SEO techniques that still work for online stores

Most SEO advice is either generic or out of date. These are the techniques that consistently move product and category pages, in the order we would apply them to a real store.

See which ones your site needs

Guides

Fix “Crawled – currently not indexed” — Why Google read your product pages and still left them out, and what changes the verdict.
Fix “Discovered – currently not indexed” — Pages Google knows about but has not crawled: internal links, sitemaps and crawl budget.
Duplicate product descriptions — Manufacturer copy and variants that repeat the same text — and how to make each page unique.
Product schema markup — The Product structured data a store needs for price, availability and review results.
Collection and category page SEO — Turn category pages into the pages that rank for buying searches.
Out-of-stock product SEO — Keep, redirect or remove: what to do with products that are sold out or discontinued.
Fix 404 errors — Which 404s matter, when to redirect, and when to let a page go.
Shopify SEO checklist — Twenty checks: what Shopify does for you, and what it leaves to you.
Crawl budget for ecommerce — Where Google spends its time on your store, and how to win it back.
Striking distance keywords — Searches you almost rank for, and how to push them to page one.
AI product descriptions and Google — What is safe, what fails, and how to use AI for product copy.
Merchant Center disapprovals — Why Google Shopping rejects products, and how to fix each cause.
Should you block AI crawlers? — Training crawlers versus AI search crawlers in robots.txt.
llms.txt for ecommerce — What it does, what it does not, and how to write one.

The techniques

1. Fix indexing first: Pages Google leaves out cannot rank. Start with Search Console’s Pages report and the Google indexing issues behind it.
2. Unique product content: Specs, uses, sizing, care, honest pros and cons and your own photos — never the manufacturer’s copy. See duplicate product descriptions.
3. Category pages that help: A short buying guide on each category page often ranks better than a separate blog post for buying searches — see collection page SEO.
4. Internal links: Link related products, categories and guides so every page is a few clicks from the homepage. The internal linking tool finds the orphans.
5. Titles that match searches: Put the search people use near the start of the title; write a description that earns the click.
6. Structured data: Product and Breadcrumb markup so results can show price, availability and reviews — see product schema markup.
7. Speed and mobile: Compress images, cache pages and check Core Web Vitals — most visitors are on phones.
8. Earn links, don’t buy them: Recover links to dead pages (fix 404 errors), get listed where your market looks, and publish guides worth citing.
9. Measure: Compare clicks, positions and indexed pages before and after each change.

What to avoid

Publishing AI content at scale without review — Google treats it as scaled content abuse.
Buying links or joining link schemes.
Using the Google Indexing API for product pages — it is only for job postings and livestreams.
Chasing a tool’s score instead of the pages that bring sales.

Questions people ask

What is the most important SEO technique for ecommerce?: Making each product and category page genuinely unique and useful — it is what gets pages indexed and ranked in the first place.
Do SEO techniques differ for Shopify and WooCommerce?: The techniques are the same; how you apply them differs (themes, apps, plugins). NicheSEO applies fixes on both, with your approval.