Ecommerce SEO Checklist

I keep this checklist in a Google Doc and run through it every time I take on a new ecommerce client. It is not exhaustive, but it covers the things that most often break.

• Crawl the site with Screaming Frog or a similar tool. Look for 4xx and 5xx errors, blocked resources, and orphaned pages. Check the robots.txt allows CSS and JS. Fix any disallowed directives that block important pages. This is the foundation of [technical SEO for ecommerce](/technical-seo-for-ecommerce/).
• Submit an updated XML sitemap to Google Search Console. Exclude non-indexable URLs like cart, checkout, and account pages. Keep the sitemap current as you add or remove products.
• Audit canonical tags. Every product and category page should have a self-referencing canonical. Filter and sort parameters should be set to noindex or canonicalised back to the parent page. This is where most [ecommerce SEO](/ecommerce-seo/) mistakes happen.
• For each product page, write a unique title tag, H1, and meta description. Target one primary keyword per page. Avoid keyword stuffing. Use the product name plus a benefit or differentiator. For best results, see [SEO for product pages](/seo-for-product-pages/).
• Add structured data (Product schema) to every product page. Include price, availability, and reviews if you have them. Use a plugin or app to handle this. I recommend [ecommerce SEO tools](/ecommerce-seo-tools/) like Yoast for WooCommerce or JSON-LD apps for Shopify. If you are on [WooCommerce](/woocommerce-seo/), enable the built-in schema; if on [Shopify](/shopify-seo/), use a dedicated app.
• Check site speed for mobile and desktop. Compress images, use a CDN, and lazy load below-the-fold content. Run the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console and prioritise fixing the largest contentful paint issues.

The checklist above can take a week to complete for a small store, but for a large catalogue you need to be ruthless with your time. The biggest mistake I see is people trying to optimise every single product page. If you have 10,000 products, you do not need 10,000 unique title tags. Focus on the 20% of products that generate 80% of your revenue. Hand-craft titles and descriptions for those. For the rest, use a template: combine the category name with the product name and a short descriptor.

Another area where you can stop is canonicalisation. Once you have set self-referencing canonicals on all main pages and noindexed or canonicalised the main filter variants, you are done. Do not chase every URL parameter. Use Google Search Console to monitor for duplicate title warnings, but if the counts are low, move on.

Core Web Vitals are important, but do not spend weeks shaving off 50ms. Get your site in the green for LCP and CLS, then stop. The bulk of your ranking gains will come from the first three items on the list: crawlability, canonical tags, and keyword mapping. Everything else is diminishing returns. I also stop when I have a feedback loop set up. Once the site is indexed and I can see which pages are getting impressions, I start again from the top with the data.

For years I skipped the crawl audit and went straight to optimising product pages. I thought I knew the site structure, but I missed a massive duplicate content problem caused by faceted navigation. The client had filter URLs like /products/colour=red&size=large that were all indexed, and they were competing with the main product pages. I spent two weeks writing new titles for duplicate pages before I realised the root cause. Now I always start with a crawl and a canonical audit.

I also used to insist that every product page needed a unique title tag. That is fine for a boutique store, but for a 50,000-product site it is impossible to manage. I now use a template-based approach for long-tail products and only hand-craft titles for the top sellers. The search engines still understand the page content from the H1 and the body text.

Another thing I got wrong was ignoring internal search pages. I used to block them all in robots.txt, but some of them get decent traffic. Now I selectively index the ones that have informative content and noindex the rest. It is a small change, but it recovered a few thousand visits for one client.