Twenty-five steps that work on any platform, not just one. Most checklists come from Shopify or WooCommerce and only cover their own store. This one covers both, plus Magento and BigCommerce, in the order we work through them with clients.
Quick Answer
Start with steps 1 to 8. They cover keyword research and site structure, and they decide what everything else can achieve.
Steps 9 to 16 are your product and category pages, which is where most organic sales actually come from.
Steps 17 to 25 are technical, and they matter most on larger catalogues. If you have under 100 products, skim those and come back later.
eCommerce SEO in One Paragraph
eCommerce SEO is the work of getting more sales from search, rather than more visits. That distinction matters more than it sounds.
An online store can grow its traffic and lose money at the same time. Visitors who never intended to buy cost you hosting and tell you nothing.
So every step below connects to revenue, and where a step only helps traffic we say so.
Part One: Keyword Research and Strategy
1. Build a keyword map from your product range
Start from what you actually sell, listing every category and product type. Then write down how a customer would describe each one. Tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush add volume figures to that list. Assign each term to exactly one page.
2. Split terms by buying intent
Sort your terms into three groups. Buying terms name a product or model, while comparison terms use words like best or versus. Research terms ask how something works, and each group needs a different page type.
3. Check what already ranks
Search your top ten terms and look at what Google shows. If the first page is all category pages, a blog post will not rank there. Match the page type Google is already rewarding.
4. Find your competitors' gaps
Run two or three rivals through Ahrefs or Semrush and list the terms they rank for and you do not. Filter that list by commercial intent. Most of it will be noise, and a handful will be genuine openings.
Part Two: Site Architecture
5. Keep every product within three clicks
A shopper should reach any product in three clicks from your home page, and so should Google. Deep products get crawled less often and rank worse for it.
6. Design your category structure around demand
Build categories around how people search, not how your warehouse is organised. If shoppers search for waterproof jackets, that deserves a category even if your supplier files it under outerwear.
7. Sort out faceted navigation
Faceted navigation means the filters shoppers use to narrow a category, such as size and colour. Every combination can create a new address, which produces thousands of pages nobody searches for. Index the few filters with real demand and block the rest.
8. Add internal links between related products
Link related products, accessories and parent categories to each other. This spreads ranking strength and raises average order value at the same time. It is the cheapest step on this list.
Part Three: Category and Product Pages
9. Write real content on category pages
Category pages carry the most commercial search demand and usually the least content. Add a short introduction above the grid and a buying guide below it. Two hundred useful words beats a bare product list.
10. Replace manufacturer product descriptions
Supplier text appears word for word on hundreds of stores, so Google has no reason to pick yours. Rewrite your top sellers first, since those are where the money is.
11. Write titles and descriptions for clicks
Your title tag is the blue headline in Google. Keep it under 60 characters and lead with the product name. Meta descriptions do not affect rankings, and they strongly affect whether anyone clicks.
12. Fix your heading structure
Every page needs one H1, usually the product or category name, with subheadings running below it in order. Themes frequently get this wrong, so check rather than assume.
13. Handle product variants deliberately
Sizes and colours can each generate their own address, creating near-identical pages. Keep one page unless a variant has real search demand of its own. A colour may deserve its own page, and a size rarely does.
14. Add customer reviews to product pages
Reviews add unique content that competitors cannot copy, and they lift conversion at the same time. They also feed the star ratings that appear in search results.
15. Plan for out-of-stock products
Never delete a page for a temporarily unavailable item. Keep it live, say when it returns and offer some alternatives. Deleting throws away the rankings and links that page earned.
16. Redirect discontinued products properly
For items you will never restock, redirect to the closest replacement. Send a shopper looking for a discontinued kettle to a similar kettle, not to your home page.
Part Four: Technical SEO
17. Set up Google Search Console
Google Search Console shows what Google did with your store, so verify your site and submit your sitemap. Check the index coverage report monthly. Do this before anything else, so you have a baseline.
18. Connect Google Analytics with conversion tracking
Google Analytics shows what shoppers did after arriving, so turn on ecommerce tracking to attribute revenue to landing pages. Without it you are guessing about which pages earn.
19. Audit your site with a crawler
Screaming Frog and Sitebulb both crawl your store like a search engine would. They list broken links, redirect chains, duplicate titles and orphan pages in one report. Run this quarterly.
20. Fix duplicate content with canonical tags
A canonical tag tells Google which version of a page counts as the original. Ecommerce sites create duplicates constantly through filters, variants and pagination, so point each copy at the version you want ranked.
21. Compress your images
Product photography is the main reason stores load slowly, so resize before uploading and then compress with TinyPNG or similar. Add alt text describing what each image shows.
