5 Ecommerce SEO Best Practices to Drive Site Traffic in 2025

Get the latest ecommerce SEO best practices for your website, including an SEO cheat sheet and expert tips for your online store.

According to an Ahrefs report, 96.55% of websites don’t actually get any organic traffic via Google. The key to being the other 3.45%—a business that shows up at the top of Google search results pages (SERPs)—is to leverage tried-and-true search engine optimization (SEO) tactics. 

So let’s look at some of the latest ecommerce SEO best practices and expert tips that will help you maximize views––and potential conversions––for your online store.

Ecommerce SEO cheat sheet 

If you’re unsure where to begin or what to do, start here with your no-frills, straightforward ecommerce SEO to-do list. 

• Make sure your products have descriptive titles and headings. Write useful, detailed descriptions on your product details pages (PDPs). Include everything shoppers need to know about your products in order to make a purchase decision.
• Collect and display reviews, as well as questions from users and their answers. You could build a designated FAQ page, for instance.
• Build collections. For groups of products with at least three to five products and search demand, build a collection. Optimize your collection page titles, descriptions, and headings.
• Make all collections accessible from the main nav. Link from the main navigation to all collections or most important collections, and make sure there are no orphaned pages. 
• Write blog articles for informational queries related to your products. Link to products and collections from those blog articles. 
• Use structured data. Structured data helps search engines understand the content on a page, so use it to mark up your content for better visibility in results. Examples include: using AggregateRating markup on product review ratings, product structured data markup on things like pricing, availability, shipping, and returns (automatically provided by Shopify), and Google Merchant Center sync. 
• Improve site speed. Make sure your site is optimized for speed and performance so that customers can quickly and easily access your products.
• Monitor search rankings. Monitor your search rankings regularly to ensure that your products are visible in search results. The best way to do this is with Google Search Console. Make sure to adjust your SEO strategy if your rankings start to dip.

📚 Read more: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Ecommerce SEO

5 ecommerce SEO best practices for 2025

1. Find the best keywords for your ecommerce shop
2. Build backlinks and internal links to different types of content
3. Set up Google Merchant Center and sync your product feed
4. Focus resources on getting collection pages to rank
5. Create a blog that gives you authority in your niche

Some of the top ecommerce SEO best practices to keep in mind in 2025 include choosing the right keywords and developing content to target those resources. Learn more about those best practices and more below.

1. Find the best keywords for your ecommerce shop

Keyword research will uncover the words that people enter into Google when seeking a brand or product like yours. Once you uncover those keywords (also known as search terms), you’ll incorporate them into your website to help different pages rank as high as possible in Google search results. 

Research the best keywords to target

A keyword research tool will help you identify the best keywords for your business to target. Ubersuggest is a free tool with upgrade options, as is the Moz Keyword Explorer. While Ahrefs doesn’t offer a free version, the $99 per month option provides everything you need to search for keywords and track your rankings.

Once you’ve chosen a tool, you’ll identify the words people most often search for when they’re looking to buy a product that you sell.

An easy way to do that is to search your product on Google. Find which business is ranking at the top of results and then plug it into a tool, see what keywords they rank for, and implement a similar strategy. For example, searching for “rosette shaped succulents for sale” generates search results where the brand Succulents Box ranks first. 

Succulents Box ranks highly because of its ecommerce SEO tactics. Succulents Box

📚 Learn more: Keyword Research for Ecommerce: A Beginner’s Guide

Ensure the keywords you found have purchase intent

There are a multitude of reasons why someone searches for something online. Each reason is known as a particular type of search intent. What you’re looking for are the people searching with intent to buy. For example, someone might Google “prickly pear cactus” because they’re looking for photos of one, or they might do so because they want to purchase one for their garden.

To uncover the keywords that actually have purchase intent behind them, you need to look at what keywords Google ranks product and collection website pages for. If Google is ranking product and collection pages for that keyword, then you know it’s buying intent.

For example, the keyword “prickly pear cactus” generates images, a definition explaining what they are, and care instructions. A search for the keyword “prickly pear cactus for sale,” on the other hand, yields collection pages. So, that’s the keyword with purchase intent behind it, and the keyword you’d need to target.

Place keywords strategically across your website

Now that you’ve uncovered a set of keywords aligned to the different products you sell, you’ll need to place them strategically on different pages on your website and build content around them. 

That means placing keywords in:

• The meta title: The page title that shows up in results on search engines like Google.
• The meta description of a page: The description that shows up under a meta title in search engine results.
• The H1 headline of a page: The title that readers see at the top of a page like a blog post or landing page.
• A blog post around the topic: This could be a post defining a topic, explaining a how to, etc.
• The description box on a collection or product page: A box that provides more information about a singular product or collection of products.
• The URL of the page: The keyword goes at the end, like this: https://www.yourshop.com/the-keyword-only.

