134 SEO tips for ecommerce stores

Advice provided by: Leonie Mann

A robust redirect strategy for out-of-stock products is crucial for maintaining SEO value and user experience for ecommerce sites.

Redirecting old product pages to similar current products helps retain link equity and organic traffic, ensuring potential customers are directed to relevant offerings instead of encountering dead ends.

This strategy improves user satisfaction and preserves the site’s authority and ranking in search engine results.

By effectively managing out-of-stock products through appropriate redirects, ecommerce sites can maximise their SEO potential and keep users engaged.

You can handle out-of-stock products in multiple ways, such as adding a 301 redirect to a similar product, adding an email notification to users for when the product comes back in stock, or just deleting the page and not redirecting if the page holds no SEO value.

There’s no 1 size fits all solution, read through the guide and see what works best for you.

Additional resource: How Should You Handle Out-of-Stock Products? It Depends

Advice provided by: Andy Frobisher

Do not rely on JavaScript to handle the loading of page content, metadata, headings, and most importantly internal links (header menu and product filters). Doing so can mean that Googlebot may not be able to read some or all of your content, or discover important internal links.

Make sure that all of your important resources like content, headings, metadata and links are within the HTML that you serve to the browser.

Additional resource: JavaScript SEO: How to audit, find, and fix JavaScript SEO problems

Advice provided by: Sonia Beroud

Keep an eye out for pages that are generated automatically by e-commerce CMS platforms.

For instance, Shopify is notorious for automatically creating a bunch of pages with thin content, little to no value, that are indexable and can potentially compete with other valuable pages (especially collection/category pages).

Once you spot them, you can tweak your Shopify theme code to set them to noindex.

Additional resource: 9 Common Shopify SEO Issues & How to Fix Them (For Real)

Advice provided by: Stevy Liakopoulou

“Do you have an e-commerce site with thousands of products in multiple variations and colors?

Well, having products in different colors, sizes, or dimensions and separate product pages for them can be tricky for duplication and a waste of crawl budget.

You can find all the duplicate pages inside the sitemap by using Screaming Frog and deciding what you should do with them.

1. Go to Screaming Frog, and set the Mode to List.
2. Tap on Upload<Download XML Sitemap and paste the URL of your Sitemap.
3. Then go to Configuration<API Access and connect the Google Search Console setting the timeframe as the last 3 months.
4. Now you have data for every URL inside the sitemap such as clicks, impressions, CTR. You can set any timeframe that works best for you.
5. Under the Configuration, go to Content<Duplicates and tick the “Enable Near Duplicates” box.
6. Push the Start button.

After you have crawled the sitemap, download the data from the “Near Duplicates” and combine them with the data from the Google Search Console.

Put them all in an Excel tab and keep only the URLs that are reported as “Near Duplicates”.

Checking at the same data from Google Search Console you can proceed into actions e.g. if a specific product comes in 5 colors, you see from the data that only one version has clicks and impressions, then consider adding this version as a canonical tag to all different colors and remove the other colors from the sitemap.

Additional resource: How to Optimize E-commerce Sitemaps with 1M+ Pages

Advice provided by: Simone De Palma

YouTube’s embedded videos normally take on rankings on Google Search and that’s a fact. Noticeably, though, eCommerce websites self-hosting videos benefit of enhanced security and faster page speed due to retrieving fewer third-party resources from cross-origins.
Ultimately, self-hosting videos seem to really disclose ore rooms for natural backlinks.

Self-hosting or YouTube embedded videos?

Make sure to tie your business goals to your domain expertise before striking the perfect fit for your video SEO strategy.

Additional resource: A technical guide to video SEO

Advice provided by: Nikki Halliwell

If eCommerce websites don’t take the time to understand how their users interact with the site and their expectations, they may end up with a site architecture that doesn’t meet their users’ needs.

Additional resource: Breaking Down Barriers: Understanding eCommerce Website Challenges

Advice provided by Emilija Gjorgjevska

Underutilized Black Friday & Cyber Monday Schema Markups:

BreadcrumbList -> good to use when you have a collection of pages that are interlinked together. The rule here is to use your top pages first in your breadcrumb list while the upcoming pages develop from there, forming a list of ordered, sequential elements. ItemList can be also utilized here too.

Offer -> This is reserved for both online and offline deals that you want to showcase on your website, like selling a ticket for an event, streaming occasions, and so on. It goes well in combination with paymentMethod, areaServed, aggregateRating, availabilityStarts, availabilityEnds, category, offeredBy, GTIN, and similar attributes that proved to be helpful in the process.

FAQPage -> Great deals come with many unanswered customer questions around the new prices in specific time periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. That is why it is important to include the most prominent questions in your webpage by using the FAQPage schema markup. This structured data type goes well with mainContentOfPage, speakable, abstract, about, author, and rating attributes when combined together.

