We explain how to improve the on-page SEO for e-commerce brands

Date: 07/05/2026
Author: Ryan Walsh
Subject: On-page SEO for e-commerce brands

 

Introduction:

If you’re running an e-commerce business, you may be using a sales platform such as Magento or Shopify to run your business. Perhaps you’ve been running this store for some time; however, it’s not making the sales you had hoped and aimed for.

There can be many reasons why an e-commerce store is not reaching its full potential in terms of sales; these could boil down to on-page, off-page and technical SEO issues. More often than not, there is a mixture of these that will subsequently need improvement and optimisation.

 

A bit about me:

I am an SEO specialist with over 10 years of experience working with e-commerce businesses and local companies. More often than not, what’s really holding these e-commerce businesses back, in my experience, is that their websites are “content thin” with a lot of duplication issues.

This means that, rather than the page offering useful, helpful advice that satisfies the Google Helpful Content update, the written work is instead deemed as low quality.

The reason the written work is low-quality is that it’s essentially a carbon copy of an existing page, either external or internal, on the e-commerce website.

Visibility and the growth of the online business are therefore held back; they’re held back by having pages that are not unique, often duplicated.

Google’s algorithms have therefore assigned a low-quality score; this is often due to a lack of helpful information that’s present on the page.

What exactly is on-page SEO, and why does it matter so much to e-commerce businesses?

Businesses naturally want to gain as much free search traffic as possible from search engines like Google.

This means that whether visitors are coming from Google or Bing, you will want to attract as many shoppers as possible to your store.

Therefore, for this to occur, on-page SEO, along with the other key components of a successful search engine optimisation campaign, must all work together.

Good on-page SEO makes it crystal clear to the search engines what that page is selling and what it’s about- its purpose. Now, the top experts in this business know that there’s a delicate balance between optimising and over-optimising a page.

You don’t want to “over-optimise” the page and keyword-stuff it, but you don’t want to communicate vague signals about what the page is about, either.

 

Therefore, a good SEO consultant must optimise, but not over-optimise, the following:

• H1-H6 Tags
• Meta title and meta description
• Alt text
• Anchor text
• How internal links are used
• The main product description text
• Offering a good user experience is crucial

 

Keyword research is essential.

Use tools such as Google Keyword Planner and Google Search Console to identify which keywords you should optimise your e-commerce store for. Honestly, for an experienced SEO like myself, this sounds like super simple advice, and it is.

However, we have seen page titles and content-thin pages where the shopper wouldn’t know what is being sold on the page from reading the text alone.

Therefore, this raises the question: if, from the text alone, the human shopper wouldn’t know what’s being sold on the page, how would Google’s algorithm know?

 

Why e-commerce keyword research needs to be more extensive

For a traditional bricks-and-mortar business that offers a set service, keywords are often more straightforward to identify and optimise the website for. However, for an e-commerce business, the keywords that the website needs to be optimised for are often much more extensive and span a wider range.

The product range is often much more extensive, and so are the many ways that customers describe those different products. Therefore, more keyword research and on-page SEO are needed for e-commerce businesses.

 

Start by optimising the simple stuff:

 

Title tags and meta descriptions.

Title tags are simply the headings shown in Google’s organic search results.

Therefore, to improve what we call the CTR (click-through rate), they need to be click-worthy—basically, giving the shopper a strong reason to click the link. Keep the title under 60 characters and include a few keywords in the meta title.

The meta description is what appears directly below the meta title in search engine results pages. The meta description should be below 150 characters, and again, try to convey a reason to choose your business. For example, when a customer spends a certain amount, you may offer free next-day delivery and wish to state this in the meta description.

 

Structured Headings (H1-H6)

Imagine structured headings ranging from H1 to H6 as the spine of the page. They basically inform Google’s algorithm, via Googlebot crawling and indexing them, which products are being sold on that page.

For example, if the structured headings range from H1-H6 and are mostly written to describe, say, a brand of bagless vacuum cleaner, then this helps Google’s algorithm understand that page much better.

You’re basically sprinkling a lot of clues via the structured headings about what the page is selling.
It’s also important that you don’t always need to use the full H1-H6 tags; sometimes just H1-H3 is enough.

 

On-page content marketing

The quality of on-page content marketing significantly affects how an e-commerce page ranks within the organic search results.

What do we mean by content marketing quality?

Content marketing quality is how helpful and useful the advice is to the customer.

Does the author and the page really and truly understand Google EEAT?

Therefore, is there expertise and experience reflected in that page?

Let’s sum it up in one paragraph: if it’s clear that the business has written unique and helpful advice, then this can help improve the business’s search engine optimisation.

However, if the content marketing is just duplicated or thin, it doesn’t show much effort. This will result in the page ranking lower in Google’s SERP’s.

 

Image optimisation

On many e-commerce websites, there are often many product photos. However, even the product photos of, say, a rather generic kitchen kettle can be optimised. This is done through alt text optimisation; however, you can also compress the pictures to make them load faster.

And any good SEO expert knows, it’s a balance with on-page SEO to offer as much useful advice as possible. However, the page needs to offer a good user experience; to do that, the page must be fast. For it to be fast, SEO’s need to work with web developers and designers to produce fast pages, and we mean lightning fast.

 

URL Slugs and internal linking

When creating new pages, think about the URL slug; you can add some keywords there. This can make it clear to Google what that page is selling or what it’s about.

We would also highly recommend using internal links; this way, you can link to related products or articles. This helps Googlebot to understand the products you’re selling.

 

What are some of the most common e-commerce on-page SEO mistakes that you see?

Keyword stuffing

No matter if it’s a brochure website or a large e-commerce website, often inexperienced marketing companies and consultants can sometimes “keyword stuff” the page.

This means they repeatedly add the keyword they want to rank for. Sometimes, reading the work back makes it clear that the keyword has been added too much.

At this point, Google notices and sees that a keyword has been used too many times on the page. This repetitive use of keywords can make the page appear low quality.

 

Content thin

Perhaps the most common problem we see is a lack of effort to optimise the page. This often results in a content-thin page, a page that, well, doesn’t say much at all.

The information is lacking substance, so Google’s algorithm doesn’t know where to rank the page. More often than not, the page is “crawled and indexed” by Googebot; however, the quality of the information is not good enough for it to be indexed in Google’s results.

 

Duplicate content

Perhaps one of the most common issues with e-commerce websites is duplicate content.

We understand why it’s used; often, businesses have a million and one things they need to do that day.

Therefore, rather than writing a bespoke product description written by an expert on that product or service, duplication is sometimes used.

This means that sometimes the business simply copies and pastes product descriptions directly from, say, the supplier’s website. This causes what we call duplication issues, copied from an external source.

However, Google is super clever; they will know the work is duplicated, therefore the page will not rank high in Google’s results.

 

How we can help:

With over 10 years of e-commerce and brochure website SEO experience, we are here to help you generate more sales online.

Ryan Walsh, who owns and runs Walsh & Partners, is one of the best and most well-known SEOs in this area.

Whether your e-commerce website is built using Shopify or perhaps Magento, we are here to help you generate more sales online.

E-commerce SEO packages start at just 1k for lower-competition industries; give us a call today.