Ecommerce
Ecommerce SEO: category pages, product data and the details that sell
29 June 2026 · 9 min read · Coselli, Bournemouth
Shops lose most of their organic potential in architecture decisions made on day one. Categories, facets, product data and the schema that ties it together.
Ecommerce SEO is mostly an information architecture problem. Get the structure right and the content work becomes straightforward; get it wrong and you spend years fighting duplication.
Category pages do the heavy lifting
For most shops, category pages — not product pages — target the highest-value commercial terms. Treat them as landing pages: a real H1, 150–300 words of genuinely useful introduction above or below the grid, internal links to sub-categories and buying guides, and an FAQ answering sizing, delivery and returns questions.
Faceted navigation
Filters generate near-infinite URL combinations and are the single biggest cause of crawl waste in ecommerce. The rule of thumb:
| Facet | Treatment |
|---|---|
| High-demand (e.g. colour, size with real search volume) | Indexable static URL with unique copy |
| Low-demand combinations | Canonical to the parent category |
| Sort orders, pagination params, session IDs | Blocked or canonicalised, never indexed |
Product pages
- Write original descriptions. Manufacturer copy duplicated across a hundred retailers ranks for none of them.
- Include the full specification table — machines and buyers both use it.
- Show real reviews, real photos, delivery timescales and return terms.
- Answer the questions your support inbox actually receives.
Product schema
Mark up name, image, description, SKU, brand, price, currency, availability and aggregate rating — but only where those are genuinely on the page and accurate. Stale price or availability markup causes rich result suppression and, worse, disappointed clicks.
Out of stock and discontinued products
- 01Temporarily out of stock: keep the page live, mark availability accurately, offer alerts and alternatives.
- 02Permanently discontinued with a successor: 301 to the successor.
- 03Discontinued with no successor: 301 to the parent category, or keep the page with clear messaging if it still attracts search demand.
- 04Never mass-delete product URLs into 404s — that is a large, avoidable loss of accumulated equity.
Speed and conversion
Shops are image-heavy and script-heavy by nature. Lazy-load below-fold product imagery, defer marketing tags, and keep the add-to-basket interaction responsive. Every 100ms of latency in checkout has a measurable revenue cost.
Content that supports the shop
Buying guides, comparison pages and care instructions capture the research stage and give you natural internal links into categories. They are also the pages most likely to be cited by AI assistants when someone asks which product to buy.
Frequently asked
- Should category pages have text?
- Yes, but useful text — sizing help, material differences, buying advice — placed where it aids the shopper. Keyword-stuffed blocks below the fold add nothing.
- How do I stop filters wasting crawl budget?
- Index only facet combinations with genuine search demand, canonicalise the rest to the parent category, and block sort and pagination parameters in robots.txt.