SaleEvent -> This one is definitely the most underused across the ecommerce industry. This schema markup is probably the most appropriate for temporary deals (therefore, the use of the word event in its name comes obvious). SaleEvent works perfectly with the audience, contributor, startDate, endDate, eventAttendanceMode, eventStatus (for postponing and rescheduling), location, Offers, subEvent, and sameAs properties. Definitely worth checking out. Ideal when you want to showcase the commercial intent of a webpage compared to the use of FAQPage schema markup which is more informational.

CollectionPage -> This is a more specific use of the Webpage schema markup. It can also be used with ItemList together with the mainEntity that references it. This way, it is clear to customers that they are having a collection of items on the webpage that they are seeing. 

OpeningHoursSpecification -> It is always wise to update your opening hours during specific season periods like the black week so that you can properly inform your online visitors (potential customers) about the right time to reach out to you. Great when used in combination with dayOfWeek, opens, closes, validFrom, validThrough, description, and sameAs attributes.

OfferCatalog -> This is basically an ItemList but it refers to a list of products that are offered by the same provider. Very important to know the difference here. Works pretty well when used with itemListOrder, alternateName, description, disambiguatingDescription (useful for differentiating between similar product items), name, sameAs and identifier properties.

discountCode -> often misunderstood with the Offer schema markup which usually refers to product schema markup, while this one can refer to a service. This is still not part of Google’s Search Gallery, so you cannot expect to obtain a rich snippet on the SERPs by using it, however, it is still a good choice when providing discounts to stuff or working with a coupons website.

ImageObject and VideoObject are quite similar, so we will cover them together. They are particularly useful when you want to provide more images of your products or have a video overview (e.g. games products). The 3DModel schema markup can also prove interesting for advanced ecommerce brands who utilize the power of augmented reality to show off their products in a more interactive way with their audience during the black cyber season.

Language schema can also be very interesting for you -> especially if you’re struggling to get a buy-in to implement hreflang (which from my experience requires a bit more complex technical setup). I’ve used it as a side-way in the past to fix issues when we had multiple stores with similar languages interfering with each other’s organic rankings. I can confirm first-hand that I managed to decrease irrelevant traffic coming to our core pages, so this is something that you can consider too.

Additional resource: Dominate Black Friday & Cyber Monday with Strategic SEO Techniques

Advice provided by: Liraz Postan

E-commerce of its nature, can cause a lot of technical errors. Out-of-stock, changed products, unoptimized products and categories can cause some duplication issues and index bloating.

I normally suggest automating your technical processes, auditing with real time alerts and be on top of things whenever you can.

Check AI overviews for commerce, as this is going to be taking most of CTR in 2025, and see how can you tackle or work around it using a smart content strategy

Additional resource: Screaming Frog to Google Sheets: Simplifying Technical SEO Audit

Advice provided by: Dan White

If you’re using Shopify, check links to your product page from your collections. If they keep /collection/… within the URL in your product then you need to fix your product URL structure. Fortunately, it’s a quick fix and a potentially hugely impactful change depending on your industry.

Additional resource: Fixing Shopify’s Product URL Structure For SEO Success

Advice provided by: Ilana Davis

Selling in multi-currency? In most cases, Google will only crawl your site from a US-based IP address and they don’t attempt to vary the location to detect site variations. That’s why Google doesn’t want you to use IP location to automatically adapt your content. The risk is that Google may see mismatched prices and currencies between your landing page, structured data, and product feed. This most often impacts non-US-based e-commerce stores selling in currencies other than their default currency.

To solve the issue, do this:

1. Turn off automatic IP detection. Allow users to select the currency that they wish to use with a drop-down or link, and
2. Use unique URLs (e.g. au.example.com or example.com/au or example.com/en-au) that Google can access for each currency you support.

This issue may also be the root cause for Google Ads and Merchant Center rejecting product data feeds for invalid pricing.

Additional resource: The multi-currency SEO issue plaguing Shopify stores but no one is talking about

Advice provided by: Suganthan Mohanadasan

Identify and resolve keyword cannibalization to boost website performance. Start by compiling a list of all relevant keywords and use a clustering tool to group them, which helps to identify content overlaps. Address cannibalizing pages by merging, redirecting, and re-optimizing content. Regular audits and a centralized strategy can prevent future issues, enhancing organic visibility and user engagement.

Additional resource: Using Keyword Clustering To Identify Keyword Cannibalization

Advice provided by: Fabian Pfluger

Controlling and checking your site’s indexing is crucial for maintaining optimal SEO performance with multiple languages.

Only your indexed products can rank and bring in organic traffic.

