Skip to content
GetProfit
Log in

← All terms

Ecommerce SEO

Ecommerce SEO is the work of making an online store's category and product pages easy for search engines to find, understand and show in unpaid results.

How it works

Google describes SEO as helping search engines understand your content, and helping people find your site and decide whether to visit it. In a store, the work happens in three places:

  • Structure. Google works out which pages matter from links, not from URL structure. Menus should link to category pages, and categories to every product.
  • Addresses. Filters, sorting and tracking parameters create duplicate content, and the store decides which URLs Google should crawl.
  • Product data. Product markup on the page and a Merchant Center feed give Google the price, availability and other details. Neither is required for a page to appear in Google Search, but both help Google understand the products.

That product data is where SEO and Shopping meet. Shopping ads need the products in Merchant Center, and so do the free listings on the Shopping tab. Google Search may also use the same data for product rich results.

In our study of 1.4 million products in 130+ stores, 55.0% got no ad budget at all over 13 months. In Shopping, those products could appear only in free listings. Our ecommerce SEO guide sets out what to fix first.

Not to be confused with

  • Organic traffic — the visits that unpaid results bring. Ecommerce SEO is the work, and organic traffic is one of its results.
  • Free listings — unpaid product listings built from the Merchant Center feed. Work on the pages alone does not put a product there.

Right and wrong readings

  • Wrong: “Without product markup, product pages can’t appear in Google.” Right: Google says product markup isn’t required for a page to appear in Search results. It helps Google understand the page and makes it eligible for rich results.
  • Wrong: “We changed the page titles last week and nothing moved, so it didn’t work.” Right: Google says some changes take effect in a few hours and others take several months. It suggests waiting a few weeks before judging.

Sources