You can do all of this in the back end editing section of your ecommerce website. While it’s important to ensure your keywords are strategically placed, avoid overuse—a practice known as keyword stuffing. In other words, when you’re incorporating keywords, make sure they don’t impact the flow or readability of your content. 

Add further context about your products on each collection page, like in this Succulents Box example. Succulents Box

Here’s how keywords might translate across different parts of your ecommerce store: 

• Product pages show single products, e.g. “ruby glow succulent.”
• Collection pages show a minimum of three to five products that share a common characteristic, e.g. “indoor succulents.”
• Blog articles share informational content, e.g. “How often should I water indoor succulents?”

Add keywords to every meta title

A meta title is the title of your page that shows up on the result page of a search engine like Google. Optimizing your meta titles by adding keywords to them is a low-effort, high-reward SEO fix you can make to your site.

People often say you don’t see SEO results for six months, but there are times when the biggest jump in results are from the first month just because the meta title is so important.

You should be able to set a meta title for any page on your website on the back end of the ecommerce platform you use. On Shopify, within your admin dashboard, navigate to the page you need to edit in the sidebar and scroll down to the “search engine listing preview” at the bottom of the page.

It looks like this:

Here’s what optimizing meta titles and descriptions looks like from the back end of a Shopify store. Shopify

For example, Succulents Box ranks on the first SERP for the term “tulip prickly pear cactus for sale.” The meta title for the page that ranks is “Tulip Prickly Pear Cactus | Succulent Care Instruction.” The brand likely added “succulent care instruction” to capture the people looking for how to care for the succulent in addition to those looking to purchase one.

Succulents Box does a nice job optimizing its meta titles to include the keywords it wants to rank for. Succulents Box

Similar to adding the keywords you’re targeting to meta titles, an SEO best practice is to add that keyword to the corresponding meta description as well.

📄 Learn more: How To Write Meta Descriptions: Tips and Examples 2025

2. Build backlinks and internal links to different types of content

Link building involves reaching out to different brands and publications online and seeing if they will link to a page on your website from their website. The more backlinks you have, the more credible you are to Google, since the search engine rewards that credibility with a higher position in search results. In short: If a lot of other folks trust your content and see it as worthy of a link, Google will as well.

Building backlinks to your website is an important ecommerce SEO best practice. There are tons of ways to do this, so perusing a list of link building ideas is a great way to get started. 

Cultivating relationships with other brands is one of the most powerful backlink building strategies—as long as you create top-notch content that’s worth linking to. 

This is where creating content for a blog comes in. While other brands might not want to link to a collection page that shows a list of the products you have for sale, they may get excited about a helpful blog post. For example, they’ll be more likely to link to a blog post that shares succulent care tips than they are a collection page of succulents. You’ll also want to link to your collection and/or product pages from that blog post, which can help pass along those link signals. 

Link building requires outreach and relationship building, but internal linking involves creating links between pages. That means linking to one of your blog posts from a different blog post or linking to a collection page from a relevant blog post. Both types of links are effective in helping pages rank.

3. Set up Google Merchant Center and sync your product feed

Setting up Google Merchant Center and syncing your product feed with your store is an essential step you’ll need to take in order to rank organic product listings on Google. This will allow your listings to show up in Google Organic Product Grids, which have started to take up prime real estate in search results. 

Here’s how to do it. 

1. Navigate to the Google Merchant Center sign up page. Google will ask you a couple of questions about your business, like if you sell products online and whether or not you have a retail store. If you’re selling online, Google will ask you for your shop’s website. 
2. Select the checkout options that you offer. 
3. Add products. You can do this automatically or manually. In order to choose the automatic option, you’ll need to follow Google’s steps to add structured data to your online store.
4. Verify your online store by linking it to your Google Merchant Center account. 
5. Link your Shopify account to your Google Merchant Center account. 

4. Focus resources on getting collection pages to rank

A product page features a singular product, like a blue candle cactus. A collection page shows all of the products in a category, like all plants within the cactus family. While it’s challenging to get product pages on page one, collection pages are much easier to rank.

Google tends to prefer ranking collection pages for more generic non-branded queries, like “indoor succulents.” This is because collection pages provide searchers with more options. Product pages often rank for more specific queries, like “ruby glow succulent.”

The collection pages can respond really well to links, so it’s better to spend your resources ranking those. Because there’s so much you can do SEO-wise, if you’re doing it yourself, focus your energy on helping collection pages show up in search results rather than product pages, which can become a dead end.