Regularly monitoring indexing helps ensure that only high-quality, relevant pages are visible to search engines, which can significantly improve your site’s ranking and user engagement.

In this example, I boosted visibility/indexing with technical fixes around 800% and products started to rank in multiple languages.

Additional resource: LinkedIn Post

Advice provided by: Orit Mutznik

How to make your ecommerce pagination search engine friendly:

• It’s rare for ecommerce websites to put all of their products in one page because that usually results in a bad experience for the user – it takes a long time to load and to scroll.
• Most ecommerce businesses then turn to pagination, displaying a set number of products per page and then providing links to the next pages (the most popular and straightforward option), some opt a “”load more button, others opt for infinite scroll.
• No matter what option you choose, you need to make sure that you make it accessible to search engines, not for ranking of the paginated page itself, but to allow Google to be able to crawl and index all of your products.

Ecommerce Pagination Setup Tips:

1. URL Uniqueness – Each paginated page should canonicalise to itself – back in 2019, googler John Mueller said “”I’d also recommend making sure the pagination pages can kind of stand on their own”” – if you canonicalise to the main category page, Google will not index the content on your paginated pages.
2. Crawlability – The urls of your paginated pages need to be unique – Whether via parameters or permanent URLs, the paginated page URL has to be unique and change as you go through the pages. e.g. /category-page?page=2 or /category-page/page2. If the url doesn’t change to show more products or you use # for these changes, Google won’t be able to index or crawl your paginated pages
3. Indexability – don’t block your paginated pages by robots.txt or meta robots, canonical to self – as you would do for any other page you wish to properly index its content.

I’ve looked into indexability per pagination type in my research for “State of Pagination in eCommerce: Case Study & Analysis of the Top 150 UK Fashion Retailers” for BrightonSEO, and whilst traditional pagination (1, 2, 3 >>) is the most simple, straightforward and indexable way to go, “load more” and “infinite scroll” can also be set up as search engine friendly, as long as you bear in mind to provide search engine with a “”No JS”” version of your pagination, that is, a version with clean href links to navigate between a set amount of products, or just all product in one that would be search engine friendly.

Another way would be to serve your pagination using server side JS vs client side, which is a format that search engines are much more efficient in reading.

If you’ve gone through the path of search engine friendly pagination, here are 3 very important last tips:

1. Make sure that the 1st page of the series (i.e. the category page) is the most optimized for SEO by adding unique page content & meta tags. If you de-optimize the rest of the pages in the series (by removing those content/meta tags) Google will get a clear message of what to rank.
2. Take control of your crawl budget – as much as it is critical that pagination be indexable to index the products within, make sure to restrict the crawlability of your filters (use #, block any filter parameters via robots txt) to make sure that the limited time that search engines spend on your time is spent only on what you actually care about indexing.
3. Use Screaming Frog or any other enterprise crawler right after any change you make, to make sure that any restrictions or removal of restrictions is driving the results you were looking for to make sure you’re getting the expected outcome 

Additional resource: Pagination Best Practices 2024: eCommerce Case Study and Tips for Search Friendly Pagination

Advice provided by: Ebere Cecilia Jonathan

Ever Got Lost in Your Online Shopping Cart? Breadcrumbs Can Help!

Have you ever been browsing an online store and gotten confused about where you are on the website? Maybe you clicked on a category, then a subcategory, then another subcategory, and suddenly you’re not sure how to get back to the main page. This feeling of being lost can frustrate both you and search engine bots!

That’s where breadcrumbs come in. Breadcrumbs are a simple navigational element that appears at the top of a webpage, typically just below the main navigation bar. They act like a trail of breadcrumbs, showing you the hierarchy of pages you’ve clicked through to get to your current location.

Here’s why breadcrumbs are important:

• Improved User Experience: They make it easy for customers to navigate your website and find what they’re looking for.
• Reduced Bounce Rates: Frustrated users who feel lost are more likely to leave your site (bounce). Breadcrumbs help them find their way back and continue shopping.
• Enhanced SEO: Search engine bots use breadcrumbs to understand the structure of your website, which can help in categorizing your web pages on search results

Here’s a quick example:

Imagine you’re browsing for a new swimwear on a women clothing website. The breadcrumbs might look like this:

Women> Clothing > Swimwear > Bikinis

This lets the user see exactly where they are within your website’s hierarchy.

By implementing breadcrumbs and making your website structure clear, you can create a smoother shopping experience for your customers and also helps Google understand your site better, which can potentially lead to more sales!

Advice provided by: Gerry White

Dig into Google Search Console, so much is hidden in places such as within the settings, which hides some incredible insights, from crawl analysis through to issues with the robots.txt file on all the hostnames within that domain (often more than you think.

