E-Commerce SEO

Your store is open. Google just does not know what you sell yet.

An online store has a problem that a service business does not. A plumber has one homepage and a handful of service pages. A store selling candles has 60 product pages, eight category pages, filter combinations generating hundreds of duplicate URLs, and a checkout flow that search engines cannot see behind the login. The sheer volume of pages creates SEO problems that do not exist on a standard five-page website.

E-commerce SEO is the work that makes all of those product and category pages visible, indexable, and rankable. It covers product titles and descriptions written around the terms people actually search for, category pages structured to capture broader shopping queries, schema markup that feeds Google the price, availability, and review data it needs to generate rich results, and a site architecture that does not bury your best-selling products four clicks deep.

This is a different discipline from local SEO or on-page SEO for a service site. The scale is larger, the technical requirements are more specific, and the competition includes marketplaces like Amazon and eBay that already dominate product search results.

Shopify stores have their own SEO rulebook

I build e-commerce sites on Shopify, and Shopify handles a lot of the infrastructure well (hosting, SSL, mobile responsiveness, basic sitemap generation). But it also creates specific SEO challenges that most store owners never realise are there.

Shopify generates a duplicate URL for every product that sits in a collection. A single product can have /products/soy-candle-vanilla and /collections/candles/products/soy-candle-vanilla both live at the same time. Without canonical tags pointing Google to the right version, those pages compete against each other instead of working together.

Collection pages default to thin content. Shopify shows the product grid and nothing else unless you add descriptive text above or below it. Google sees a page full of images and prices with no written context about what the collection is or who it is for. That page will not rank for "soy candles UK" if it does not contain those words anywhere.

Shopify's URL structure is locked to /products/ and /collections/. You cannot change it. That means the SEO strategy has to work within those constraints rather than designing a perfect URL hierarchy from scratch the way I would with a hand-coded brochure site or bespoke build.

These are solvable problems, but they require someone who understands both the platform and the SEO. Most Shopify store owners either ignore them entirely or pay a general SEO agency that treats the store like a WordPress blog and misses the platform-specific issues.

What e-commerce SEO work looks like in practice

There is no standard checklist I can paste here because every store is different. A shop with 15 products and a clear niche has a completely different SEO profile from one with 500 SKUs across 30 categories. But the areas I typically work across include the following.

Product pages need unique titles and descriptions that match buying-intent search terms. "Vanilla Soy Candle 200ml" is a product name, not a search term. "Hand-Poured Vanilla Soy Candle, 200ml, 40-Hour Burn Time" is closer to what someone types into Google when they are ready to buy.

Category pages need written content that tells Google (and the visitor) what the collection contains and why it matters. This is where broader terms get targeted: "soy candles," "scented candles UK," "eco-friendly candles." A well-written category page can rank for terms that individual products cannot.

Product schema (structured data) feeds Google the information it needs to show your products directly in search results with price, availability, star ratings, and stock status. This is the difference between a plain blue link and a rich result that stands out on the page.

Internal linking between related products, between categories and their products, and between blog content and product pages builds the kind of interconnected structure that Google uses to understand what your store is about and which pages matter most.

This is not part of the standard Growth plan

The Growth plan at £380 a month is built around service businesses: a hand-coded website with local SEO, keyword research, location pages, and Google Business Profile optimisation. It works because the site is small, the page count is manageable, and the SEO targets are geographic.

E-commerce SEO operates at a different scale. A store with 100 products needs ongoing product page optimisation, collection page content, technical SEO monitoring for crawl issues specific to Shopify, and regular review of search performance at the individual product level. That volume of work does not fit into a fixed monthly plan designed for a five-to-fifteen page service site.

So e-commerce SEO is quoted on a per-project basis. I look at the store size, the current state of the SEO, the competitive landscape for the product categories, and the scope of work needed. Then I put together a proposal with a clear monthly price and a defined set of deliverables. No guessing, no open-ended retainers that run indefinitely without reporting.

If you already have a Shopify store and want to know where it stands, I will review the current SEO setup and tell you what is working, what is not, and what the priorities should be. That initial review does not cost anything.

When e-commerce SEO is worth the investment and when it is not

Spending money on SEO for a brand new store with ten products and no existing traffic is usually premature. The first job is getting the store live, getting the product pages right, and generating initial sales through other channels (social, paid ads, word of mouth). SEO compounds over time, but it needs something to compound from.

E-commerce SEO makes sense when the store is established, the products are proven, and the bottleneck is visibility. When you know people want what you sell but they are finding your competitors on Google instead. When your paid ad costs keep climbing and you want an organic channel that does not charge you per click. When your category pages sit on page four and you know they could rank if someone actually optimised them.

That is the point where the investment has a clear return, and that is when I would recommend starting the work.

Monday to Sunday: 24 hours

Call, Text or WhatsApp us anytime
for a free consultation call.