A Practical Guide to E-commerce SEO
Search optimization for sites with large catalogs, faceted navigation and products that come and go.
Samir Haddad
Why does it matter?
The problems are structural rather than editorial: category pages, filters and out-of-stock handling produce most of the traffic and most of the technical faults.
What are the numbers?
- Category pages usually the highest-value pages for commercial terms
- Faceted navigation can generate very large numbers of crawlable URLs
- Product structured data supports rich results with price and availability
- Out-of-stock pages need a deliberate policy rather than deletion
- Pagination must be crawlable to reach deep products
- Thin product pages manufacturer descriptions duplicated across many retailers
What should I do?
- Treat category pages as primary landing pages and give them real content
- Control which facet combinations are crawlable and indexable
- Keep URLs for discontinued products and redirect or explain, rather than deleting
- Write original product descriptions where the term is competitive
- Keep product structured data accurate, especially price and availability
What should I avoid?
Avoid:
- Leaving every facet combination crawlable
- Deleting product URLs that hold links and traffic
- Manufacturer copy used verbatim on competitive products
- Structured data that disagrees with the page
When should I get help?
Short answer Bring in help when crawl reports show enormous numbers of parameter URLs, when category pages do not rank, or when a replatform is planned.
Where this comes from
- Google Search Central — Ecommerce SEO documentation
- Google Search Central — Product structured data
- Shopify Help Center — SEO guidance
The figures and practices above come from the sources listed.
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Where to go next
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