Been grinding my ecommerce store but my SEO game's stuck. I know I need a boost to get real search trafficfor my ecomzy but tbh I have no clue how to even start. Product pages? Blogs? Links? Total confusion.
E-commerce SEO is not that different from normal SEO. You need to focus on : 1. Optimized hn (h1, h2, h3) 2. Use canonical for only a main product = running shoes. Any other variants, (colors, size, gender, etc...) should have a canonical pointing to the main page. If I'm not mistaken, Shopify already does a good job at this. 3. Use cross linking 4. Manage your "out of stock" and don't delete your page under no circumstance. Instead, propose a link to a similar product to avoid losing seo juice. 5. Use schema a lot 6. If you are targeting several countries, create different sitemaps and relevant content pages 7. Create shopping guides and a blog, linking them to the corresponding products. 8. Manage your crawl budget by avoiding useless crawling, in particular for search pages = /search, ?s=, ?q=. If your cms doesn't allow you to block their indexation, you can use AI to create a php script.
Short answer: yes, ecom SEO is its own beast, even though it shares DNA with regular SEO. @EAsports covered the fundamentals well — especially the canonical-for-variants point and the "don't delete OOS pages" rule, which are both massively underrated. I'd add three things that make ecom genuinely different in practice: 1. Crawl budget is a real constraint, not a theoretical one. Blogs almost never hit crawl budget walls. Ecom hits them constantly because of faceted navigation. Had a case where an 800-product site was generating ~140k crawlable URLs because of unblocked filter/sort combinations. Googlebot was spending 80% of its crawl on those parameters and only revisiting actual product pages every 3-4 weeks. Cleaning it up (canonicals on filter URLs, robots rules for sort parameters, parameter handling in GSC) cut product recrawl down to ~3 days. 2. Category pages often outrank product pages for commercial queries — and most newer owners don't realize it. "Running shoes" is a category query. "Nike Pegasus 41 size 9" is a product query. Most stores pour all their copywriting into individual product pages and ignore category pages, but the high-volume commercial keywords usually match to category landing pages in Google's eyes. Optimize category descriptions, breadcrumb schema, and internal linking with that hierarchy in mind. 3. Server-side caching strategy matters more on ecom than anywhere else. Logged-in vs logged-out users see different views, so generic full-page caching breaks. Saw a setup where TTFB was swinging between ~15ms (cache HIT) and ~800ms (cache MISS) just because session and currency cookies weren't being stripped from the cache key. Fixed once, every page got faster — including the category pages that don't actually change per user. Generic SEO guides rarely cover this, but it's where you find the biggest CWV wins after on-page basics are done. @salsal — for what it's worth, if I were starting from zero on a new store I'd fix crawl/index basics first, then go heavy on category page content, then product schema. Blog last — it compounds slowly and only pays off after the rest is solid.