Ecommerce SEO is not general SEO with a shopping cart attached. A store is a catalogue, and catalogues fail in search in their own ways: category pages with nothing on them, product descriptions shared with every other retailer, and filters that quietly generate thousands of pages nobody asked Google to index. Most online stores that are hard to find have all three.
This is where the search visibility of a South African online store actually lives, in the order worth fixing it.
Category pages match the searches that sell
Someone searching for linen shirts or ceramic mugs is looking for a range, not a single product, and the page that matches that search is a category page. For most stores these pages are the most valuable in search and the least looked after: a heading, a grid, and nothing that tells Google or the customer what makes this range worth choosing.
- Name categories the way customers search, not the way the stockroom files them.
- Put a short introduction at the top that answers what the range is and who it suits, in plain words.
- Link from each category to its best sellers and to the related categories a customer would look at next.
- Give every category its own title and description rather than the platform default.
Product pages answer the buying questions
A product page ranks for the specific searches close to a sale, and it converts for the same reason: it answers what the customer needs to know before buying. Those answers are also what gives Google something to understand.
A specific title
The product, the material, the size or the model, in the words a buyer would type.
An original description
Written for this product. The supplier text is on every competing store already.
The details
Dimensions, materials, care, compatibility: whatever the phone rings about.
Delivery and returns
Cost, time and the way back, on the product page itself.
Real photographs
Several angles and one in use, each with alt text that describes what is in the frame.
Price and availability
Visible, current, and consistent with what the checkout says.
A supplier description is on every store that sells the product. It gives Google no reason to choose yours, and the customer no reason either.
Fix the pages the catalogue creates by accident
Every filter, sort order and variant can produce its own address. A category with filters for size, colour and price can become thousands of URLs that show nearly the same products, and Google spends its attention on those instead of the pages that matter. This is the problem that separates ecommerce SEO from ordinary website SEO, and it is invisible from the storefront.
- Decide which filtered views deserve to be found, such as a popular colour, and keep the rest out of the index.
- Point variants of one product to one main page rather than competing with each other.
- Leave out-of-stock products live with a clear status when they are coming back, and redirect them to the closest alternative when they are not.
- Remove or redirect discontinued products instead of letting them return errors.
The foundations a store cannot skip
South African shoppers mostly arrive on a phone, often over mobile data, so page weight is a search issue and a sales issue at once. Compress product images, keep the store quick on a real phone, and make sure the navigation is plain links Google can follow rather than menus that only appear on a tap.
Product structured data tells search engines the product name, price, availability and reviews in a form they can read reliably. Most modern store platforms produce it; check that it is present, valid and matches what the page shows, because a price in the markup that disagrees with the page is worse than none.
Content that earns traffic to the catalogue
The articles worth writing for a store are the ones that answer a question close to a purchase: a sizing guide, a comparison between two popular products, care instructions, what to buy for a particular use. Each should link to the categories and products it discusses. An article that brings visitors who have no reason to buy is a very efficient way to grow a traffic report.
Prioritise by revenue, not by the audit
- 01Category pages for ranges people already search for.
- 02Best-selling and highest-margin product pages.
- 03Technical errors that stop those pages being found.
- 04Duplicate pages from filters, variants and supplier descriptions.
- 05Supporting articles for the questions buyers ask before choosing.
The point
Ecommerce SEO is the catalogue made readable: category pages that match how people search, product pages that answer the buying questions in original words, and a store that stops publishing near-identical pages by accident. Do those in order of what sells, and search visibility follows the parts of the store that earn money.
Sources and method
- Google Search Central, "Ecommerce SEO" and "Product structured data" documentation, read 14/09/2026.
- Priorities drawn from auditing product catalogues in practice. No client figures appear.
Written by Assay House, a South African brand strategy and creative agency. Published 14 September 2026.
