Ecommerce SEO checklist for a UK online shop

What is ecommerce SEO?

Ecommerce SEO is making the pages of an online shop easy for search engines to find and understand, and useful enough to deserve to rank. It differs from SEO for a small site because a shop produces pages in bulk: every product, category, filter combination, sort order and variant can become its own URL.

That is why most shop problems are structural. A site with 500 products can easily expose tens of thousands of URLs, and a search engine has to work out which ones matter. This checklist is ordered by how much trouble each area tends to cause.

How should product and category URLs look?

Short, readable and consistent. A person should be able to guess roughly what a page is from its address.

• Use descriptive words, not internal IDs. Prefer /products/black-leather-wallet to /products/3243.
• Use one letter case everywhere, normally lowercase, so the same page is never reachable under two spellings.
• Never change page content with a # fragment. Google ignores everything after it, so #black and #white are the same page to a crawler.
• Keep session IDs, tracking codes and values such as time=last-week out of internal links, because they create short-lived duplicates.
• Write parameters as ?key=value, not ?value, and join multiple values with a comma, for example ?type=candy,sweet.
• Link to the same URL everywhere: in menus, in the sitemap and in the canonical tag. If these disagree, you are asking Google to guess.

How should you structure categories and internal links?

Search engines work out how your shop is organised mainly from links, not from URL patterns. Every important page should be reachable by following ordinary links from the home page through categories to products.

• Build a clear hierarchy: home, category, subcategory, product.
• Show a visible breadcrumb trail and mark it up with BreadcrumbList, so the hierarchy is stated in two ways.
• Link to your most important products and categories from the home page and from relevant content. The more internal links a page has, the more important it looks.
• Do not rely on your search box to expose products. Crawlers do not type into it.
• Add real text to category pages, such as a short introduction and advice on choosing, because a bare grid of products gives little to rank on.

How do you handle filters, sorting and pagination?

This is where shops lose the most crawl effort. Decide the rules up front.

• Give each page of a category its own URL, for example ?page=2.
• Give each page in the sequence its own canonical URL. Do not point every page at page one.
• Link pages to each other with normal links. A "load more" button or infinite scroll that needs a click or scroll to reveal products is invisible to crawlers unless there are paginated URLs behind it.
• Stop sort orders and most filter combinations from being indexed. Google suggests noindex or robots rules for variations such as ?order=price.
• Allow the occasional filtered page to be indexed only when people actually search for it, such as a brand within a category, and give it a proper title and some text of its own.
• Do not worry that pages in a sequence share a similar title. Google says that is acceptable.
• Do not bother with rel="next" and rel="prev". Google no longer uses them.

What should you do about product variants?

Variants such as size and colour are the second big source of duplicates.

• Choose one approach. Either give each variant its own URL, as a path (/t-shirt/green) or a parameter (/t-shirt?color=green), or keep all variants on one page.
• If variants have separate URLs, use the version without the parameter as the canonical.
• Group variants in structured data with ProductGroup, so Google understands they are one product in several versions.
• Give every variant its own identifier, such as a SKU.

What should happen to out-of-stock and discontinued products?

Google's ecommerce documents do not give a single rule for this, so what follows is practical advice rather than an official procedure.

• Temporarily out of stock: keep the page live, say clearly that it is unavailable and when it is expected back, and mark availability correctly in structured data. A product page that keeps its history is worth more than a new one.
• Permanently discontinued with a close replacement: redirect with a 301 to the replacement.
• Permanently discontinued with no replacement: return a proper 404 or 410. Do not redirect everything to the home page, because that is treated as a soft error.
• Do not use the URL removal tool to hide products that are only out of stock. It is a temporary measure.
• Empty categories: either add noindex or return a 404 until products return.

What makes a good product page?

A page that tells a buyer what they need to know and says it in your own words.

• Write your own description. Copying the manufacturer's text means you are one of dozens of identical pages.
• Include the details buyers ask about: sizes, materials, compatibility, what is in the box.
• Use sharp images, placed near the text that describes them, with short, accurate alt text.
• Show delivery costs and times, and your returns policy, where a UK shopper would look before buying.
• Publish only genuine reviews. Never mark up reviews that are not visible on the page, and never invent them.
• Mark up the product with Product structured data: name, image, price, currency (GBP for a UK shop) and availability. The values must match what is on the page.

Structured data does not make a weak page rank. Its job is to state clearly what a good page already shows.

If you also want products to appear in Google's shopping results, you can send them through Merchant Center. Check its policies for your product category first, because some categories of goods are restricted.

What technical basics should you check?

• Product and category content is in the HTML, not added only after scripts run.
• Navigation uses real links, not click handlers alone.
• Robots.txt does not block the CSS, JavaScript or images needed to display pages.
• Core Web Vitals are in the "good" range: LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1.
• The whole site runs on HTTPS, with one preferred hostname and permanent redirects from the others.
• An XML sitemap lists the pages you want indexed and nothing else.
• The mobile page has the same content as the desktop page, since Google indexes the mobile version.

Where should you start?

Work in this order, because each step makes the next one easier:

1. Fix URLs, duplicates and the filter and pagination rules.
2. Check the category structure and internal links.
3. Handle stock and discontinued products properly.
4. Improve the product and category pages that already get visits.
5. Add structured data, then reviews and extras.

A good test before you begin: pick one category and count how many different URLs show its products. If the number surprises you, start there. If you would like a second pair of eyes on that, our ecommerce SEO services begin with exactly this kind of review. If you are planning a new shop, these decisions are far cheaper to make before the store is built.