For example, Urban Americana, a vintage midcentury modern shop in Long Beach, California, has found success with this ecommerce SEO best practice. Its collection page for all midcentury modern furniture ranks on the first page of Google for the keyword “vintage mid century modern furniture.”

Urban Americana ranks on the first page of Google for its all furniture collection page. Google

A big benefit of ranking a collection versus a product page is that shoppers can see your entire inventory for a certain category. It gives them more options, rather than sending them to a single product page where they have only one choice.

💡 It’s essential to link to collection pages in the main navigation of your online store. If you have too many collections to link to them all in the main navigation, then link to related collections that are not featured in the nav from collections that are featured in the nav. This is sort of like creating sub-collections or child collections. 

5. Create a blog that gives you authority in your niche

Creating a blog is an important part of an ecommerce SEO strategy, but not for the reasons you might think. Rather than thinking about blog traffic as something that drives sales, the real benefit of having a blog is that it creates something called topical relevance.

Google likes ranking sites that are authoritative in their space. That could mean having a really good link profile. It could also mean having very high quality content that answers all the questions people have about a particular product.

For example, plant shop Succulents Box creates short pieces of content around informational keywords that relate to succulent care, such as: 

• When should I water my succulents?
• How to deal with transplant shock
• Can succulents grow well in sand?

Once you create these pieces of content, add an internal link from each blog post to the corresponding collection. For example, you might link the article about growing succulents in sand to a collection page of succulents that thrive in sandy soil.

By doing that, you create that layer of relevancy and those blogs help the collection pages rank.

Succulents Box uses its blog to tackle shorter, more granular topics, rather than publishing comprehensive guides. Succulents Box

A blog post doesn’t need to be a long, in-depth piece of writing. In fact, shorter, more-specific pieces can perform better. Google likes granular content. Instead of creating an ultimate guide and ranking for all these keywords, it’s actually easier and more effective to create separate articles for each subject, so that your article is hyper focused on one topic.

That means ditching the ultimate guide to succulent care, for example, and opting for articles that tackle smaller sub-topics—a practice known in the SEO world as targeting long-tail keywords. Succulents Box, for example, publishes short blog posts about caring for specific varieties of succulents:

• How to care for the kalanchoe flapjacks succulent
• How to care for fishbone cactus
• How to care for echeveria raindrops

✅ Check all the boxes: Want to Rank Your Store? Get On Page One With This SEO Checklist

The benefits of investing in SEO for ecommerce 

There are many advantages to creating an intentional ecommerce SEO strategy, including:

• Achieving long-term results. Once you invest time and resources in SEO, or choose to hire an agency to help you out, you don’t have to keep “paying to play.” As your website pages start to show up at the top of search results, the traffic you get to those pages grows over time. Showing up top gives your brand more credibility, gets you the most eyeballs, and means you’ll make more sales.
• Targeting high-intent shoppers. With SEO, you can bring in visitors who will convert at a higher percentage because there’s intent behind those keywords. It’s higher quality, more predictable traffic. For example, if your brand shows up number one on Google for a search for rare succulents, people are more likely to buy plants from you as opposed to your competitors. 

Providing more predictable and cost-effective traffic. SEO can have a strong impact on your revenue, brand awareness, and brand trust if you take the time to invest in it. While paid ads can seem more immediate, they’re extremely expensive and unreliable, and when you stop paying for them, you’ll stop seeing traffic and conversions. SEO is a much more stable way to send shoppers who have a high intent to purchase to your website. It’s a reliable, steady traffic source that will create a much stronger foundation for your business long term. 

📙 Get the in-depth overview: What is SEO Marketing and How Does it Work?

Ecommerce SEO best practices FAQ

How do I optimize SEO for ecommerce?

To optimize SEO for ecommerce:

• Use descriptive titles and headings for your products.
• Encourage and display customer reviews and common Q&As.
• Create and strategically link to product collections.
• Ensure all pages are accessible via the main navigation.
• Publish informational blog posts linking back to products and collections.
• Implement structured data markup.
• Improve website loading speed.
• Regularly monitor rankings and update SEO strategies accordingly.

How does SEO work for ecommerce?

SEO for ecommerce involves optimizing your online store to help search engines find, index, and rank it effectively. This includes refining product and category page content, ensuring mobile responsiveness, using relevant keywords, building backlinks, optimizing multimedia, and measuring performance regularly to refine strategies.

What are your top 5 SEO recommendations?

1. Conduct keyword research tailored to your ecommerce niche.
2. Build both internal and external links to important pages.
3. Integrate Google Merchant Center and sync your product feed.
4. Prioritize ranking collection/category pages.
5. Maintain a blog to build domain authority in your market.