Ecommerce SEO differs from ordinary website SEO in three ways: you have far more pages, most of them are near-identical, and much of your content was written by somebody else.
Those three facts explain almost every problem shops have with search.
The duplicate description problem
You sell a product. So do forty other retailers. All of you use the manufacturer's description, word for word.
Search engines now have forty-one pages of identical text and must decide which to show. They will favour the larger, more established site — which will not be you.
The remedy is original content, and the practical approach is prioritisation. Writing unique descriptions for eight thousand products is not realistic. Writing them for your two hundred best sellers is, and those are the pages that make the money.
What to add beyond the supplier text:
- Who it suits, and who it does not
- How it compares with the alternative you also stock
- Practical details you know from selling it — what customers ask, what they get wrong
- What is in the box, in your own words
- Answers to the questions your sales team fields daily
That last one is the most valuable and the most overlooked. Your team already knows the questions; nobody has written the answers down.
Category pages do most of the work
People search for "waterproof work boots" far more often than for a specific model number. That search is served by a category page, not a product page.
Yet most category pages are a grid of products with a heading and nothing else — nothing for a search engine to understand and nothing for a buyer who wants help choosing.
A category page that competes has: a genuine introduction explaining what is in the category and how to choose, a section addressing the common questions, and internal links to related categories and to any guides you have written.
Put the substantial text below the products rather than above them. Buyers came to see products; search engines will read it either way.
Structured data
Product markup lets search results display price, availability and review ratings directly. That visibly increases the proportion of people who click.
Mark up product name, price, currency, availability and review data where you have it. Keep it accurate — marking an out-of-stock item as available is the sort of thing that gets the enhancement withdrawn.
Category pages benefit from breadcrumb markup, which shows the site structure in results and helps people understand where they would land.
The technical problems specific to shops
Faceted navigation
Filters for size, colour, brand and price combine into an enormous number of URL variations, most showing broadly the same products.
Left alone, this generates thousands of near-duplicate pages, wastes the crawling budget search engines allocate you, and splits the value that should concentrate on your main category pages.
The handling is a judgement rather than a rule: allow indexing of the filter combinations that people genuinely search for — a brand within a category, often — and block the rest. Use canonical tags to point variations at the main category page.
Pagination
A category running to eleven pages needs each page to be reachable and each to indicate its place in the sequence. Infinite scroll with no underlying paginated URLs means search engines see only the first screen of products.
Out of stock and discontinued items
Do not delete pages for products with traffic or inbound links. Keep the page, mark it unavailable, and offer the replacement or the category. Deleting discards ranking that took years to earn.
If a product genuinely will not return, redirect to the closest equivalent rather than to the homepage.
Internal search pages
Your site's own search results should not be indexed. They are infinite, low value, and a well-known way to accumulate junk pages.
Speed
Product pages carry a dozen images and are the slowest pages on most shops. This costs both ranking and sales, and the fixes are the ordinary ones in why your website is slow.
Most ecommerce SEO effort goes into product pages. Most ecommerce search traffic arrives on category pages. The mismatch is worth correcting.
Content that supports the catalogue
Buying guides, comparisons, sizing advice, maintenance instructions. These rank for the questions people ask before they know what to buy, which is where you meet a customer earliest.
Link from the guide to the relevant categories and products, and from the products back to the guide. That internal linking is one of the most underused tools available to a shop, and it costs nothing.
It is also the content that AI assistants quote when summarising, which is an increasingly significant source of visibility — see getting found by AI search.
Where to start
- Identify your twenty highest-value products and write original descriptions for each.
- Add genuine content to your top five category pages.
- Check product structured data is present and accurate.
- Audit faceted URLs and decide what should be indexed.
- Stop deleting pages for discontinued lines.
- Write one buying guide for your most-considered purchase.
Our ecommerce team works on search visibility for UK retailers, starting with the pages that actually carry the revenue. Start a conversation.
