Ecommerce SEO services built on your catalog's structure and searches

What does an ecommerce SEO agency do?

Search brings shoppers to two kinds of page. Category pages answer the broad searches, such as a type of product, and product pages answer the narrow ones: a model, a size, a brand. An ecommerce SEO agency works on both, and on the links between them, so search engines can reach every product. Google’s guidance for online stores calls being discovered in Search a critical challenge for any ecommerce website.

We plan the work around three kinds of seller:

• Established local sellers: one shop or warehouse, selling online and often over the counter too. Google can show the shop’s products in Maps results once its stock and location are shared through Google Merchant Center.
• Multi-location and regional sellers: several shops, or deliveries across counties or states. Each location’s page has to stand on its own.
• National sellers: shipping across the US against national retailers. In a large catalog, the links and filters affect which pages search engines spend their time crawling.

One of the questions Google suggests asking anyone you hire is whether they cite official Google documentation behind their advice. This page’s sources are listed at the end. And when SEO isn’t the right spend for your store yet, we say so on the call.

How do you do SEO for an ecommerce website?

The work runs in this order:

1. Find the searches: how shoppers search for what you sell, what Google shows for each search, and which stores rank there.
2. Shape the catalog around them: categories for the broad searches, subcategories for the narrower ones, and a page for each product worth finding.
3. Link every product: Google says its crawler generally doesn’t type into a site’s search box, so a product reachable only through that search might not be found. It recommends links from menus to categories, from categories to subcategories, and from those to every product.
4. Write each page for its search: a unique title, product descriptions in the words shoppers use, and category descriptions for the less specific searches.
5. Mark it up: structured data for products, breadcrumbs and the business, so search engines can read each page’s details and its place in the store.
6. Earn links and measure: links from other sites, and Search Console to see which searches bring visits and where they land.

The monthly side of that work is set out on our SEO services page. If the store already has traffic, an SEO audit shows what holds it back before anything changes.

How should a store’s categories and addresses be organized?

Around links first. Google says it generally doesn’t look at the structure of URLs to work out the structure of a site. It reads the links between pages instead: the more links a page has from within the site, the more important it looks beside the others. For a best-selling product, Google suggests a link from the home page or from blog posts.

Addresses matter in smaller ways. Google says descriptive words in a URL path may help it understand the page. For a product sold in several colors or sizes, it asks for a separate URL per variant, and where a query parameter picks the variant, the URL without it as the canonical. It also asks for the same URL in internal links, the sitemap and the canonical tag, and for ordinary HTML links rather than JavaScript.

One honest note from the same guidance: if your store runs on an ecommerce platform, Google says you can most likely skip its URL advice. On a platform store, the work is mostly in the categories, the words and the links.

What do filters, sorting and pagination do to a store’s SEO?

They multiply its addresses. Faceted navigation, the filters for size, color, price or brand, most often works through URL parameters, and Google warns that it can generate infinite URL spaces: crawlers spend their time on filter pages nobody needs and find new products more slowly. Google’s advice is to keep the filter addresses you don’t need in search from being crawled, and to keep filtered and re-sorted lists out of the index.

Some filters earn a page of their own. When shoppers search for a combination by name, such as a material and a product type, it can become a category with its own words and a place in the menus. The plan decides which combinations get a page and which stay out of search.

Pagination needs care too. Google asks for a unique URL for each page of a long category, such as one ending in ?page=2, and says not to use the first page as the canonical for the rest. Its crawlers don’t click “load more” buttons, so the pages need ordinary links in sequence. Google no longer uses the old next and previous link tags.

How do you improve an ecommerce product page for SEO?

Give it what a shopper checks before buying, in a form search engines can read:

• A title of its own: Google’s starter guide describes a good title as unique to the page, clear and concise, and accurate about what the page holds.
• Words shoppers use: Google suggests product descriptions that match the terms shoppers search with, and category descriptions that cover the less specific searches.
• Photos with alt text: alt text explains the relationship between each image and the page, and product photos can bring shoppers in from Google Images.
• Price, stock, shipping and returns: Google says being clear on return and shipping policies improves a shopper’s trust.
• Reviews: Google suggests accepting ratings and reviews from customers, to help new shoppers understand a product.
• Markup that matches the page: with Product structured data, a result can show price, availability, review ratings and shipping, and Google asks for markup that matches the visible text on the page.

What doesn’t help: Google Search doesn’t use the keywords meta tag, repeating a phrase over and over is against its spam policies, and there’s no word count to hit, because length alone doesn’t matter for ranking.

What happens to sold-out products and empty categories?

Each case has its own answer:

• An empty category: Google says a category with no items should carry a noindex robots meta tag, and that if the site drops an empty category from search and browsing on its own, returning a 404 is worth considering.
• A product that sells out: the store marks it unavailable at once, but Merchant Center can lag behind, especially with feed files. Google suggests telling Merchant Center to update its copy of your product data from the website when the two disagree.
• A product that’s coming back: the page can stay up, with its availability set in the product markup, so it keeps the links and visits it has earned.
• A product dropped for good: a permanent redirect to its closest replacement, or to its category, sends visitors and search engines somewhere useful.

