SEO for an ecommerce website comes down to three pages (category, product, and the technical layer under them). Here is how to pick keywords, write product pages, handle faceted navigation and add Product schema.
Short answer: SEO for an ecommerce website means making three layers work: category pages that target the broad "what" searches, product pages that win specific and model-number searches, and a technical layer (clean URLs, controlled filters, Product schema, fast images) that lets Google crawl all of it without wasting effort on duplicates. Most small stores lose rankings in the technical layer, not the writing.
The rest of this guide goes through each layer in the order you should fix it.
Ecommerce keyword research is different from blog keyword research because every keyword needs a page type, not just a page. Sort your list into three buckets:
| Search looks like | Intent | Page that should rank |
|---|---|---|
| "linen bed sheets" | Browsing a product type | Category page |
| "king size linen sheets sage green" | Narrowing down | Filtered category or subcategory |
| "Brooklinen linen core sheet set" | Wants one product | Product page |
| "how to wash linen sheets" | Research | Guide or blog post that links to the category |
Where to find the terms:
One rule prevents a lot of pain later: one primary keyword per URL. If your "linen sheets" category and your "best linen sheets" blog post both target the same phrase, they compete with each other and neither ranks well.
A category page that is just a grid of products gives Google very little to understand. Add:
Product pages fail for one main reason: they reuse the manufacturer's description, which is already published by every other retailer. A product page that ranks usually has:
For stores with hundreds of near-identical variants (the same shirt in eight colours), keep one product URL and use a variant selector rather than eight separate pages. Separate pages only make sense when a variant has its own search demand.
This is where ecommerce sites differ most from normal websites, because product catalogues generate URLs automatically.
Filters for size, colour, price and brand can create thousands of URL combinations such as /sheets?colour=green&size=king&sort=price. Left alone, Google wastes crawl time on them and sees near-duplicate pages. The fix:
Add Product structured data (JSON-LD, using the schema.org vocabulary) to every product page with name, image, description, brand, offers (price, currency, availability) and aggregateRating if you have genuine reviews. This is what makes price, stock and star ratings eligible to appear in search results and Google Shopping's free listings. Check it with Google's Rich Results Test.
Add BreadcrumbList schema too, so results show "Home > Bedding > Sheets" instead of a raw URL.
Product pages are image-heavy. Serve images in WebP or AVIF, size them for the space they fill, lazy-load anything below the fold, and set width and height so the layout does not jump. Google's Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) are measured on real visits and reported in Search Console.
Do not delete a product page with backlinks or traffic and leave a 404. Redirect it (301) to the closest replacement, or keep it live with "discontinued" and links to alternatives.
Link building for stores does not have to mean outreach spam. Tactics that work for small shops:
Say you sell soy candles. Your keyword map might look like this:
That is five or six well-built pages rather than fifty thin ones, and it is a structure Google can make sense of.
For the general on-page items that apply to every site, see our on-page SEO checklist. If you are still setting up the shop itself, how to make a website to sell stuff covers the build side.
We.Inc builds online stores from a plain description, with visual and code editing so you can rewrite product copy, adjust titles and add structured data yourself, and hosting with SSL included. It handles the build; the keyword mapping and the writing above are still yours to do.
Usually the category page. Shoppers search for groups of products ('women's trail running shoes') far more often than for one exact product, and category pages are where those searches land. Product pages matter most for branded or model-number searches.
Avoid using it as-is. Hundreds of other retailers publish the same text, so Google has no reason to rank your copy over theirs. Rewrite it with your own details: who the product suits, sizing notes, what is in the box, and answers to questions customers actually ask you.
Decide which filter combinations have real search demand (for example colour plus category) and let those be indexable with their own title and copy. Point the rest at the main category with a canonical tag or keep them out of the index, and do not add them to your sitemap.
If the product is coming back, keep the page live, mark it out of stock in your Product schema and offer a back-in-stock alert. If it is gone for good, 301 redirect the URL to the closest replacement or its category rather than letting it return a 404.
Fixes to titles and indexing can show up within weeks once Google recrawls the pages. Ranking a new store for competitive category terms typically takes months, which is why most stores run paid ads or email alongside SEO in the first year.
How we research, test and update this page: our editorial policy. We.Inc is our own product.
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