The Complete Ecommerce SEO Guide for Beginners

Google’s own ecommerce guides on Search Central are written for developers. This post puts the same ideas in plain words.

Start with keyword research for categories and products

Keyword research means finding the words people type when they want to buy what you sell. Category pages and product pages need different kinds of words.

Category pages suit broader searches. Someone searching “men’s work boots” wants to browse and compare. Your work boots category page should be the page that answers that search.

Product pages suit specific searches. Someone searching “steel toe waterproof work boots size 12” or a brand and model number knows what they want. That search belongs on a product page.

Good places to find these words:

• Google’s search box. Type a product name and look at the suggestions and the related searches at the bottom of the results.
• Amazon’s search box, which shows how shoppers describe products.
• The Performance report in Google Search Console, which lists the searches that already show your pages.
• Your own site search, customer emails and reviews.

Then match each search to one page. If two of your pages chase the same search, pick one and point your links at it.

Searches that want to learn, like “how to break in work boots”, suit a buying guide that links to the right category.

Write category pages people can shop

A shoppable category page has a clear heading in the shopper’s words, a short intro above the products, useful filters, plain links to every product and a little buying advice below the grid. Category pages answer the broad searches many shoppers start with, and on a lot of stores they are also the thinnest pages: a heading and a grid of products.

A good category page has:

• A clear heading that uses the shopper’s words, like “Waterproof Work Boots”, not “Collection 4”.
• A short intro of two to four sentences above the products. Say what’s in the range and who it suits.
• Filters that help people narrow down by size, brand or price.
• Plain links to every product, so shoppers and Google can reach them.
• A little buying advice below the grid, like how to pick the right size or what a safety rating means.

Keep long text below the products, so shoppers don’t scroll past an essay to find the boots. Our on page SEO guide covers titles, headings and descriptions for any page type.

Make every product page unique

Make each product page unique by writing your own description instead of the manufacturer’s, using real photos with plain alt text, and adding Product structured data.

Write your own descriptions

If you copy the manufacturer’s description, your page says the same thing as every other store selling that item. Write your own, starting with your best sellers. Cover what shoppers ask before they buy: size and fit, materials, what’s in the box, care, shipping and returns.

Use real photos where you can, from several angles. Give each image a plain file name and alt text that describes it, like “brown leather steel toe boot, side view”. Alt text is a short description of an image that screen readers and Google can read.

Add Product structured data

Structured data is code on the page that spells out facts for Google, like the product name, price and stock status. Google says it isn’t required to appear in search, but it helps Google understand price, discounts and shipping costs on the page.

Google’s Product structured data intro describes two types:

• Product snippets, for pages where people can’t buy directly, such as a review page.
• Merchant listings, for pages where customers can buy from you. This is the one most stores need.

The merchant listing documentation lists the rules. The required properties include the product name, an image and the price inside an offer. Merchant listings need a price greater than zero. Availability, such as in stock or out of stock, is recommended. Google also says only pages where a shopper can buy the product are eligible, and the markup belongs on product pages, not category pages.

Google may check your product data before showing it, so keep the markup matched to what visitors see. Test a few pages with the Rich Results Test after any theme or app change.

If you sell one product in several sizes or colors, Google’s product variant documentation shows how to group them so Google knows they belong together. Your theme or an app may already add Product markup. Check what your pages output before adding more, so you don’t end up with two sets that disagree. Our guide to schema markup explains structured data in more depth.

Control faceted navigation and duplicate URLs

Faceted navigation is the set of filters on a category page: color, size, brand, price, sort order. Each filter often adds something to the URL, like /boots?color=brown&size=10. A store with a few hundred products can end up with thousands of filter URLs that all show nearly the same thing.

Google’s guide to managing faceted navigation names two problems. Google’s crawler can waste time on filter URLs. That leaves it less time to find your new products.

Google offers two routes.

If you don’t need filter pages in search, stop Google crawling them. The guide suggests blocking the filter parameters in your robots.txt file, which tells crawlers what to skip. Another option is filters that use a # fragment in the URL, which don’t affect crawling. Google says canonical tags and nofollow links are generally less effective over the long term.

If some filter pages should be in search, follow Google’s rules for them:

• Use the standard & to separate URL parameters.
• If filters sit in the URL path, keep them in the same order every time, with no repeats.
• Return a 404 “not found” status when a filter combination has no products.

A filter page is worth indexing when people actually search for it, like a brand within a category. In that case, a proper landing page with its own heading and a short intro usually does better than a raw filter URL.

