What is ecommerce SEO? It is search optimisation for a site whose most valuable pages are categories and products, and that changes the priorities. A blog has a few hundred pages written one at a time. A shop can have tens of thousands generated from a catalogue, most of them variations on each other. The hard problems are less about writing and more about structure: which pages exist, how they link, and which ones Google should ignore.
What is ecommerce SEO, in practice?
Backlinko’s ecommerce SEO guide, by Leigh McKenzie and updated in February 2026, is one of the most cited on the subject, and most of its core advice is sound. It rests on four pillars: keyword research, site architecture, technical fixes, and content and links. The table below sets out where its recommendations stand against what Google itself has said.
| Recommendation (Backlinko) | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Product-focused keyword research | Sound: “the basis for every other SEO-related task” |
| Every page three or fewer clicks from the homepage | Sound: a good structural target |
| Canonical tags and noindexing unnecessary variations | Sound: the core technical fix for shops |
| Informational content linking to products, plus link building | Sound |
| “1,000+ word descriptions” | Disputed: Google says length “alone doesn’t matter for ranking purposes” |
| “LSI keywords” | Disputed: Google’s John Mueller has said “There’s no such thing as LSI keywords” |
Keyword research starts with products, not topics
Backlinko is right that “keyword research is the basis for every other SEO-related task.” For a shop, that means product-focused keywords: the terms people type when they already know what they want to buy. Those map to category and product pages, which is where the revenue is.
Two of its sources are worth borrowing. Amazon’s search suggestions show how shoppers actually phrase product searches, often with the modifiers that matter, such as size, material or use. And competitor analysis shows which categories rival shops have built pages for. A category you sell but have no page for is usually the quickest gap to close.
Once you have the list, map each keyword to one page. If a category page and a product page both chase the same term, you are asking Google to choose between them, and it may pick the one that converts worse. A simple spreadsheet of keyword, target URL and page type prevents most of that before any page is written.
On-page SEO for an ecommerce website starts with architecture
Backlinko’s rule is to “keep every page three (or fewer) clicks from your homepage.” For a large catalogue this is the single most useful structural target, because pages buried deep in pagination or nested subcategories get crawled less and receive less internal link value. Our post on click depth and SEO covers how to measure it.
In practice, a shallow structure means a small number of top-level categories, subcategories that are genuinely distinct, and links from category pages straight to the products in them. Clean, readable URLs that mirror that hierarchy help both shoppers and crawlers, as our guide to URL structure for SEO explains. Resist the urge to create a category for every attribute; that is how the next problem starts.
Duplicate and thin pages are the real technical problem
Backlinko lists the technical issues that hit shops hardest: duplicate content, thin content, too many pages and slow page speed. The first three are linked. Faceted filters, sort orders and product variants can each generate a new URL, and a catalogue of a few thousand products can quietly expose many times that number of crawlable pages, most of them near-duplicates with almost no unique text.
The fixes are the ones Backlinko names: canonical tags pointing variations at the main version, and noindexing variations that serve no search purpose. A colour variant with its own search demand might deserve its own indexable page. A price-sorted view of a category almost never does. Our guide to the canonical tag covers how to set it up without creating new conflicts.
Site speed is the fourth issue on Backlinko’s list, and shops are prone to it: large product images, review widgets, tracking scripts and apps added one at a time over years. Audit what each one costs before adding another. The pages that matter most are the category and product templates, because a fix there applies to every page built from them.
Where the standard advice goes wrong
Two of Backlinko’s recommendations deserve pushback. The first is “1,000+ word descriptions” for product and category pages. Google’s own SEO Starter Guide says content length “alone doesn’t matter for ranking purposes”. A shopper deciding between two kettles needs the specifications, the differences and the answers to their objections. Padding that to a word count makes the page worse to use, and multiplied across a catalogue it is a lot of writing for no stated ranking benefit.
The second is “LSI keywords”. Google’s John Mueller has said: “There’s no such thing as LSI keywords”. Using the vocabulary a topic naturally needs is good writing; calling it LSI implies a technique Google does not use. Our post on LSI keywords covers the history, and our list of SEO myths covers similar claims. Neither point makes Backlinko’s guide wrong overall. It means the structural advice deserves more of your time than the content-length advice.
Content and links still matter for shops
Backlinko’s last pillar is content marketing around informational keywords, linking through to product pages, plus link building. This is where a shop’s blog earns its place. Buying guides and comparisons capture people earlier in their research, earn links that product pages rarely attract on their own, and pass internal link value to the categories you want to rank.
The link from the guide to the category matters as much as the guide itself. A buying guide that never points readers to the products it discusses captures traffic and lets it leave. Link to the specific category or product in context, with descriptive anchor text, so readers and crawlers both follow the path you want.
The limitation is that this post weighs one guide against Google’s public statements, and Google does not publish how it ranks product pages. The structural advice above is widely agreed; the disagreement over length and LSI is about what Google has said, not about a controlled test of shops. Your own catalogue will have its own quirks, from how your platform generates URLs to how many variants carry real demand. Start by crawling the site to count how many URLs it actually exposes compared with how many products you sell. If the first number is far larger than the second, that gap is your ecommerce SEO plan for the next quarter, and it will do more than any rewrite of your product descriptions.
Frequently asked questions
What is ecommerce SEO?
Optimising a shop’s category and product pages for search: product keyword research, a shallow site structure, and control of duplicate and thin pages.
How long should product descriptions be?
As long as the shopper needs. Google’s SEO Starter Guide says content length alone doesn’t matter for ranking purposes.
How deep should product pages sit?
Backlinko recommends keeping every page three or fewer clicks from the homepage, which suits large catalogues well.
How do I handle product variants and filters?
Use canonical tags to point variations at the main version, and noindex variations that have no search demand of their own.
The takeaway Spend your ecommerce SEO effort on product keywords, a shallow structure and controlling duplicate pages. Skip word-count targets and LSI keywords.
