Technical SEO for ecommerce sites

Each filter a shopper picks can add to the page address. Four sizes, six shades and three price bands make 72 combinations for one collection. Multiply that by every collection, and Google may spend most of its visits on pages that should never appear in search.

• How to spot it: In Google Search Console, open the Pages report and look for addresses with filter settings in them. Searching Google for site:yourstore.com plus a filter word works too.

  The fix: Decide which filter pages deserve to rank. A few might, such as a shade people search for by name. Keep the rest out of the index, and out of the sitemap and internal links where you can.

A product can be reached through every collection it belongs to, through tracking settings added to links, and with or without a trailing slash. Each version is a separate address to Google. Canonical tags tell Google which one is the main copy, and your own links should agree with them.

• How to spot it: Crawl your site with a free crawler (the free version of Screaming Frog checks up to 500 addresses) and sort by page title. The same title on several addresses is the sign.

  The fix: Link to the main address everywhere, keep canonical tags pointing to it, and redirect old copies that have links from other sites.

Technically, your developer may say the canonical tag already sorts this out. Just make sure your own links point at the main address. A full audit checks for every duplicate like this.

Most variants belong on one page. Shoppers want to compare sizes in one place, and one page gathers all the links and reviews. A separate page makes sense when people search for that variant by name and it differs in more than size, such as a shade that is sold as its own line.

• The fix: Keep variants together by default. Split one out only when there is search demand you can see in a keyword tool or in Search Console.

How to set up the product page itself is in our product and category page guide. For how Shopify handles variants, see Shopify SEO.

• Coming back soon: keep the page live, say when it is due back, offer a back-in-stock email and show close alternatives.

• Gone for good, with a clear replacement: redirect the old address to the replacement (a 301 redirect).

• Gone for good, with no replacement: redirect to the collection it was in, or let it return "gone" (a 410) if nothing comes close.

Never redirect everything to the home page. Google treats that much like a missing page, and shoppers land somewhere that has nothing to do with what they clicked.

A page with links from other sites is worth keeping in some form.

If you would rather someone checked your store for these, request a store review.

Product markup is a block of code that tells Google a page's price, stock and reviews in a form it can read directly. Google can then show those details beside your result. Most current themes add basic markup. Check that the price and stock it reports match the page, and that reviews are only marked up when they are real reviews from customers.

Google also shows products in its shopping results for free, through Google Merchant Center. A clean product feed with the same prices as your pages is the entry ticket.

Google measures three things on real visits: how fast the main content appears, how quickly the page responds to a tap, and how much the layout jumps while loading. It calls them Core Web Vitals. On stores the usual causes of slow pages are large images, apps that load code on every page, and fonts and scripts loaded before they are needed.

• How to spot it: Run your collection and product pages through PageSpeed Insights. It is free, and it shows data from real visitors when there is enough of it.

  The fix: Compress and resize images, remove apps you no longer use (and the code they leave behind), and delay anything that is not needed for the first screen.

If you have to pick only one, let it be images. They are usually the heaviest thing on a store page.

Moving from one platform to another changes most of your addresses, and Google has to learn them again. Rankings usually carry over when every old address redirects to its closest new one.

By all means, a new store should get its addresses right the first time. But a store that has been trading for years should weigh what a change of addresses costs before making one it doesn't need.

1. Export every address that gets visits or has links from other sites.

2. Map each one to its new address, one to one.

3. Set up the redirects before launch and test a sample.

4. Keep page titles, headings and product text the same at launch. Change one thing at a time.

5. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console on launch day.

6. Watch the Pages report and your top search terms for the following weeks.

Send us your store's address. We will check it for the problems on this page.