Why e-commerce SEO is a different problem from a brochure site
A five-page business site has five things to get right. A catalogue with two thousand products has two thousand near-identical templates, which means every small mistake, a missing meta description, an unoptimised image, a thin description, repeats itself two thousand times. E-commerce SEO is mostly a prioritisation problem: deciding which fix, applied once at the template level, produces the largest aggregate gain.
Category and product URL structure
Keep the URL hierarchy shallow and logical: a category, then a product, without unnecessary intermediate folders. Filter and sort parameters, colour, size, price range, should not generate new indexable URLs for every combination, since that produces thousands of near-duplicate pages competing against each other for the same keyword research target instead of consolidating authority onto one canonical version.
Product page content that actually ranks
Manufacturer copy pasted unchanged across hundreds of competing stores gives Google nothing to differentiate your page with. A genuinely unique description, even a few original sentences on sourcing, sizing or use case, is what lets a product page compete rather than blend into an identical crowd of resellers.
Structured data for products
Product schema paired with Offer data is the highest-impact type of structured data available to a store, since it is what makes a listing eligible to show price, availability and rating directly in the search result. Keep it accurate: schema describing stock or pricing that does not match the live page is a policy violation, not a shortcut.
Handling out-of-stock and discontinued products
Keep an out-of-stock page live with clear messaging rather than deleting it, unless the product is genuinely gone for good. A live page keeps the ranking history and backlinks it has already earned and can recover the moment stock returns. A deleted page has to earn all of that back from zero.
Site speed at scale
A single unoptimised hero image on a product template repeats its cost across every product using that template, which is why Core Web Vitals matter more for a catalogue than for almost any other site type. Fixing image compression and lazy-loading once at the template level is usually the single highest-leverage technical change available to an online store.
The honest summary
Almost none of this is complicated on its own. What makes e-commerce SEO hard is scale: the same small mistake compounding across thousands of pages, and the same small fix paying off across all of them at once. Prioritise by what repeats, not by what feels most urgent on any single page.