The same idea applies to other duplicate URLs. The same product can often be reached through several paths, or with tracking codes added. A canonical tag tells Google which version is the main one. Google’s page on consolidating duplicate URLs explains how. Google’s ecommerce URL guide adds that descriptive words in URLs may help Google, and that each page of paginated results needs its own URL. It also notes that Google ignores anything after a # when indexing. So /t-shirt#black and /t-shirt#white count as one page.

Handle out of stock and discontinued products

Keep a temporarily out of stock page live and mark it out of stock. For a product that’s gone for good, keep the page, 301 redirect it to a close replacement, or let it return a 404 or 410.

Temporarily out of stock

Keep the page live. Google answers this directly in its guide to pausing an online business. It says not to remove out of stock products from search, and to keep the page up and mark it out of stock instead. That way people still understand what’s going on.

On the page, say when you expect stock back, offer a “notify me” option and link to similar products. Update the availability in your structured data and your Merchant Center feed so they match the page.

Discontinued for good

Pick one of three options:

• Keep the page if people still look it up for specs, manuals or reviews, and point them to the newer model.
• Redirect it to a close replacement with a 301 redirect. Google’s redirect guide lists removing a page and sending users to a new one as a normal use.
• Let it return a 404 or 410 if nothing comparable exists. Google’s page on HTTP status codes says it treats both the same and drops those URLs from the index.

Don’t send every dead product to the home page.

List your products free in Google Merchant Center

Google Merchant Center is a free Google account where you upload your product data. It powers free listings, which can show your products at no cost on Google Search, the Shopping tab, Images, Lens, Maps, YouTube and Gemini.

What Google’s help page says about them:

• New Merchant Center accounts are opted in to free listings by default.
• Free listings send people to product pages, not category pages or your home page.
• In the United States, you must set up shipping settings or add shipping costs to your product data.
• Google recommends adding your return policy too.
• Being eligible doesn’t guarantee your products will be shown.

Google’s product data guide recommends using both structured data and a Merchant Center feed. A feed lets you tell Google about every product, even ones its crawler hasn’t found. Sync problems are common, for example when a product sells out on your site before the feed updates. Google suggests turning on automatic item updates in Merchant Center so it corrects price and stock from your website.

Speed up your store

A slow store frustrates shoppers, especially on phones. Google’s page on Core Web Vitals gives three targets for a good experience:

• Largest Contentful Paint, how fast the main content loads: within 2.5 seconds.
• Interaction to Next Paint, how fast the page responds to a tap: under 200 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift, how much the page jumps around while loading: under 0.1.

Check the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console to see which page types fall short. Common causes are oversized product photos, apps or plugins you no longer use, and pop ups. Compress images, remove apps you don’t use and test again. Our technical SEO guide covers speed, crawling and indexing in more detail.

Link your pages together

Google’s guide to ecommerce site structure says Google uses your internal links to work out which pages matter most. The more links a page gets from inside your site, the more important it looks.

What Google recommends:

• Link from your menus to category pages, from categories to subcategories, and from subcategories to every product.
• Use normal links, not buttons that only work through JavaScript.
• Don’t rely on your site search. Google says its crawler generally doesn’t type searches into a search box.
• If you can’t link to every product, list them in a sitemap or a Merchant Center feed.
• Link to your best sellers from the home page and from blog posts or guides.

Breadcrumbs (“Home > Boots > Work Boots”) and “related products” blocks add useful links on every product page without extra work.

A simple checklist to start

1. Map your main searches to category and product pages.
2. Add a short intro and buying advice to your top categories.
3. Rewrite descriptions for your 20 best sellers.
4. Check your Product structured data in the Rich Results Test.
5. Decide which filter URLs Google should crawl, and block the rest.
6. Set rules for out of stock and discontinued products.
7. Set up Merchant Center with shipping and returns.
8. Fix the slowest page type in the Core Web Vitals report.

Don’t expect results overnight. Google’s SEO Starter Guide says some changes take effect in a few hours and others take several months. Track organic sales by page type in your analytics, not only rankings.

Get help with your store’s SEO

If you’d rather spend your time on stock and customers, our ecommerce SEO services page explains how we work on online stores. If your store runs on Shopify or needs a rebuild, see our Shopify web design service. To find out what’s holding your store back first, request a free ecommerce SEO audit. We’ll send the findings within 2 business days. Free audit. No obligation. No hard sell.

Common questions