEO elements, the platform’s scalability, performance in terms of loading speeds, and the quality of support and resources for optimizing your site effectively.
Ultimately, the best platform for SEO will depend on your specific needs, technical expertise, and business goals. If you want any help making this decision, feel free to contact us to speak with an expert.
4 Tools You Need to Optimize Your E-Commerce Website
We might be a bit biased, but our recommendation for obtaining the most traffic possible for your website is to work with e-commerce SEO experts like us.
However, if you’re not ready for that step yet, here are the four tools we would definitely suggest you use to achieve the results you want:
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) is a critical tool for e-commerce websites, offering deep insights into user behavior and site performance. It tracks key metrics such as traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate, and average session duration, allowing business owners to understand how visitors interact with their sites.
One of its most powerful features is the ability to track e-commerce-specific metrics, like transactions, revenue, average order value, and cart abandonment rates. This helps businesses identify which products and pages are driving sales and where users drop off in the conversion funnel.
GA provides detailed reports on traffic sources, showing how visitors arrive at the site (organic search, paid ads, social media, etc.), helping marketers assess the effectiveness of their acquisition strategies. User segmentation enables analysis of different customer groups, such as new vs. returning users or high-value customers, providing insights for personalized marketing.
You can use its Exploration reports to create one similar to the “Behavior Flows” from GA4 which show how users navigate through the site, highlighting potential barriers to conversion, while event tracking allows monitoring of actions like button clicks, video plays, or form submissions.
2. Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) is an essential tool for e-commerce websites, providing insights into how a site is performing in Google’s search results. It allows site owners to monitor and optimize search visibility, offering data on clicks, impressions, average position, and clickthrough rate (CTR) for all of your pages.
One of its most valuable features is the ability to track how your site is being indexed. GSC identifies crawl errors, blocked resources, and mobile usability issues, all of which can impact rankings. It also provides insights into structured data and rich results, which are crucial for sites that use product schema or other markups to enhance visibility in search results.
Google Search Console also links to your Core Web Vitals report, so you can see how Google grades your webpages based on how fast they load (we also use GT Metrix for this type of auditing, though it’s not essential).
GSC offers tools for submitting sitemaps, ensuring that all key pages are indexed correctly, and monitoring their statuses. Additionally, the performance report makes it easy to analyze which queries drive traffic, helping SEOs refine their keyword strategy.
The URL inspection tool is particularly useful for diagnosing page-specific issues, showing if a page is indexed, mobile-friendly, or blocked from crawling.
3. Semrush or Ahrefs
These two tools are very similar, so although we use both, you don’t need the budget for both if you’re only supporting one website.
For my money (literally), I prefer Ahrefs for keyword research and competitor analysis. One thing I really like about their “Keywords Explorer” too for doing keyword research is that it references about how many backlinks might be required to rank for a specific keyword:

This provides important context when trying to understand how hard it’s going to be to get the results you want.
However, I prefer to use Semrush when auditing clients’ websites. It does a good job of reporting on things like the state of your site’s internal linking, markup types, and more. You can also set up ongoing audits that will send you weekly updates on the “health” of your site.
4. Screaming Frog
With that said, when it comes to efficiently auditing e-commerce websites, nothing compares to Screaming Frog.
This powerful e-commerce SEO tool is especially ideal for websites with large product catalogs. It efficiently crawls all pages, detecting critical issues such as missing metadata, broken links, and duplicate content across thousands of URLs. This is particularly useful for sites where these issues can impact rankings at scale.
It also helps identify slow-loading pages by integrating with PageSpeed Insights, which is vital since page speed directly influences both SEO and conversions. Additionally, Screaming Frog validates schema markup (like Product or Review schema), helping ensure e-commerce sites benefit from rich snippets in search results.
For sites with pagination or filtering (which your e-commerce should have), Screaming Frog detects potential SEO issues, like duplicate or thin content. It also provides insights on internal linking – the importance of which, we’ve covered at great length here).
Further, the tool integrates with Google Analytics and Google Search Console to provide traffic data alongside the audit results. It can also crawl JavaScript-rendered content, which is increasingly common in modern e-commerce sites.
With its ability to handle large-scale sites, customizable settings, and bulk export options, Screaming Frog gives e-commerce SEOs comprehensive, actionable insights to improve search rankings and user experience.
Contact Us to Talk with an Expert About Your E-Commerce SEO Needs Today
Well, there you have it.
You now know absolutely everything about e-commerce SEO and can start taking the necessary steps for attracting the kind of traffic that creates massive profits as quickly as possible.
…more or less.
But if you’d like to be sure your website is definitely on the right path for achieving these kinds of results, contact us today and let’s talk about your business’s unique needs.