Ecommerce SEO: how to get product pages found on Google

What ecommerce SEO covers

Ecommerce SEO is search engine optimization for an online store. It is the set of changes that help Google find your product and category pages, understand what each one sells, and show them to people searching for those products. It covers the words on each page, how the store's URLs and links are built, and the product data you send to Google directly.

This guide follows Google Search Central, Google's documentation for site owners. It cites Google where Google calls something required or recommended, and says so where Google says something does not matter.

If your store runs on an ecommerce platform, the URL side is probably handled for you. Google's guide to ecommerce URL structure tells platform users they can most likely skip its URL section, because the platform has most likely already considered these issues for you. Your work then sits mostly in what goes on each page: titles, descriptions, photos and how products link to each other.

Where product pages can appear on Google

Ordinary search results are one of several places a product can show up. Google lists separate surfaces for ecommerce content, and some of them need data you send through Google Merchant Center, Google's service for product data and feeds.

Read the table this way: a product page can appear in ordinary search results without structured data or a feed, but the Shopping tab, Lens and Maps need Merchant Center. Google notes that uploading product data to Merchant Center isn't mandatory to appear in Google search results, though it can enhance Google's understanding of your products.

How to set up one product page for search

Work through these steps on your best-selling product first, then repeat the pattern across the catalog. The examples assume a store that sells hand-poured soy candles, with one page per scent.

1. Write a distinct title

   Google asks for distinct text that describes the content of each page in the title element. Put the product name and its main detail first, such as the scent and jar size of a candle. For the store name, Google suggests including just your site name at the beginning or end of each title, separated from the rest of the text with a delimiter. Giving every page the same title makes it impossible for users to distinguish between two pages. There is no limit on how long a title can be, but Google truncates the title link in search results as needed, so keep the useful words at the start.

2. Write a meta description

   The meta description is a short summary of the page that sits in its code. Google will sometimes use the meta description tag from a page to generate a snippet in search results, which is the text shown under the title. Google recommends descriptions that accurately describe the specific page, and for product pages it suggests bringing together key details such as price, age and manufacturer. For a candle, that could be the scent, burn time, jar size and price. There is no limit on how long a meta description can be, but the snippet is truncated in search results as needed.

3. Use a readable URL

   Google recommends descriptive words in URL paths, such as /product/black-t-shirt-with-a-white-collar, rather than a string of ID numbers. It also recommends hyphens instead of underscores to separate words in URLs. For the example candle store, that means a path like /products/amber-jar-soy-candle-cedar rather than a product ID.

4. Describe the product in your own words

   Google suggests informative product descriptions that match search terms used by shoppers. Cover what a shopper needs to decide: materials, size, scent notes, care and how the item ships. Write the text yourself rather than lifting it from other sites. Google's starter guide says the same content under several URLs on your own site will not cause a manual action, then adds that copying others' content is a different story.

5. Name and describe your photos

   Google calls alt text the most important attribute when it comes to providing more metadata for an image. Write what the photo shows in plain words, such as 'amber glass soy candle with a wooden lid'. Google also recommends short, descriptive filenames, such as my-new-black-kitten.jpg rather than IMG00023.JPG. For product structured data, covered in the next step, Google recommends several high-resolution images of at least 50K pixels when you multiply width by height, in 16x9, 4x3 and 1x1 aspect ratios.

6. Add product structured data

   Structured data is code on the page that states the product's name, price, availability and other details in a standard format. For pages where shoppers can buy, Google's merchant listing markup requires an Offer, because the merchant has to be the seller of the product, and its listing experiences require a price greater than zero. On an ecommerce platform, Google notes it may be easier to use an integrated platform extension or plugin to add structured data. Then validate your code using the Rich Results Test and fix any critical errors.

7. Check how Google sees the page

   Once the page is live, use the URL Inspection tool to test how Google sees the page. Allow time before you judge it: Google says it may take several days after publishing a page for Google to find and crawl it.

Product structured data and Merchant Center feeds

Google takes product data in two ways. You can add Product structured data to your pages, or you can upload data feeds with Google Merchant Center and opt into free listings within the Merchant Center console. Google says providing both structured data and a Merchant Center feed maximizes your eligibility for Google's product experiences and helps Google correctly understand and verify your data.