Start with your indexed pages, why your pages aren’t indexed (often crawl traps can inflate the numbers exponentially), make sure you have a look at soft 404s if they are an issue, check the sitemaps are the up to date should they have been removed?

Work through the ‘Enhancements’ it will identify errors within your Schema and feeds, critical for e-commerce, then keep going through each section, this helps feed into what on your site technically needs to be fully audited. 

Advice provided by: Glen Allsopp

If you’re running a Shopify store, be wary of having multiple URL paths to your product pages. On a significant percentage of Shopify stores I’ve found situations where they have the main /products URLs, and /collections/products URLs, then spreading out internal links between them. Try to ensure you’re primarily linking to pages you want to rank.

Advice provided by: Marie Turner

Most e-commerce sites I onboard over the last 7 years are large, and often have crawling & indexing issues, and/or duplicate content. Always make sure the fundamentals are in place and in good working order:

• robots.txt file is a great tool to manage crawl bloat from user-generated filter URLs
• sitemap.xml file should be up to date and watertight
• check regularly for crawl errors
• International sites should also be using HREFLANG alongside localisation

The best content SEO strategy will not outshine a site that can’t be crawled in its entirety or indexed, or has large duplicate content issues hindering growth.

Advice provided by: Luce Rawlings

XML sitemaps are important for bots to discover and index web pages. However, Magento 2’s default XML sitemap function only allows whole page types to be excluded rather than individual pages or pages that meet certain criteria.

This means that URLs, regardless of their indexability and status code, are included. This is not ideal when we want search engines to focus on the most important pages – those that are indexable and return a 200 “OK” response.

To overcome this issue, you can create a custom XML sitemap that only includes the necessary URLs, and work with a Magento-savvy developer to override or rewrite a Controller to serve the new sitemap over the default one.

Advice provided by: Isaline Muelhauser

For a B2B WooCommerce selling material for professional brewers, there were 60 products for over 220 pages with an absolute indexable URL for categories/product tags/attributes/brand.

Google stopped indexing the website. If these pages are necessary for the users but are near duplicates, a sound indexing strategy is necessary.

If an indexing strategy is too complex to implement, remove the unnecessary pages so that the number of indexable category pages is balanced with the number of products.

Advice provided by: Ash Nallawalla

When a blended in-house SEO and agency model is in play, there need to be some rules of engagement to avoid misunderstandings and get the best value for the e-commerce platform. Here are some examples:

• Who is the SEO “director” (not by title but by role)?
• Who does what work (strategy, audits, reports, BAU), and how frequently?
• How is agency time to be recorded?

I have been in a situation where the agency was appointed without my participation in the selection.

They would undertake tasks to maximize the billable hours, which were not shared with the in-house team. The business decided to add a Shopify subdomain and I did not know until it was implemented. The agency did not object.

Better communication would have let me show them how to use a reverse proxy and make it show as a folder in the main domain. This allows the folder to inherit the link equity of the website and avoids the need for a separate SEO strategy for a subdomain.

Advice provided by: Nick Smith

When working with Shopify be sure to address the duplicate product URLs that are automatically generated by most Shopify themes.

Shopify will create multiple product URLs depending on the number collections a product is assigned to. This means you can have a single product URL generate tens of duplicate pages.

Shopify attempts to handle this through canonicalisation, however canonicals are a hint not a directive, and with multiple internal links pointing away from the canonical page, Google might choose to ignore the canonical tag.

By removing the code that generates the URLs, you can avoid this issue all together.

In your liquid files you will find a couple of references to {{ product.url | within: collection }} (Use an extension like “”Shopify Theme File Search”” to easily find these) and remove the within: collection reference, it should look like this {{ product.url }}.

Your internal product links will now all point to a single product page.

Keep in mind that this will remove your breadcrumb link. However, the trade off is worth it, and there are ways to have the breadcrumb link without the duplicate products.

Advice provided by: Deborah Oyewole

Image alt text can improve your product page’s accessibility.

It isn’t enough to optimize written content while leaving out the images. A well-optimized image could help you feature in image searches, gain featured snippet opportunities, and improve your website’s accessibility and product visibility.

However, manually adding alt text to many images could be daunting for an e-commerce store. But there’s a way to add alt text to product images in bulk.

You can use Alttext.ai to add image alt text in bulk or individually. You can do this via the website or by integrating it as a plugin for your e-commerce sites such as Magento, Shopify, Contentful, and WordPress. This tool allows you to add alt text using customized criteria unique to your business and SEO strategy.

It offers integrations for Magento, Shopify, WordPress, Dropbox, WooCommerce, Contentful, Pinterest, Cloudinary, Zapier, Chrome Browser, and more.