Author: Ryan Walsh 

Date: 04/03/2026

E-commerce SEO is hard work.

Okay, so it’s not very inviting to read the rest of this article if we start with a rather negative statement like that!

But it is blooming well difficult, that’s because, well, you don’t need us to tell you that the competition in your business niche is normally rather fierce.

It doesn’t matter if you’re selling lovely scented candles or e-bikes to the masses; the competition online is huge!

Therefore, as that old cliché statement “work smarter, not harder”, well, this definitely is true for e-commerce SEO, as otherwise you won’t see the fruits of your labour.

 

Who are you?

Sounds like a rather abrupt statement or perhaps the start of a fight!

But we think it’s a good idea, before we dispense our pearls of wisdom, to explain who we are and who the author is behind this work.

This article has been written by Ryan Walsh.

I have unparalleled knowledge and expertise in this business sector.

I have been working with companies for nearly 14 years to improve organic SEO for national brands. I have had work cited by what I regard as, and many others as, the best of the best in terms of SEO consultants.

I therefore know my robot.txt and from my do-follow backlinks, so I am the best person to walk you through the complex journey of optimising your wonderful e-commerce website.

 

Don’t be foolish

Steve Jobs once said, “Stay hungry, stay foolish”- never a truer word was spoken.

It means keep experimenting, keep having a go.

Don’t settle for the status quo.

Regarding SEO, you do have to do that, as the road to success can sometimes be long, and you have to be a bit foolish to go up against some companies who are spending millions more on their marketing.

We deviate, however, it’s important also to pick your fights, which leads us nicely to our first point:

Choose your keyword optimisation strategy carefully.

Okay, so you have say an Ahref’s subscription- now you think, well, this is an absolute piece of cake, I just need to select the keywords that have the highest search volume.

So, your e-commerce website sells lets say various face creams, and “organic face creams” seems to be doing pretty well, so you say, “let’s jump on that bandwagon,” thank you very much!

 

But hold your horses!

This leads us on to our previous point regarding “picking your fights”, so to speak.

There are only so many working hours in any one day, week or month, and you have to balance competition with the ability to win that fight.

If there’s an absolute monster of a company you’re competing with, well, do you really want to compete on an important keyword?

Will you fall short, make no sales, run out of cash flow, and will the business cease to exist?

Wouldn’t it be better to go for the medium- and low-hanging fruit?

Well, we would think the answer to that question is a resounding yes.

Do that!

As the old saying goes, a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush, meaning don’t aim for the stars and fall flat on your face.

 

Select the right keywords

Now, you’ve done the hard part, you’ve come up with a group of products and keywords that you want to optimise the website for, pat yourself on the back and go and make a brew- why not have a biscuit while your at it?

 

Now you can start to get the on-page basics right

Now, we would recommend a two-prong attack if you like.

What we mean by that is simple: first, you now have your rather wonderful list of keywords that you want to optimise your e-commerce store for.

They’re not too hard, not too easy, there just right!

Now, to optimise those product pages. How do you do that? We hear you cry- here’s how:

 

Page titles and descriptions 

We have seen e-commerce product pages where just a fraction of the product name is added as the title, such as “Diamond”- well, diamond what?

But what if you really employed a top SEO agency like us?

Well, we would see that the products on that page are perhaps rings featuring glorious pink diamonds.

Then we talk to the engagement ring expert at the business; they tell us that this is exclusive, luxury diamond ring page. Bought mostly for engagement rings, plus the prices for these diamonds are increasing as the colour is rare, due to a huge mine called the “Argyle Mine” closing.

Right, well, a good marketing company then optimises the “page title” around “pink diamond engagement rings”. This wording and knowledge are incorporated into the meta description and page titles. There should also be a short paragraph added to the top of the page, so when Googlebot first indexes the page, instantly it knows your talking about pink diamond engagement rings here.

Then we work with top web designers, we tell them, this page is “content thin”, so start to add some further text to the header and footer sections- we start to “beef up” the content marketing.

Add an accordion, tell the shopper that these rare pink diamonds are the best thing since sliced bread.

Then we work with our copywriters to craft content that shows we know a thing or two about rare pink diamonds and we link to that product page from work we have added to the blog this month. As Google’s EEAT score increases, the page’s organic ranking improves, jewellers sell more engagement rings, and Walsh & Partners further cements our position as a leading SEO company in the U.K.

 

How do I write a good page title and meta description?