Where can a store’s products show up on Google?

Google lists several surfaces for ecommerce content:

• Search results: product and category pages, with richer results where the product markup qualifies.
• Images and Lens: product photos, and for Lens, product details sent through Google Merchant Center with product listings switched on.
• The Shopping tab: products uploaded to Merchant Center, which Google says is mandatory for Shopping tab listings and optional for ordinary search results.
• Business Profile and Maps: the business’s details on its profile, and products in Maps results when they’re uploaded with the location of the stock.

To increase a product’s eligibility for richer results on more of these surfaces, Google recommends both: structured data on the product pages and a feed uploaded to Merchant Center. For a smaller catalog that changes rarely, Merchant Center can build the product data from the pages themselves; for a large or fast-changing one, Google suggests uploading feed files, which gives more control. Your proposal says which of these surfaces the work covers. The paid placements on the same surfaces are ads, and we don’t manage paid ads.

Do ecommerce sites need SEO and PPC?

A store can run both, and the two don’t touch each other. In Google’s telling, paying for its ads does nothing for a site’s organic place, Google takes no money to include or rank a site, and showing up in organic results is free. An ad shows while you pay for it. A page that ranks carries no price per click, though keeping it there is continuing work.

Ecommerce marketing takes in more than either: search and shopping ads, email to past customers, social media, marketplaces and organic search. Each is paid for and measured in its own way. Our part is search: SEO, and GEO, which makes a business easier for AI answers to find, read and cite. We don’t manage paid ads, so if you run them, they stay with whoever runs them now. Search Console shows the searches behind your organic visits, which is worth setting beside the search terms in your ads account.

Why do we move a store into our own system first?

Because we do SEO on systems we build and run. When we take on a store built somewhere else, we rebuild it in our own system, and the monthly SEO runs there. We don’t work inside other platforms or their themes, apps and plugins. If you’d rather keep the store where it is and have it tuned from the inside, a specialist in your platform is the better call.

The move is planned to protect what the store has earned. Each product, category and page address either stays the same or gets a permanent redirect to its new page, and Google says 301 and other permanent redirects don’t cause a loss in PageRank. Google also says to expect rankings to fluctuate during a move, and to time it for lower traffic, which for a seasonal store means a quiet stretch of its year.

The move carries a one-time store migration fee, priced as its own line in your proposal, and the proposal names the system behind the catalog, the checkout and payments. For a store on Shopify, our Shopify SEO page sets out the market’s figures for moving a store at each level, and website migration covers moves between platforms.

Can AI answers find your products?

They draw on the same pages search does. By Google’s account, AI Overviews and AI Mode ask nothing beyond what Search already needs: a page cited as a supporting link must be in Google’s index and eligible for a snippet, and it needs no AI text file or special markup. Among the practices Google calls worthwhile are structured data that matches the visible text, and Merchant Center and Business Profile information kept up to date.

The switch for this sits in Search Console: the Search generative AI control, which reached every site on August 31, 2026 and starts at include. Set to exclude, it keeps a store’s links and content out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative features in Google Discover. Google says the control doesn’t override a choice to take part in Merchant Center. Visits from AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in Search Console’s Performance report, under the Web search type.

Our GEO work makes a store easier for AI answers to find, read and cite, and each month we count how often AI answers mention it. Whether a tool names your store is that tool’s decision, so we report what we see and never promise a mention.

What would we build for a store at each level?

What we would build depends on the catalog and the market. Three outlines, before any research:

• An established local seller: a category page for each product line, product pages with markup, a page for the shop with its address and hours, and articles that answer the questions buyers ask before they order.
• A multi-location or regional seller: the same, plus a page for each location or delivery area with what it offers and how to reach it, linked from the categories it serves.
• A national seller: a category structure planned for the whole catalog, rules for which filtered pages may be indexed, product markup across every product, and buying guides for the searches no category answers.

A store with a handful of products and most of its sales from repeat buyers may not need a monthly plan at all, and we’ll say so on the call. Our pricing page describes each level, and SEO pricing has the market’s monthly ranges and what moves them.

How is ecommerce SEO reported?

Against targets, never as promises. We do not guarantee search rankings, traffic, or uninterrupted uptime. What runs on a schedule is the work: weekly checks on the store, monthly checks on its links, a review each quarter, and a one-page report at each month’s end that puts leads first.

The figures come from the store’s own accounts. Search Console’s Performance report shows the searches that brought shoppers in, the pages they landed on and how often the store appeared, and visits from Google’s AI features are counted there too. Each target in your plan sits in the report beside the figure it reached.

If you sell online and want more of your orders to start in search, book a 15-minute call. Tell us what you sell and to whom, and we’ll tell you whether SEO is the right next step.