22. Improve your Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are three speed scores Google measures on real visits. Check them in Google PageSpeed Insights, then confirm in Search Console, since slow stores lose rankings and sales together.
23. Add product and review schema
Schema is code from Schema.org that describes your page to search engines. Product schema carries your price and stock. Product review schema carries your ratings, which is what earns the stars in search results.
24. Feed Google Merchant Center properly
Google Merchant Center holds your product feed, which powers Google Shopping and the free product listings. Missing GTINs and vague titles cap how often you appear. Fix the feed at source rather than working around it.
25. Earn links with content, not products
Nobody links to a product page, though buying guides, comparisons and original data all do. Those links lift the product pages they point at. This is the slowest step and the one competitors find hardest to copy.
eCommerce SEO Checklist for Shopify Stores
Shopify handles several of these for you and blocks a couple, so here is what changes on that platform.
Steps 17, 20 and 23 are largely done already. Shopify builds your sitemap, sets canonical tags and ships product schema in most themes.
Step 7 needs more work here. Shopify filters generate a lot of URLs, and you now control this through the robots.txt.liquid file in your theme.
Step 13 is the awkward one. Shopify creates variant addresses automatically, so check your canonical tags point at the main product page.
eCommerce SEO Checklist for WooCommerce
WooCommerce gives you more control and hands you more responsibility, and the differences sit in three places.
Step 22 matters far more here. Your hosting decides your speed, and cheap shared hosting caps everything else you do.
Steps 20 and 23 need a plugin. Yoast SEO and Rank Math both handle canonical tags and schema properly, and you only need one of them.
Step 6 is easier on WooCommerce. You can build any category structure you like, rather than working within a fixed pattern.
How to Run an eCommerce SEO Audit
An audit is this checklist run as an inspection rather than a task list. Set aside a day and work through it in this order.
- Crawl the store with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb
- Compare indexed pages against your real page count
- Check Core Web Vitals in Search Console
- Test three product pages in the Rich Results Test
- Review your top twenty category pages for content
- Export your rankings and note which pages earn nothing
Write the findings as a prioritised list rather than a report. Then fix them in order of expected revenue, not in order of how easy they are.
How Often Should You Audit?
Run a full audit twice a year on a store of any size. Check Search Console monthly for index coverage and Core Web Vitals. Crawl the site after any migration, redesign or theme change, because that is when things break quietly.
The Technical SEO Checklist for eCommerce Websites
Steps 17 to 24 above form a technical SEO checklist for ecommerce websites on their own. Here they are gathered together, since many people only need this half.
Crawling and indexing. Confirm Google can reach every product and is not wasting time on filters. Compare your indexed page count against your real one each month.
Duplicates. Check canonical tags across variants, filters and pagination, since those three create almost all ecommerce duplication.
Speed. Compress images first, then look at scripts and apps. Product photography causes most slow stores, and everything else is secondary.
Structured data. Product, review and breadcrumb markup, tested rather than assumed. Themes often ship incomplete schema that passes a glance and fails a test.
Redirects. No chains, no loops and no broken links from deleted products. Every old address should resolve in a single hop.
Feeds. Your Merchant Center feed should carry complete titles, GTINs, availability and shipping. Feed errors usually reveal product data problems worth fixing.
If You Also Have a Physical Shop
Retailers with a shop as well as a website have an advantage that most never use. Local search brings buyers who are ready now.
Claim and complete your Google Business Profile, which is the free listing that appears in Google Maps. Add your opening hours, real photographs and your product range.
Turn on local inventory if your platform supports it. Shoppers can then see that you have an item in stock nearby, which pure online rivals cannot match.
Build a proper page for each shop location with its address, parking and opening times. One page listing every branch will rank for none of them.
Collect reviews steadily on the Google Business Profile as well as on your products. The two do different jobs and both affect whether people buy.
Content That Earns Links to Your Store
Step 25 deserves more detail, because it is the step most stores skip entirely. Product pages almost never earn links on their own.
Buying guides answer the question a shopper asks before choosing. A guide to choosing a mattress firmness earns links that a mattress listing never will.
Comparison pages catch people deciding between two options. Name both honestly, including the one you do not sell, since that is what makes it credible.
Original data works better than anything else and takes the most effort. Your own sales figures, anonymised and turned into a trend, are genuinely new information.
Care and repair content keeps earning for years. How to clean, store or fix what you sell brings steady traffic and quiet links.
Link each of these pages to the categories they support. Content that sits alone earns links and passes none of that value on to your commercial pages.