Allow the keyword research that you conducted at the start to guide you as to which product pages to start working on. Extract the keywords you want to optimise, and apply the right keywords to the page. Then write a compelling meta description to enhance CTR further.

 

Here’s how to write a good page title:

• Clearly describe the product
• Base this on working with the experts in the company and keyword research
• Write a nice meta description that will improve the CTR
• Add key selling points, such as “pink diamond engagement rings”
• Add keywords, but naturally don’t overdo it!

 

Time to get technical

Technical SEO is important.

Often today, you’re competing with other e-commerce stores that are also working with really good agencies. Therefore, their content marketing is really good as well, helpful, and has a high Google EEAT score, etc.

So, how do you get that edge?

 

Page speed

“[A] speedier site has since led to an 11% increase in conversion rate.”

 

Have you ever been stuck in traffic and just sounded off your car horn for no reason?

Well, that’s frustration being released by just having a quick slap of that car horn- makes you feel better, right?

Well, in the world of e-commerce SEO, think of that frustrated shopper, time pressured, they just got home from work, they need to buy something quickly.

If they can’t get the page to load quickly, they don’t honk; they leave. This causes the bounce rate to increase; you lose the shopper, and it’s a red flag to Google if this happens too much that you’re causing a poor user experience.

So, you don’t want to be letting off car horns or losing shoppers, you want, as REM said, “happy smiley people”.

 

Now to get there, you need to:

• Make the page faster
• Compress images, but don’t make product pictures blurry that shoppers are squinting as to what your selling, as people need to see what they are buying
• Use Google’s PageSpeed tool to see where you can speed things up
• GTMetrix is also a really good tool

Fix any coding glitches that are preventing the page from loading like clockwork.

 

Improve the user experience or “U.X”

Have you ever been in a store and, well, you’re not that fussed on the person’s attitude who works there?

They’re not helpful; they look half asleep, and well, you get that feeling they can’t be bothered.

So you leave, you take your hard-earned bucks down the road.

Well, this happens with e-commerce SEO; however, rather than a half-asleep sales assistant, it could be a slow-loading or poorly designed website that gets the shopper annoyed!

JavaScript is not loading properly, large product images are slowing everything down, and the page speed is so slow that you can see a beard appearing to grow as the page very slowly loads.

This is no good; this is why the large brands have their user experience sorted. They often bend over backlinks to “remove friction in the buying process”.

That’s marketing language for: we get people where they need to go without making them feel like they need to pull their hair out!

So therefore:

• Make the navigation logical and not a mess
• Make the website fast
• Keep things simple while providing all the helpful information the customer needs.
• Make the font easy to read.
• Make the customer’s life that bit easier by helping them find the right product or service.

Crawlability

How crawlable is your e-commerce website?

It’s not something that some e-commerce managers think about, yet it’s massively important.

We have worked on websites, where the main pages were crawlable, yet all of the articles were set not to be indexed. This means that previous SEO business, they were billing and adding content marketing that could never appear in Google’s index because of the content marketing, i.e the blogs were set to be “no-index”.

So, yes, what’s the point in that?

Therefore whichever pages or blog posts you want to appear in Google, they must be crawlable.

Googlebot

This means that the work needs to be able to be indexed. This means giving the marketing manager a budge, and asking them if you have an up-to-date sitemap in place?

If so, if they nod to that question, do ask them what about our robot.txt, is that blocking any pages from getting indexed?

You may see that sometimes, when a web developer was making some changes that they may have set some pages to not be indexed.

This may have accidentally been left on, which means, that Googlebot’s blocked from indexing the page.

 

Why you often can’t compete on links

It’s all well and good having bucket loads of ambition, and this, of course, is what is needed in business.

However, you might want to take on the major brands, but once again you have to “box clever”- now what do we mean by that?

Well, the big brands, the multi-million-pound businesses in your business sector, normally have a lot of links. So many links that it may crash Microsoft Excel when exporting all the backlink lines they have.

 

Now, what does this mean?

Well, if they have a lot of quality links, this means it will be very hard to compete. Global brands just typically have a lot of links, major newspapers and online publishers, such as Bloomberg, may quote this business. This is natural if Nike bring out a brand-new product line; if it boosts profits, the major news outlets may comment.

So, therefore, as a small business, well, it can sometimes seem like David and Goliath.

Should you give up and go home, well mostly definitely not.

You simply have to box clever.

Therefore what can you do better than the major brands?

Pour your time and energy into winning content marketing

 

Google EEAT

Quite simply put, if you pour your time into writing winning content marketing, which has an exceptionally high Google EEAT score, then you can improve your organic rankings this way.

