Marketing

SEO for online stores: a practical guide

SEO for online stores comes down to one thing: shoppers find your products in Google at the moment they want to buy. You do not need an agency for the basics. This guide walks you through keywords per category and product, category pages, product texts, images, internal links, technical basics, structured data, Google Merchant Center, reviews, local search and measuring your results.

Updated 20 October 2026 10 min read
In short
  • Pick one main search term per category and per product, based on the words your customers use.
  • Category pages are usually your strongest ranking pages, so give them a clear name and a short, useful introduction.
  • Write your own product texts. A copied supplier description adds nothing Google has not seen elsewhere.
  • Keep sold out products online and marked out of stock, and redirect discontinued products to a real successor.
  • Measure in Google Search Console and improve the pages that already get impressions.

Keyword research per category and product

Start with how your customers search, not with the names you use internally. Google's SEO starter guide points out that experts and beginners often use different words for the same product. A cyclist searches for “gravel bike”, a beginner for “bike for dirt roads”. Work from the top down. Categories get the broad terms with the most searches, such as “women's running shoes”. Products get the specific terms: brand, model, size or colour, such as “Brooks Ghost 16 women”. Fewer people search for those, but they are much closer to buying. Give each page one main term and use it in the title, the heading and the first lines of text. Do not aim two pages at the same term, or they compete with each other. Google recognises related wording on its own, so you do not need to cram in every variation.

Where to find search terms

  • The suggestions Google shows while you type
  • Questions customers ask by email, phone or in the shop
  • The words in your order history and your shop's search box
  • The queries in Google Search Console, once your shop is live
  • The category names that large shops in your market use
Good to know
On SitePack every page has its own focus keyword, SEO title and meta description. The tips under these fields score your title, description and text, and a preview shows how the page will look in Google.

Category pages are your main ranking pages

For most online stores the category pages bring in the most search traffic. Someone searching for “oak dining tables” wants to compare, not land on one table. A category page with a good choice answers that search better than a single product. Treat each category like a landing page. Give it a name that matches the search term, a short introduction and a web address that says what is on it, such as /oak-dining-tables rather than /cat-112. Google's own ecommerce guidance recommends descriptive words in URL paths instead of only numbers. Keep the structure logical: main categories with subcategories under them, like the aisles and shelves of a physical shop. Avoid near-identical categories that compete for the same search term.

A strong category page has

  • A name that matches what people search for
  • A short introduction: who it is for and how to choose
  • Enough products to compare
  • Filters for what matters, such as size or material
  • A link from your main menu
Good to know
In SitePack you build main categories and subcategories under Products, and you can merge duplicate categories without losing the linked products. Filters on category pages come from your product specifications, and a Category menu element in the footer keeps links to your main categories up to date.

Product titles and descriptions

A product title should say what the product is, in the words people search with: brand, product type, model and the one property that matters most. “Brooks Ghost 16 running shoe women” works better than “Ghost 16” or a title full of capitals. The description is where most shops lose out. Many use the supplier's text, so the same paragraph appears on dozens of sites. Google's guidance on helpful content asks whether a page avoids simply copying or rewriting other sources and adds real value of its own. A copied supplier text does neither. You do not need long texts. Google says word count on its own does not affect rankings. What helps is information a shopper needs and cannot find elsewhere: who the product suits, how it fits or feels, what you noticed when you used it, and an honest word on what it is not good at. Start with your best sellers. Fifty texts rewritten properly do more than five hundred small tweaks.

Write product texts that sell

  • Open with the main benefit in one or two sentences
  • Answer the questions customers really ask
  • Put specifications in a list: size, material, weight, care
  • Add your own experience or tips from the shop
  • Write a separate text for every language you sell in
Good to know
Selling abroad? Write or check product texts per language instead of publishing a raw machine translation. In SitePack each language gets its own web address, hreflang tags and translated SEO title and description, and your sitemap lists every language version.

Images and alt text

Shoppers buy with their eyes, and your photos can also be found through Google Images. Use sharp photos from several angles and make the first image your clearest one: in SitePack the first image you upload becomes the thumbnail in listings. Give every image a short alt text that describes what is on it. Google calls alt text the most important metadata for images. Keep it descriptive, such as “black leather ankle boot with side zip”, and do not stuff it with keywords. Google warns that this hurts users and can look like spam. File names help too. Google prefers a short, descriptive name like black-ankle-boot.jpg over IMG00023.JPG. Place images close to the text they belong to, so Google understands what they show.
  • Sharp photos from several angles
  • A descriptive file name before you upload
  • A short alt text for every image
  • One image per variant, so the right colour shows
  • Compressed files in a modern format such as WebP or AVIF
Good to know
In SitePack you set alt text in the media library. Screen readers read it aloud and it shows when an image fails to load. The media library accepts JPG, PNG, GIF, WebP and AVIF files up to 10 MB.