Common Mistakes on eCommerce Sites
Deleting products that stopped selling. The page had rankings and links, and deleting throws both away, so redirect it to something similar instead.
Blocking pages you meant to noindex. Blocking in robots.txt stops Google crawling a page, so it never reads your noindex tag either.
Writing for the SEO plugin. Chasing a green light produces stiff, keyword heavy copy that shoppers dislike. Write for the person buying.
Ignoring internal search data. What people type into your own search box is free keyword research, and almost nobody looks at it.
Launching a redesign without a redirect map. This is the single fastest way to lose a store's organic revenue overnight.
Judging results after six weeks. Ecommerce SEO compounds over quarters, and a fortnight of data tells you nothing worth acting on.
What to Measure
Pick five numbers and review them monthly. Watching everything weekly leads to reacting to noise rather than to trends.
Organic revenue is the number that matters, and it is the one most reports leave out. Everything else is a leading indicator.
Impressions in Search Console move first when your work starts landing, so watch these before you watch rankings.
Index coverage shows which pages Google skipped and why. A rising excluded count usually means filters are leaking into the index.
Category page performance deserves its own view. These pages carry the most commercial demand, so track them separately from products.
Core Web Vitals from field data rather than a lab test. Search Console reports what real visitors experienced, which is what Google uses.
An eCommerce SEO Strategy for the Next Twelve Months
A checklist tells you what to do, and a strategy tells you in what order and why. Here is how we sequence these twenty-five steps across a year with a client.
Quarter one is repairs and measurement. Set up Search Console and Analytics, crawl the store, fix redirects and duplicates, then compress your images.
Nothing here looks exciting on a report, and all of it decides what the later work can achieve. Expect impressions to move before rankings do.
Quarter two is commercial pages. Rewrite your top twenty category pages and your fifty best-selling product descriptions, then add internal links between them.
This is where the first real revenue movement usually appears. Category pages respond faster than most people expect once they carry genuine content.
Quarter three is content and structured data. Publish buying guides for your main categories and complete your product and review schema across the catalogue.
Quarter four is authority. Promote the guides you published and earn links to them. Then start again at the audit with a year of data.
The order matters more than the speed. Stores that publish content before fixing their technical foundations usually waste both efforts at once.
Adapting the Checklist to Your Catalogue Size
The same twenty-five steps apply at every size, and their priority changes considerably. Work out which group you are in before starting.
Under 100 products. Do steps 9 to 16 by hand and skim the technical section. You can write every page yourself, which is a real advantage over larger rivals.
Between 100 and 1,000 products. This is where faceted navigation and duplicate variants start to matter, so steps 7, 13 and 20 become your priority.
Over 1,000 products. Page-by-page work stops being possible, so you need templates and rules. Crawl budget and index bloat become genuine constraints on your growth.
Over 10,000 products. Log file analysis joins the list, since you need to see where Googlebot actually spends its time. Prioritise by revenue rather than by search volume.
Questions to Ask Before You Start
Five questions worth answering before you begin. They decide which of the twenty-five steps will actually earn you money this year.
Which categories carry your margin? Rank your categories by profit rather than by revenue, then work on the profitable ones first.
What does a customer cost you elsewhere? If paid search costs you thirty pounds a customer, that number sets what organic work is worth.
Who is actually beating you? Search five of your main terms and note who appears. Sometimes it is a rival, and often it is a marketplace or a review site.
Can your platform do what you need? Some fixes need theme access or a developer, so find out before planning around them.
Who owns this work each week? A checklist without a named owner gets started in January and abandoned by March. Assign it properly.
Marketplaces and Where Your Store Fits
One thing this checklist cannot change is who else appears in your results. On many product searches you are competing with Amazon and eBay rather than with other shops.
You will not outrank a marketplace on a bare product name. Their authority is decades old and no amount of on-page work closes that gap.
What you can win is everything more specific than that. Long product names, comparison terms and buying questions all favour a specialist store over a marketplace listing.
So check the results before targeting a term. If the first page is all marketplaces, spend your effort on the questions those listings cannot answer. Specialist knowledge is the one advantage a marketplace cannot buy from you.
Where to Start If You Only Have a Week
Twenty-five steps is a lot, so if you only have a few days these five will produce the most.
- Step 17, set up Search Console so you can measure anything
- Step 9, add content to your top ten category pages
- Step 21, compress your images
- Step 23, check your product schema actually works
- Step 8, add internal links between related products
Those five take about a week between them. The rest can follow over the next quarter.
Working through this yourself?
Most of this list is doable in house with a crawler and some patience. If you would like someone to run the technical half, read about our eCommerce SEO and Shopify SEO services.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about ecommerce seo checklist.
