Quick Summary
Online businesses lose sales every day due to technical SEO issues. A research study finds that over 67% of companies lose business due to a poor website and technical SEO issues.
Among those, the most common problem is that users cannot find the product they are looking for. The second most common issue is that the website loads so slowly that users leave before completing a purchase. These scenarios depict the importance of SEO for eCommerce websites.
So, when your eCommerce website has strong technical SEO, search engines crawl your pages faster. When technical SEO aspects of your eCommerce website are well optimized, your products can rank higher. And most importantly, your customers have a better experience.
The result is more traffic, conversions, and revenue. This article breaks down technical SEO for eCommerce into practical, actionable steps you can implement right now.
The most basic definition is to give search engines the information they need to find, crawl, and rank your pages. It does not focus on writing better product descriptions or optimizing keywords. Instead, it provides search engines with all the technical standards required to show our content in the best, fastest, and simplest way possible. Basically, technical SEO is different from content SEO.
eCommerce Technical SEO covers six main areas:
Without these pieces in place, even great products get buried in search results.
“Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.”
– Phil Frost
Over 53% of mobile users abandon sites that take longer than three seconds to load.
For eCommerce, a 1-second delay in page load time causes a drop in conversions. This further means a loss of sales as customers do not wait around.
Search engines now treat technical SEO as a ranking factor. Google specifically rewards fast, mobile-friendly websites with better search positions. Websites that meet Google’s performance standards rank 1% higher than the average. Meanwhile, slow websites rank 3.7% lower than fast ones.
This means technical SEO is no longer optional. It is a necessity.
Search engines use automated bots called crawlers to discover and index your website. Understanding how these bots work can help in optimizing your website for them. There are 3 main phases in which this works:
After this, on-page SEO for an eCommerce website is very important, as is off-page SEO. Check out our article on the benefits of eCommerce SEO to know more about it.
Now that you know about these three terms, it is important to know about the crawl budget. Crawl budget is the number of pages Google crawls on your website in a specific timeframe. For large websites with 10,000+ pages, this budget is limited. If you do not manage it well, Google will crawl your low-value pages and miss the best products.
The solution is simple and strategic. Organize your website so that search engines prioritize high-value pages, such as products and categories. Block/disavow low-value pages. Make your structure easy to crawl. When you do this, more of your crawl budget goes toward pages that actually generate revenue.
Here are a few technical SEO tips for eCommerce websites that you can implement to get better rankings.
Your website structure is how visitors will find your store. It is also how search engines know your content hierarchy. A good eCommerce website structure looks like this:
Homepage → Categories → Product Pages
Or
Homepage → Product Categories → Subcategories → Product Pages
This way tells search engines what exact pages are important. Category pages are more important than product pages (in terms of crawl priority). The homepage is most important overall.
Instead of keeping your URL or slug pattern like this:
yourstore.com/p?id=12345
Use this:
yourstore.com/mens-clothes/jackets/croison-leather-jacket-black
The second URL tells both users and search engines exactly what they are looking at and where they are. It’s keyword-specific, contextual, logical, and clean.
Here are URL best practices for eCommerce:
A well-structured website saves crawl budget and helps search engines better understand your content.
This is where many eCommerce websites fail. Most online stores create multiple (sometimes even hundreds) of duplicate pages by accident.
In most cases, the product filters are responsible. When visitors filter by size, color, or price, they generate new URLs. These pages contain duplicate content as the original product page, just sorted in a different way. But search engines see these as duplicates.
URL parameters are another problem. ?utm_source=facebook or ?session_id=12345 creates new URLs with the same content. This wastes the crawl budget on pages Google doesn’t need to index.
Use canonical tags to manage duplicates. A canonical tag conveys to the search engines which version of a page is the main version. Place it in the <head> section of your HTML code. For example:
<link rel="canonical" href="yourstore.com/mens-clothes/jackets/croison-leather-jacket-black">
This should point to your preferred URL. Every product page should have a self-referencing canonical tag. After this, search engines will get clear information on which versions to index. This is the most basic eCommerce SEO tip to get started with working on more technicalities.