Internal links and breadcrumbs

Google finds and weighs your pages mostly through links. Its ecommerce guidance recommends a clear path: from the menu to categories, from categories to subcategories and from there to products. Google partly infers how important a page is from the number of internal links pointing to it, and it strongly recommends linking to every product you want indexed. So link to key categories from the menu and the home page, feature best sellers on the home page, and link from blog posts to the categories they are about. Use link text that says where the link goes, such as “view all oak dining tables”, not “click here”. Breadcrumbs show where a page sits in your shop, for example Home > Furniture > Tables > Oak dining tables. They help visitors move up a level, and Google can use breadcrumb markup to place the page in its search results. Google advises basing them on the path a typical visitor takes, not on your URL structure.
  • Main categories in the menu
  • Best sellers and key categories on the home page
  • Related products on each product page
  • Links from blog posts to matching categories
  • Descriptive link text instead of “click here”

Technical basics: speed, mobile, sitemap, variants and stock

Google indexes and ranks your shop using the mobile version of your pages, so check every page on a phone. The mobile version needs the same content as desktop. You can tuck text into tabs or accordions, but do not leave it out. Speed matters for shoppers and for search. Google's Core Web Vitals give clear targets: the main content appears within about 2.5 seconds, the page responds to a tap within 200 milliseconds and the layout does not jump (a shift score below 0.1). Large image files slow a page down, so compress them before you upload. Variants such as size and colour should not become competing pages. Google recommends that separate variant pages point their canonical tag to the main product. In SitePack variants live inside one product, each with its own price, stock, EAN and image, so one product page covers them all. For sold out products Google advises keeping the page and marking it out of stock instead of removing it. If a product is gone for good and has a real successor, add a 301 redirect to it. If there is none, let the page return a not found error: Google then removes it from its index.

Technical checklist

  • Pages work well on a phone
  • Images compressed, main content loads fast
  • A sitemap with every page you want found
  • One URL per product, with the variants inside it
  • Sold out products stay online, marked out of stock
  • A 301 redirect for every renamed or removed page
Good to know
SitePack generates canonical URLs, a sitemap and structured metadata for you. When you change a product's web address the old one stops working, so add a 301 redirect under Content > Redirects. SitePack counts how often each redirect is used.

Structured data, Google Merchant Center and reviews

Structured data is code that tells Google exactly what is on a page: this is a product, this is the price, it is in stock. Google says it is not required to appear in search, but it can make product pages eligible for rich results with price, availability, shipping and returns. For merchant listings Google needs at least a product name, an image, a price above zero and a currency. Google Merchant Center is the second route. To appear in the Shopping tab you need to take part in Merchant Center. Google notes that a product feed helps it learn about all your products, because crawling can miss some. Smaller shops whose range rarely changes can use an automatic feed that Merchant Center builds from crawled pages. Structured data on your pages also helps Merchant Center check your feed. Reviews build trust. Ask every customer for one, on your Google Business Profile or an independent review site. One rule to know: on pages about your own business, Google does not show review stars for reviews you control yourself, and that includes Google reviews embedded through a widget. Never write or buy fake reviews.
  • Test product pages with Google's Rich Results Test
  • Keep price and stock the same on your site and in your feed
  • Fill in your return policy and contact details
  • Ask customers for a review after delivery
  • Link your review profile from your website
Good to know
Under Settings > My company in SitePack you describe your business for search engines: your type of organisation, contact details, return policy and links to profiles such as your Google Business Profile or a review site. The payment methods switched on in your store are passed on automatically.

Local SEO and measuring with Google Search Console

Do you also have a physical shop? Then local searches such as “bike shop Utrecht” matter. Keep your address and opening hours identical everywhere: on your website, on your Google Business Profile and in other listings. Google can use structured business details such as address, opening hours and phone number to show a business in a knowledge panel on Search and Maps. In SitePack you manage these under Settings > Locations, and linked contact and opening hours elements update across your site by themselves. Then measure. Google Search Console is free and shows how your shop performs in Google. Verify your site, submit your sitemap and check the Performance report every month: which search terms bring impressions and clicks, and which pages they land on. Pages with many impressions but few clicks often need a better title or description. Search Console also lists pages Google could not index, such as empty pages flagged as soft 404s, and with URL Inspection you can ask Google to recrawl a page you improved.

Your monthly routine

  • Check clicks and impressions per page
  • Improve titles of pages with many impressions and few clicks
  • Fix indexing errors and broken links
  • Add redirects for removed products
  • Rewrite the next batch of supplier texts
Good to know
SEO is slow work. Judge your changes over months, not days, and change one thing at a time so you can see what worked.

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