E-commerce is an extremely vast industry where you can find businesses of all shapes and sizes. Thanks to that fact, people now have access to goods and services they’ve never thought about before. With the help of e-commerce platforms, you can find almost everything that you want to buy online, order it, and get it delivered right to your door in a couple of days. Amazing, isn’t it?
However, the size of this industry means that it’s highly competitive. In order to stay afloat, you should put maximum effort into every aspect of your business, especially when it comes to your website. Sure, we all know about keywords, product descriptions, high-quality photos, and a nice feedback form. But not everybody pays attention to technical SEO for ecommerce sites. And the issues that can arise from it can destroy all your marketing efforts, even if your content and products are top-tier. So, what should you pay attention to on the technical SEO side? Here’s the answer.
#1: Faceted Navigation
Faceted navigation (like filters for size, color, brand, or price range) is supposed to help users find products. And it does, but it also creates a nightmare of URL parameters that can easily spiral out of control. For example, a single product category with three filter options generates dozens (even hundreds) of indexable URLs. Search engines waste crawl budgets on these variations, and your important product pages aren’t getting any attention.
Of course you don’t remove filters. What you do is establish canonical tags that point to the main category page. You can also use the nofollow tag on filter links or implement AJAX-based JavaScript-based filtering that doesn’t alter the URL at all.
#2: JavaScript Usage
JavaScript makes sites interactive and engaging, which can be really important for e-commerce. But since search engines are not really good at rendering JS, product pages can easily get lost there.
Google’s rendering process happens in two waves—first the raw HTML, then the JavaScript. If your product titles, prices, or availability depend on that second wave, the search engine may just skip that part. And when you’re dealing with thousands of products, that uncertainty may or may not result in real revenue loss.
The pragmatic approach includes server-side rendering or dynamic rendering. Yes, it’s more work, but it’s definitely worth it. Your product pages need to be visible in the initial HTML response.
#3: Crawling and Indexing
You’ve built a beautiful site with thousands of products. You submit your sitemap. And then… nothing. Why? Because even though Google crawled your site, it got busy going through outdated clearance items from 2019 that you forgot to noindex. Don’t forget that the crawl budget is finite, especially if we’re talking about an e-commerce catalog with thousands of pages.
The fix is manual. Audit what’s being crawled and block thin pages from indexing. Also, use parameter handling in Google Search Console. And don’t let your entire product catalog sit behind three levels of navigation. Flat architecture matters.
#4: Mobile Responsiveness
You should know this by now, but in case you don’t, half of all ecommerce traffic comes from mobile devices. Which means that a lot of users don’t even see the web version of your platform, they use only the mobile experience.
And design responsiveness is only part of the problem. The other part is usability. Are your buttons thumb-friendly? Is the checkout flow designed for small screens? Does your product image zoom work on touch devices?
Google uses mobile-first indexing. That means they’re looking at your mobile site to determine rankings. If your web version is fine but the mobile one is non-existent, you won’t rank high.
#5: Unstructured Data
This is really easy to solve, but so many businesses don’t do the work. Schema markup for products, reviews, availability, pricing—it’s really hard to imagine an ecommerce page without these elements. And that’s how search engines understand what you’re selling.
Some businesses may feel that it’s overwhelming to implement a schema for thousands of products. Well, yes, it is. But the alternative is letting competitors with proper markup outrank you for product terms.
#6: Internal Linking
Internal linking for ecommerce can be a whole discipline. Category pages linking to subcategories linking to products are basic, but it’s also where opportunities are missed. Some platforms have a lot of product pages that exist in isolation, without breadcrumb navigation or contextual links that help users discover more of your catalog and help search engines understand relationships between products. If you have such a problem, it needs fixing.
You can use machine learning to identify product relationships and automatically build internal links based on user behavior. But most sites aren’t there yet. The practical step is to not treat products as independent islands and to build meaningful connections right away.
#7: Duplicate Content
This one is extremely common, especially in product descriptions and similar products in multiple categories. Duplicate content signals to search engines that your site lacks unique value.
The challenge is operational. Your suppliers provide product descriptions that are supposed to be efficient, but when every competitor sells the same product with the same description, nobody wins.
Write unique descriptions for your best-selling products. For the rest, at least customize the title tags and meta descriptions. And use canonical tags for products that appear in multiple categories.
Final Words
We can easily continue the list, but these seven are the most common ones. If you already pay enough attention to your technical SEO, then you are probably fine. But if you have never heard about technical SEO, you have a lot of work to do. Remember that your competitors are dealing with the same issues. The ones who fix them first win.
Amanda Lancaster is a PR manager who works with 1resumewritingservice. She is also known as a content creator. Amanda has been providing resume writing services since 2014.
