Ecommerce SEO is the work of getting a store’s category and product pages found, unpaid, by people searching for what it sells, and of getting its products shown with a price and a picture wherever Google shows products. It differs from SEO for a local business in two ways. There is usually no map to win, and the site itself is the hard part: a store has hundreds or thousands of addresses, and how they are built decides whether Google ever reads the pages that matter.
Advernation is a marketing agency in New York, started in Queens in 2007 by Christopher Maddaloni, a former electrician, and working from 1115 Broadway in Manhattan. We do ecommerce SEO, product feeds and paid search for stores, without contracts, and we start with a free audit.
Send us your store’s address and your best-selling category. We will show you how Google reads it today and where orders are being lost.
Who this page is for
This page is for a business that takes orders on its own website: a retailer with a catalog, a maker selling direct, a wholesaler with an online counter, a shop with both a storefront and a store online. The platform does not matter much. What matters is that you can change your pages and your product data, or let us.
It is not for a seller whose whole business sits inside a marketplace. There the marketplace’s own search decides who is seen, and that is a different job from the one described here.
How shoppers search
Shoppers search in three ways, and each lands on a different kind of page.
- By category: “standing desk with drawers”, “gifts for a new teacher”. The shopper knows the kind of thing and not the product. These searches are broad and they land on category pages, which is why category pages are usually the most valuable pages a store has.
- By product: a brand and model, a part number, an exact name. The shopper is close to buying and is comparing price, shipping and returns between stores. Product pages and product data decide these.
- By question: which size, which material, how to choose. The shopper is early. A store that answers well is remembered when the product search comes.
The results are not only blue links. Google says products can appear at no cost on Search, Maps, Gemini, YouTube, the Shopping tab, Google Images and Google Lens. A store can be in all of those or none, and the difference is mostly product data.
The website: addresses, filters and pages Google can read
The first job on a store is making sure Google reads the right pages once, and not the same page many times. Google’s guide to ecommerce addresses names the risks: content can be missed when two addresses look as if they return the same thing, the same content may be fetched many times, and a crawler may conclude that a site has an infinite number of pages. The usual causes are the features every store has.
- Variants. Google suggests giving each variant its own address, by a path or a query parameter, with one address named as the canonical on all variant pages. It does not use the part of an address after a # sign in indexing, so a color chosen that way is invisible to it.
- Filters. Google warns that with filtered navigation its crawlers will typically access a very large number of addresses before working out they are useless, leaving less time for new, useful ones. Its fixes include blocking those addresses in robots.txt, keeping filters in a fixed order and returning a 404 when a combination has no results.
- Long lists. Google’s crawlers do not click buttons, so products behind a “load more” button may never be seen. It advises linking each page of a list to the next with ordinary links and giving each page its own address.
- Tracking codes. Google advises against internal links that carry session IDs or tracking codes, and recommends long-term, persistent addresses.
Then come the pages themselves. A category page needs a title in the shopper’s words, a short honest introduction and the products. A product page needs its own description, because the maker’s text is on every other store that sells the item. We do not fill a store with machine-written pages: Google’s spam policies name the use of generative AI tools to produce many pages without adding value for users as scaled content abuse.
Product data: the part most stores skip
Product data is how a product gets its price, stock and rating shown in a result. There are two routes and Google recommends using both: structured data on the page and a product feed in Merchant Center. It says providing both maximizes eligibility and helps Google understand and verify the data. With it, a shopper can see price, availability, review ratings and shipping information in the result itself.
The feed is also what puts products into free listings. Google requires most of a set of attributes for them, among them an ID, a title, a link, an image, a price, a description and availability. In the United States it requires shipping settings as well and recommends a return policy. A complete, accurate feed is dull work with a direct effect, and it is the same feed that Shopping ads run on.
Local SEO and the map, for stores with a shop
The map matters only if customers can come to you. Google’s eligibility rules require in-person contact with customers during stated hours and exclude online-only businesses, so a store without a counter has no Business Profile to work on. A store with a real shop does, and Google lets a retail store show its in-store products on the profile. For those stores we do the local work described on our local SEO services page alongside the ecommerce work.
Reviews on a store
Product reviews help a shopper decide and can appear as ratings in results when they are marked up correctly. The rules on them are federal. A Federal Trade Commission rule makes it an unfair or deceptive practice for a business to write, create or buy fake reviews, or to give incentives conditioned on a review expressing a particular sentiment. It also bars a business from presenting the reviews on its site as most or all of those submitted when reviews are being held back because of their rating or negative sentiment.
So the request goes to every buyer after delivery, the low ratings are shown with the high ones, and the store replies to the complaints. A page of nothing but five-star reviews does not look real anyway.
Ecommerce marketing beyond SEO
Ecommerce marketing is SEO plus the paid and owned channels that bring a shopper back until they buy. An ecommerce marketing agency should be judged on profit after ad spend across all of them. The parts we run are these.
