E-commerce SEO Guide 2026: Shopify, WooCommerce & BigCommerce
E-commerce SEO has unique challenges: duplicate content, thin product pages, and category cannibalisation. Here's how to solve all of them.
In an online store, the money isn't in the blog. It's in the category pages.
The category page catches commercial intent ("men's running shoes"), carries the most volume and converts best. It's also the most neglected, because the platform generates it automatically and nobody looks at it.
Categories: where you win
Put copy on them. Not 800 words stuffed into the footer. Two or three paragraphs at the top explaining what's in the category and how to choose. It helps the shopper and the ranking.
An H1 that describes the category, not the brand name.
A stable product order. If the order changes on every load, Google sees a different page each time.
Facets: where you lose
Filters generate URLs endlessly: colour × size × price × brand. Every combination is a new page Google crawls instead of crawling your actual products.
The rule: index combinations with search demand, block the rest. "Black running shoes" deserves a page. "Black running shoes size 43 under £60 sorted ascending" does not.
In practice: canonical to the base category for unimportant facets, plus robots.txt rules for parameters that shouldn't be crawled at all.
Products
Your own descriptions. The supplier's description is on 200 other stores. You don't need an essay — three specific sentences beat a copied paragraph.
Product schema with price, availability and reviews. It's one of the few schema types with a direct, visible effect in results.
Out-of-stock items: don't delete them if they're coming back. Keep the page and show alternatives. If they're gone for good, 301 to the category — not the homepage.
What to check monthly
How many product pages are indexed versus how many exist. A large gap almost always means crawl budget wasted on facets.
How many hours a week do you lose to repetitive work?
In 20 minutes on Zoom we work out which of them can run on their own. You leave with the answer, whether we work together or not.
Free call, no obligations. You leave with a concrete list of problems and automation opportunities, whether or not you choose to work with us.
