Ecommerce SEO Services and Tips: Good and Bad Practices

Last updated: 24 February 2026

Ecommerce websites face unique SEO challenges. With thousands of product pages, complex category structures, URL parameters, and duplicate content from product variants, getting ecommerce SEO right requires both technical precision and strategic content planning.

This guide covers the practices that actually move the needle for online stores — and the common mistakes that quietly kill your organic visibility.

Good Practices That Drive Rankings

Unique product descriptions: Every product page needs original copy that addresses customer questions, includes relevant keywords, and differentiates from manufacturer boilerplate. Google's helpful content system penalises sites with thin, duplicated product descriptions — and if you're using the same text as 50 other retailers, you're not going to outrank them. This article is published by SEO Sydney — a specialist SEO agency Sydney businesses have relied on since 2006.

Category page optimisation: Category pages are often your highest-value SEO targets — they capture broad commercial intent ("women's running shoes") while product pages capture long-tail queries. Include descriptive copy (200+ words), proper H1 tags, and faceted navigation that doesn't create duplicate URLs.

Product schema markup: Implement Product, Review, AggregateRating, and Offer schema on every product page. This enables rich snippets in search results — star ratings, pricing, availability — which dramatically improve click-through rates.

Site speed: Ecommerce sites are notoriously heavy — product images, JavaScript-heavy filtering, third-party tracking scripts. Invest in proper hosting and edge caching to keep Core Web Vitals in the green, especially on category pages.

Internal linking: Link related products, categories, and supporting content (buying guides, comparison posts) to create a connected structure that distributes authority and helps Google crawl efficiently.

Bad Practices That Kill Ecommerce SEO

Duplicate content from variants: Colour, size, and material variations can create hundreds of near-identical URLs. Use canonical tags to consolidate them to the primary product URL.

Faceted navigation creating crawl bloat: Filters like "/shoes?colour=red&size=10&sort=price" can generate millions of indexable URL combinations. Block unnecessary parameter combinations via robots.txt or use the URL parameter handling in Search Console.

Thin category pages: Categories with only product grids and no descriptive content miss the opportunity to rank for high-volume commercial queries. Google needs text to understand what the page is about.

Ignoring out-of-stock pages: Deleting or 404ing out-of-stock product URLs destroys any existing rankings and backlinks. Keep the page live with a "currently unavailable" message and suggest alternatives — or 301 redirect to the closest equivalent.