Structured data is optional for ordinary results, as the table above shows. It can still improve the accuracy of Google's understanding of content such as price, discount and shipping costs on a page, and it increases eligibility for Product rich results.

A feed covers products that crawling misses, because web crawling is not guaranteed to find all products on your site. For smaller sites that change less often, Google suggests an automated feed that builds product data from crawled web content. For larger sites or sites whose content changes often, it suggests you periodically upload new data feed files to Google Merchant Center. Feed files can be used for weekly, daily, or even hourly updates.

If you use both, keep them in step. When a product sells out, your site can show that straight away, but Merchant Center may not be updated until some time later, especially if you use feeds. Google's fix is to tell Merchant Center to automatically update its copy of your product data based on the website contents.

Category pages, internal links and site structure

To help Google find every product page, its ecommerce guide says to add links from menus to category pages, from category pages to sub-category pages, and from sub-category pages to all product pages, and adds that it's strongly recommended to link to all products that you wish indexed.

Products that shoppers can reach only through your store's search box may stay hidden, because Googlebot generally doesn't try to submit searches into a search box as part of crawling a site. If you cannot link to every product, Google's advice is to use a sitemap or a Google Merchant Center feed.

Links also tell Google which pages matter most. Google says the more links a page has to it within a site, the higher its relative importance, so link your best sellers from the home page and from related category pages. For navigation, use standard a href links, not JavaScript events on other page elements.

Give category pages their own text as well. Google suggests category descriptions to cover less specific queries. Example: on the candle store, a search for soy candles is less specific than a search for one scent, so a short paragraph on the soy candle category page about what the range includes gives that page text to match.

Variants, filters and pagination

Sizes and colors, filter menus and multi-page category lists can each create many URLs for the same content, or hide content behind a single URL. These are the rules Google gives for each case.

• Variants: Google recommends that each variant can be identified by a separate URL, either as a path such as /t-shirt/green or as a parameter such as /t-shirt?color=green. If variants use optional parameters, use the URL with the query parameter omitted as the canonical URL.
• Fragments: do not switch colors or sizes with a # in the URL. Google does not use fragment identifiers in indexing, so /product/t-shirt#black and /product/t-shirt#white count as one page.
• Filters: filter menus built on URL parameters can generate infinite URL spaces. If filtered views do not need to rank, one option Google gives is to use robots.txt to disallow crawling of faceted navigation URLs, and to allow crawling of just the individual items' pages along with a dedicated listing page that shows all products without filters applied.
• Pagination: give each page a unique URL in a multi-page category list, for example with a page parameter, and don't use the first page of a paginated sequence as the canonical page.
• Tracking parameters: avoid internal links to temporary parameters such as session IDs, tracking codes and the current time.
• Consistency: use the same URL in internal links, sitemap files and canonical tags.
• Empty categories: if a category has no items, use a noindex robots meta tag.

Sitemaps and Search Console

A sitemap is a file that lists the URLs you want Google to crawl. Check whether your store platform already makes one before you build it by hand: Google notes that most content management systems automatically generate sitemaps, and their users can find plenty of sitemap plugins. A single sitemap is limited to 50MB uncompressed or 50,000 URLs. Past that, Google says to break your sitemap into multiple sitemaps.

Google Search Console is one way to hand the sitemap to Google: submit a sitemap in Search Console using the Sitemaps report, which shows when Googlebot accessed it. Keep expectations modest, because submitting a sitemap is merely a hint: it doesn't guarantee that Google will download the sitemap or use it for crawling. Keep linking to every product from your category pages as well.

Before you change anything, check whether Google has already found the store: search Google for your site with the site: search operator. After a change, Google suggests waiting a few weeks to assess whether your work had an effect in search results.

What Google says you can skip

Some long-running SEO advice does not apply to Google. Its SEO starter guide lists these points among the things it believes you should not focus on.

• Meta keywords: Google Search doesn't use the keywords meta tag.
• Repeating keywords: keyword stuffing is against Google's spam policies.
• Word counts: the length of the content alone doesn't matter for ranking purposes.
• Keywords in the domain: keywords in the domain name or URL path alone have hardly any effect beyond appearing in breadcrumbs.
• Duplicate URLs on your own site: content reachable under multiple URLs will not cause a manual action.

Where Nation fits

Questions about ecommerce SEO