Ecommerce SEO strategy: start with the searches closest to a sale.

A strategy is an order, not a list

Search for ecommerce SEO advice and you get checklists: fifty things a store could do, all of them reasonable, none of them ranked. Google publishes its own set of guides for ecommerce sites, and they are worth reading, but they describe what good looks like and not what to do first.¹ People look for the order often enough to count: "ecommerce seo strategy" is searched about 500 times a month in the UK.⁸

This guide argues for one order. Rank the pages that sell before the pages that explain. The reason shows up in our own store's numbers.

The lesson from our own store

Four kinds of search, by distance from a sale

Every search a shopper makes sits somewhere between curiosity and a purchase. Sort yours into four groups and the order of work follows.

There is a second reason to start at the top. Questions are where AI answers bite hardest. Pew Research found that 60% of Google searches beginning with a question word produced an AI summary, against 8% of searches of one or two words, and that people who saw a summary clicked a normal result about half as often.⁷ Pew measured how a search was worded and not the intent behind it, so treat that as a pattern and not a rule. But the searches nearest a sale tend to be short and specific, which is the kind least often answered on the results page.

The order of work: a 90-day plan

1. Days 1 to 14: clear the pathRead the page indexing report, fix whatever stops Google reading the store, and check that every product can be reached by a link from a menu or a collection. Google says products that are not linked may not be found, because its crawler does not use your search box.²
2. Days 15 to 45: build the collection pagesOne collection for each buying search you can serve well, with a clear title, a few sentences on how to choose and every product linked. Link to each one from the menu or the homepage, because Google reads the links to a page as a sign of how much it matters.²
3. Days 30 to 60: make product pages worth the clickComplete product data, a price and stock level that match your feed, delivery and returns, and reviews. Google describes two ways to share product data, structured data on the page and a Merchant Center feed, and the Shopping tab needs the feed.⁵
4. Days 45 to 90: add guides that point downComparisons and best-of guides for the choosing searches, each linking to the collection it supports with link text that names it. Google asks for descriptive link text and not "click here".³
5. Every month: count ordersOrders from search, search visits that land on buying pages, and positions for your buying searches. Google says to allow four months to a year for the full effect.⁶

The steps overlap on purpose, because product pages can be improved while collections are still being built. If your store is on Shopify, our Shopify SEO checklist covers the first fortnight item by item.

What each page has to do

A store has five kinds of page that can rank, and each has one job.

Links are how Google reads your priorities

Google does not work out which pages matter from your web addresses. It reads the links between pages. Its guidance says it uses the number of links needed to reach a page, and the number of links pointing at it, to judge how important that page is compared with the rest of the site.²

That turns internal links into the cheapest tool in the plan.

• Menus to collections, collections to products. Google recommends exactly that chain, and warns that a product nobody links to may not be found.²
• Guides to the collection they support. Every page you care about should have at least one link from another page, with words that describe where it leads.⁴
• Best sellers from the homepage. Google suggests linking a best selling product from the homepage or from articles, to show how much it matters.²
• No empty shelves. A collection with nothing in it should not be indexed.³

Do not publish for traffic alone

Google's guidance on helpful content says that pages made mainly to attract search visits are not what its systems are built to reward.⁹ There is a commercial reason as well: an article can only sell by sending its reader somewhere. Before an article is written, name the collection or product it will send readers to. If you cannot, it is not part of the strategy yet.

An article earns its place when it sends a reader to a page that sells. Give each one that job before it is written.

What to measure

Four numbers, checked every month.

1. Orders from search. The only one that pays.
2. Search visits that land on buying pages. The homepage, collections and products.
3. Positions for your ten most important buying searches. Not an average across thousands of terms.
4. Clicks from guides through to products. The test of whether an article is doing its job.

If traffic rises faster than orders, look at where the visits are landing. Split search visits by landing page, as in the chart above, and you can see whether the growth is reaching the pages that sell.

Search brings the visit. The page it lands on, and the emails that follow, decide whether it becomes an order. That is why every Rembanx plan includes revenue work on the store itself alongside the SEO, and why the Flagship plan adds Klaviyo and digital PR.

Paid ads have a place beside all of this, most of all while the pages are still climbing. Our guide to SEO and paid ads covers which to fund first. And if you would rather have the whole plan built and run for you, our ecommerce SEO service does it as an engine inside your own accounts.

Questions

Sources

1. 1
   Best practices for ecommerce sites in Google SearchGoogle Search Central.
2. 2
   Help Google understand your ecommerce website structureGoogle Search Central.
3. 3
   Designing a URL structure for ecommerce websitesGoogle Search Central.
4. 4
   Link best practices for GoogleGoogle Search Central.
5. 5
   Share your product data with GoogleGoogle Search Central.
6. 6
   Do you need an SEO?Google Search Central.
7. 7
   Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the resultsPew Research Center, 22 July 2025.
8. 8
   Ahrefs Keywords ExplorerUK monthly search volumes, read on 10 November 2026.
9. 9
   Creating helpful, reliable, people-first contentGoogle Search Central.

Drafted with the Rembanx engine on Claude from the sources above, then checked and approved by Matthew Banks. Prices, product features and search volumes were checked on 10 November 2026 and can change.