Your robots.txt file prevents crawlers from wasting time on pages that do not require indexing. Disallow URLs of certain pages like /cart/, /checkout/, /search?, /filter?, etc.
This tells Google not to crawl these pages as they are not important.
Your sitemap is a roadmap for search engines. It lists all the pages you want indexed. When executing good SEO for large eCommerce sites, create multiple sitemaps and organize them by content type:
Choose a platform or download a plugin that updates your sitemap automatically whenever you add or remove products. Outdated sitemaps waste crawl budget on pages that no longer exist.
Again, implement self-referencing canonicals on every page. Even unique pages should have a canonical tag pointing to themselves. This is so that search engines will not treat those pages as duplicates due to URL variations.
When you manage crawl budget properly, search engines crawl and index your highest-value pages. Your products rank faster, and new inventory gets seen quickly. Check out our eCommerce website development packages to get this service covered.
Product and category pages are your money pages. They drive traffic and convert visitors into customers. So, they require special attention.
For category pages:
For product pages:
Mobile optimization is non-negotiable in this case. Your category and product pages should work on phones as well. Especially these days, as more than 78% of traffic comes from mobile devices. Test them on actual mobile devices. Make sure buttons are large enough to tap, images load quickly, and the text is readable without zooming.
Website speed is no longer optional; it is a genuine ranking factor. Google knows your website speed through Core Web Vitals. These are the three metrics that Google uses to assess the user experience (UX).
How to optimize these metrics:
Use PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix for this. The investment in speed optimization pays for itself through improved rankings and higher conversion rates. A faster website is not just beneficial for SEO, but also better for your customers, target audience, and anyone who visits your website.
Structured data (also called schema markup) precisely tells search engines what is present on your page. Without it, Google has to guess. With it, crawlers understand immediately.
For eCommerce, the most important structured data is the product schema. These are the components that definitely need Schema markup:
Implement product schema on every product page. Here is a simple example:
{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "Product",
"name": "Croison Leather Jacket Black",
"price": "89.99",
"availability": "https://schema.org/InStock",
"review": {
"@type": "Review",
"ratingValue": "4.2",
"reviewCount": "312"
}
}
Go to Schema.org to know more about structured data and how to implement it.
When you implement product schema correctly:
☑️ Your products appear with rich snippets in search results (with reviews, price, and availability displayed).
☑️ Search engines know about your inventory better.
☑️ Click-through rates increase because of rich snippets.
Other important structured data for eCommerce:
When you implement these technical signals at once, it helps search engines. They know a step more about your website and rank it. Moreover, if you want to lay a strong foundation for the future of eCommerce, working on these signals is necessary.
Technical SEO for eCommerce is not that complicated if you know the right direction. This article gives a clear roadmap of what technical SEO aspects to work on. The guide is just a series of practical steps that removes friction between your website and search engines. If executed correctly, it solves all the eCommerce technical SEO problems.
BrainSpate recommends starting with the basics first. Fix your website structure, manage duplicate content with canonical tags and robots.txt, optimize for Core Web Vitals, and add schema markup. These steps alone will instantly improve your rankings and UX.
Do not wait for perfect implementation. Start with what matters the most for your specific case or website. Audit your website using Google Search Console and tools like Screaming Frog or SEMRush. Document everything and fix issues one by one. Hire eCommerce developers from a trusted service provider to get a head start.
Lastly, technical SEO is an ongoing process, not a one-time project. Your competitors are optimizing their websites right now. So, start today and keep maintaining, reviewing, and making it better as your revenue depends on it.
Google prioritizes fast-loading sites. Slow pages increase bounce rates and hurt rankings. Aim for under 2 seconds using optimized images, caching, and reliable hosting.
They tell Google which version of a page to index (e.g., for product variants or filtered URLs), preventing ranking dilution.
Automatically regenerate it when adding new products or pages. Submit updates via Google Search Console for faster indexing.
Yes. A logical hierarchy (Home > Category > Product) with clear navigation helps both users and search engines.
Yes. Use robots.txt to prevent indexing of private pages (cart, checkout, admin) to avoid thin or duplicate content issues.