Ecommerce SEO: more shop visitors without paying for ads

Where do you start with SEO for your online shop?

Start with the question: what do your customers search for? People who want to buy a product often type a category plus a feature. Think 'waterproof walking boots women' or 'order halal meat online'. Searches like these are specific and often ready to buy.

• Make a list of your categories and subcategories.
• For each category, find out which words people really use. How to do that is covered in our article on keyword research.
• Link each important keyword to one page. That stops two pages competing with each other.
• Pick the categories that bring in the most first and start there.

Category pages: often your strongest opportunity

In most online shops, category pages rank better than individual products. They match broader searches and stay put, even when a product leaves the range. Yet many category pages contain nothing but a title and a row of products.

• Give every category a clear H1, such as 'Waterproof walking boots for women'.
• Put a short introduction above the products: two or three sentences that help people choose.
• Add more explanation below the products: what to look out for, which sizes, which materials. Write for the customer, not for Google.
• Link to related subcategories and a few popular products.
• Write a unique meta title and description for each category.

Product pages that sell and rank

The biggest mistake on product pages is copying the supplier's text. That same text then appears on dozens of other online shops. Google sees little reason to show your page in particular. So write a short, honest description yourself, especially for your best-selling products.

• Start with the main benefit or use, in plain language.
• Put the specifications in a clear list.
• Answer questions you get a lot: does it fit, how do you look after it, what's in the box.
• Use your own photos where you can, with good alt text. Also read how to optimise images for SEO.
• Show customer reviews on the page.
• Add product structured data with price, stock and rating. Then Google can show that information in the search results.

If you have hundreds of products, you don't need to do everything at once. Start with the products that sell most or have the highest margin.

Filters, sorting and duplicate pages

Filters are handy for your customer, but tricky for SEO. Every combination of colour, size and price can get its own URL. That creates thousands of pages that are almost identical. Google wastes time crawling them and gets confused about which page matters.

• Only let filter combinations be indexed that people actually search for, such as 'black trainers'. Give those their own copy.
• Make sure the other filter and sort URLs point to the main category with a canonical tag, or aren't indexed.
• Don't let results from your internal search be indexed.
• For product variants, such as colours, preferably use one page with a dropdown instead of a separate page per colour.

This topic is closely linked to duplicate content. There you can read more about canonical tags and how Google deals with pages that look alike.

Out-of-stock and discontinued products

What do you do with a product that's gone, temporarily or for good? The answer determines whether the value you've built up is kept.

• Temporarily out of stock: keep the page, show clearly that the product is coming back and offer an alternative or an email alert.
• Permanently discontinued, with a clear successor: send the old URL to the new product with a 301 redirect.
• Permanently gone, with no successor: redirect to the best-matching category, or let the page return a clean 404 or 410 if nothing fits.
• Don't redirect everything to the homepage. That doesn't help the visitor and Google often treats it as an ordinary error page.

Your online shop's technology and speed

Online shops are often heavy: lots of photos, scripts for payments, reviews, chat and tracking. You notice that in the speed, especially on mobile. And most online shop visitors arrive on their phone.

• Keep an eye on your Core Web Vitals. Google treats an LCP under 2.5 seconds, an INP under 200 milliseconds and a CLS under 0.1 as good.
• Take a critical look at plugins and apps. Every extra integration can slow the site down.
• Use a clear URL structure, such as /shoes/walking-boots/ instead of long codes.
• Keep an up-to-date sitemap and check in Google Search Console which pages are indexed.

Ecommerce SEO: common mistakes

• Copying supplier text word for word.
• Category pages without any copy.
• Thousands of filter pages in Google.
• Removing products without a redirect.
• Focusing only on broad terms dominated by big players, instead of specific searches.
• Not collecting reviews, even though they build trust with both customers and search engines.

Help with your online shop's visibility

At Violexa we help online shops in two ways. If you're building a new shop, we make sure the basics are right from the start: clean URLs, fast pages, structured data and a CMS where you manage categories and copy yourself. An online shop or custom website starts from €1,799 excl. VAT (€2,177 incl. VAT). If you want to work on your visibility continuously, we do that within our online marketing, from €599 excl. VAT (€725 incl. VAT) per month, with no minimum term and cancellable monthly with one month's notice.

Want to know where the biggest opportunities for your online shop lie? Book a free quickscan. In 30 minutes we look at your shop together, online or on site. You get short written advice with a price indication, no strings attached.

Frequently asked questions