Most online stores do not have a keyword problem. They have an order-of-work problem. The jobs that would genuinely change how often Google shows your products usually sit behind a queue of work that will not move anything — another round of blog ideas, another pass at meta descriptions, more keyword research for pages Google cannot even reach.
So this is not another list of tips. It is a sequence: what to fix first in an online store, what comes next, and how you will tell whether any of it worked.
What ecommerce SEO actually is
Ecommerce SEO is the work of making your category and product pages findable in organic search. It covers the same ground as general SEO — crawling, indexing, content, speed — but it has to survive something most sites never face: scale.
A store with 800 products, each in four sizes and three colours, plus filters for brand, price and availability, can generate hundreds of thousands of URLs without anyone writing a word. Google has a finite appetite for crawling your site, and a store that spends it on filter combinations has none left for the products you want to sell.
Australia Post’s eCommerce Report 2026 reports $18.9 billion spent on pure online marketplaces in 2025, with 73% of online shoppers making at least one marketplace purchase — marketplaces alone, not all online retail. When a shopper’s default move is to open a marketplace app, your own store has to earn its way into search on its own terms. Our look at Australian ecommerce trends for 2026 covers where that leaves independent stores.
Technical SEO for ecommerce: the order of work
This sequence follows the path Google’s crawler takes: find the pages, understand the URLs, avoid the traps, read the products, render them quickly. Each step comes from Google’s own ecommerce guidance; the ordering is our editorial judgement, and it is the order that stops you doing later work twice.
1. Make sure every product can be reached by a link
If the only way to a product is through your on-site search box, Google may never see it. Googlebot generally does not try to submit searches into a search box while crawling, and Google strongly recommends linking to every product you want indexed. Category to sub-category to product, all through ordinary links. Where that is genuinely not possible, a sitemap or a Merchant Center feed is the fallback.
2. Sort out your URLs before the catalogue grows
Use descriptive words in the path rather than product IDs, give every paginated page its own unique URL, and avoid linking to temporary parameters such as session IDs — Google notes it sees the most URL mistakes in pagination structures. For size and colour variants, use a path segment or a query parameter per variant, and canonicalise to the version without parameters.
3. Stop your filters eating your crawl budget
Combinations of colour, size and price filters create a near-infinite URL space, which Google warns causes overcrawling and slower discovery of your real content. Two defensible options: block the filtered URLs in robots.txt so Google crawls only clean category and product pages, or, if some filtered pages genuinely need indexing, keep the filter order consistent, use a single separator, and return a real 404 for combinations with no products.
4. Give your product pages structured data
Product, Offer, Review and AggregateRating markup makes your pages eligible for product rich results and helps Google get price, availability and shipping right. Validate it with Google’s Rich Results Test, then watch the Merchant Listings and Product Snippets reports in Search Console to see what Google is reading. Your markup has to match what a shopper sees: a price in the markup that differs from the price on screen is a problem, not a shortcut.
5. Make the pages fast and stable
Core Web Vitals has three thresholds, measured on real visits at the 75th percentile: Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less. Product pages usually fail them, thanks to oversized images and review widgets. Search Console shows which templates are at fault, and our guide to what technical SEO is covers the general principles.
6. Get pagination right on category pages
Link your category pages sequentially with ordinary links, give each page its own canonical URL, and never canonicalise page two back to page one. Do not use a fragment for the page number, and noindex sort-order variants so you are not asking Google to index the same twenty products in six arrangements.
Product page SEO: write for the shopper first
Once the technical sequence is done, the product page is where the gains are. The quickest win in most stores is replacing manufacturer-supplied descriptions, which sit word for word on every competitor’s site, with your own. Write what a customer actually asks you before buying: what it fits, how long it lasts, what is in the box, who it is not right for. If your category page could belong to any store in the country, there is nothing for a shopper to prefer about it.
Where AI Overviews fit in
There is nothing extra to build. Google states there are no additional technical requirements for appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond ordinary indexing eligibility. What it asks for is what good ecommerce SEO already produces: a crawlable site, strong internal linking, decent page experience, real text rather than image-only pages, structured data that matches the visible content, and current Merchant Center details. Work through the six steps above and you have covered this too.
How do you know it is working?
This is the question most articles on the topic skip. Australian Bureau of Statistics data for 2024–25 found only 7% of Australian businesses measured the contribution of their digital activities to overall business performance — an all-industry figure, not a retail one, but a telling one. Watch these, in the order they move in:
- Impressions in Search Console — the first sign Google is showing more of your pages.
- Average position for category and product queries — filter the Performance report by page to see which templates are climbing.
- Valid items in the Merchant Listings and Product Snippets reports — proof your structured data is being read, not merely published.
- Core Web Vitals passing URLs — grouped by template, so one fix moves hundreds of pages at once.
- Organic revenue, not organic sessions — traffic that does not buy is a different problem, usually sitting in the checkout. Our post on why your checkout is losing sales covers that half.
Give it months rather than weeks. Re-crawling and re-ranking a large catalogue is not quick, and judging the work after a fortnight tells you only that a fortnight is not long enough.
An audit you can run this week
Before you commission anything, spend an hour with your store and answer these:
- Can you reach every product you sell by clicking links, starting from the home page?
- Do your product URLs contain words, or numbers?
- What does the Pages report in Search Console say is excluded, and how much of it is filter URLs?
- Does the Rich Results Test find valid Product markup on your three best sellers?
- Do those three pages pass Core Web Vitals on mobile?
- Is the description on your best-selling product yours, or the manufacturer’s?
Every answer you do not like is a task, and that list is already in priority order.
If you would rather not work through it alone, our SEO services team can audit your store and hand you the sequence, and our guide to what SEO costs in Australia sets out what that work usually involves. If you would like a hand working out which step your store is stuck on, get in touch.