“Our efforts help ensure that well under 1 percent of results visited by users are for spammy pages.”

Let’s return to our rather lovely example earlier regarding diamond rings. Well, if you answer a question regarding that product line really well, you can rank higher than some of the biggest High Street jewellery chains.

The reason is because of Google EEAT, you will have shown expertise and experience of that product. You can therefore answer that question potentially better than anyone else, therefore you can rank higher.

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Don’t auto configure your meta titles and meta descriptions

Sometimes, depending on which CMS you have purchased, the meta titles and meta descriptions can auto-populate.

Which you might first think is a good time-saving feature, that means I can get down to the pub and drink craft beer and stuffed olives.

However, before you start to suck on those olives, wouldn’t it be better if you custom hand wrote the meta titles and meta descriptions?

Well, we think so.

A meta title and meta description, is the first thing that shopper’s reader before they click on your business.

Therefore, if the meta title and description reads like a robot has written it, well it not going to get the clicks you might otherwise get.

Why not write something really catchy?

Why not be a true wordsmith?

Therefore, write somethings that’s going to grab the shoppers attention, such as buy before 11.00am and get the item the very next day! That might be all that is needed to persuade someone shopping for a fancy suit to select your business in Google’s SERP’s.

 

Speed things up

Here’s the real balancing act in SEO right now, in order to satisfy the Google Helpful Content Update and Google EEAT you need to add a lot of information to a page.

“Starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.”

Now no shopper, even if they are a huge fan of the products or services you sell are going to want to read tons, and tons of text.
Therefore, a web designer often has to break the text up, make it interesting, using accordions, drop down menus, different boxes, page titles, varying fonts etc. All of these elements need to load in, which is measured by Google’s Core Web Vitals.

In short, to improve the user experience, you have to make things fast. Therefore it’s a balance between adding as much useful information as possible and making the website fast, so that you improve the shoppers user experience.

 

Clear and simple navigation

Don’t let your web designer design super complicated navigation!

Keep the navigation simple to use.

Make the navigation a maze, where the shopper doesn’t know where they are, there likely to leave.

Not just leave, they may hate the brand due to the clunky website, ignore the result every time you appear in subsequent Google results.

So, therefore, so that you don’t get ignored, or incur a sky-high bounce rate, just make the navigation a piece of cake to use.

Don’t over complicate, just copy best practice. For example, there might be a direct competitor who has got it spot on. Then all you have to do is say to your web designer, look at there navigation, how simple it is, they sell similar stuff to us, lets replicate how their main navigation works.

Internal links are so blooming useful

Don’t ignore the power of a well-placed internal link.

What are internal links?

Well, what they do is transport you from one page on your website to another, yet within the same website.

They don’t therefore take you to a different website.

The power should not be underestimated, internal links can help direct link equity to new pages, they also help with engagement factors, keeping shoppers on the website for longer.

For example, someone may be reading a blog post about the best electric cars of 2026 and then go and visit a page which sells that brand of car or explains more about the model.

This helps improve dwell times, reduces bounce rates, basically tells Google’s algorithm that the shopper is more engaged with the products and services you are selling.

 

Content thin

Okay, so this is a massive problem with so many e-commerce websites.

That, well sometimes there’s a mass of products added, yet accompanied with very little on-page SEO or information.

This is what is called a content thin page.

Its no use, it’s as much use as a chocolate tea pot.

Therefore, you have to have good quality pages that offer helpful information. Don’t use AI text and don’t use duplicated text.

AI text (don’t do it)

Your e-commerce store might be vast, huge, so many products its mind blowing.

Therefore, you might think it’s a good idea to use AI text to fill the product descriptions, and the page?

No!

Don’t do it, don’t use AI text, use text that’s been written by a copy writer. The only way you’re going to get a super high Google EEAT score, is if the work shows originality and your not going to get that using AI to write the text.

Keep things up to date

One of the ways you an improve your e-commerce rankings is revisiting pages, giving them a bit of revamp.

This could mean updating the content marketing, perhaps just adding more up to date and relevant advice.

 

Go the extra mile

So, this is our last point, but a good one, that is, sometimes e-commerce retailers can’t compete with big brands. However, what you can do is

go the extra mile. You can engineer each page so it offers better information that your competitors.

Call us:

Walsh & Partners is one of the best at organic and local search engine optimisation.

Whether you need to optimise an e-commerce website or brochure website we are the agency to call.