- Shopping ads. Google says they use Merchant Center product data, not keywords, to decide how and where to show, and that they display a product photo, title, price and store name. The feed work above is therefore half of the ad work. We run them, and search and Microsoft ads, under Google Ads management, from $500 per cycle.
- Re-targeting. Showing ads to people who visited and did not buy suits most stores. Ours is from $400.
- Social media. Strong for products people like to look at, weak for parts and supplies. See social media marketing.
- The site. If checkout is slow on a phone, fix that before buying traffic. Our site work is described under web design.
- AI search. Google says no special optimization is needed for its AI features and lists keeping Merchant Center information up to date among its best practices. See AI search optimization.
What we do, month by month
| When | What we do | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| Month one | Free audit: how Google crawls the store, which addresses it wastes time on, the state of the product data. The searches behind your best categories and who ranks for them. Order tracking checked. | A crawl report, a keyword list by category, and a plan in order of effect. |
| Months two and three | Variant, filter and list addresses corrected. Category pages rewritten, best sellers first. Structured data and the Merchant Center feed completed. Free listings switched on. | Fewer wasted addresses, products appearing with price and stock, the first category gains. |
| Months four to six | Product descriptions for the top sellers. Guides that answer buying questions. Links from suppliers, press and partners. Shopping ads on the categories with margin. | Organic orders by category, and ad spend beside ad revenue. |
| Every month after | New categories and seasonal ranges prepared ahead, feed errors fixed, the review request kept running. | One report: orders and revenue by channel, positions, feed health. |
What it costs and how to judge a quote
Judge a quote by margin, not revenue. Take your average order, subtract the cost of the goods, shipping and payment fees, and you have what one more order leaves you. Divide the monthly fee by that. The answer is the number of extra orders a month the work must bring before it pays, and repeat buyers lower it. A quote that talks about traffic and never asks your margin is priced without the one figure that matters.
We quote monthly SEO plans for online stores after the free audit, with no contract. Get a quote.
The SEO audit is free. Google Ads management is from $500 per cycle; a cycle is one test of a campaign and you set its length: a day, a week or a month, which lets a store test one category before funding the rest. Re-targeting is from $400. See the pricing page.
What we need from you
We need access to the store’s admin, Search Console, Merchant Center and any ad accounts, or permission to set them up in your name. We need your margins by category, even roughly, and the list of products you would rather sell more of. We need your shipping and return terms in writing. And we need someone who can approve page text.
What we can and cannot show
We can show one published study of a business that sells online. Different Roads to Learning wanted more orders from teachers, parents and schools and was not happy with the agency that managed its paid ads. We took over its Google Ads, Microsoft Ads and SEO. Within three months organic traffic from search had doubled, and so had revenue from the Google and Microsoft ads. We worked with the company from 2017 to 2022. The visit and revenue figures themselves are not published. The full account is the Different Roads to Learning case study.
That is one store, and yours will differ. We will not promise a position, since Google says no one can guarantee a first place ranking, and we will not promise a sales figure. The audit shows what is holding your store back, and the first reports show whether orders moved.
Related pages: the other case studies, the New York SEO company page, and the other industries we work with. A shop that sells mostly to its own neighborhood should read small business SEO, a restaurant with online ordering should read restaurant marketing, and a licensed cannabis retailer should read dispensary marketing.
Ask for the free audit of your store. It covers crawling, product data and your top categories.
Questions people ask
What is ecommerce SEO?
It is the work of ranking a store’s category and product pages in unpaid results and getting its products shown with price and availability across Google. It covers how the store’s addresses are built, the pages themselves, and the product data.
What does an ecommerce marketing agency do?
It brings shoppers to a store and brings them back: SEO, product feeds, Shopping and search ads, re-targeting and social media. It should report orders and profit after ad spend, not visits.
How is ecommerce marketing different from marketing a local business?
A local business is found on a map by people nearby. An online store is found by product and category, by people anywhere it ships, and competes on price, shipping and returns in the result itself. The work shifts from the Business Profile to the site and the product data.
How long does ecommerce SEO take?
Fixes to crawling and product data can show within weeks. Category rankings usually take three to six months, longer for crowded products. Google’s guidance is that some changes take effect in a few hours and others take several months.
Do I need Merchant Center if I am not running ads?
Yes. Free listings run on Merchant Center product data, and Google says products in them can appear at no cost on Search, the Shopping tab, Images, Lens, Maps, YouTube and Gemini.
Which pages matter most on a store?
Category pages, in most stores. They match the broad searches shoppers make before they know the product. Product pages matter for searches by name and model, and they are where product data is read.
Can I use the manufacturer’s product descriptions?
You can, and so can every other store that sells the item. Google says duplicate content is not a violation of its spam policies, but a page that says only what others say gives it little reason to prefer yours. We rewrite the best sellers first.
Should a store hide its bad reviews?
No. A Federal Trade Commission rule bars presenting the reviews on your site as most or all of those submitted when reviews are being suppressed because of their rating or negative sentiment. Show them and reply to them.