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The New Playbook of SEO for eCommerce Websites [2025]
Introduction
SEO for eCommerce websites is no longer what it used to be a couple of years ago!
Well, you may say that SEO is always evolving with time — and that’s true. But lately, SEO is taking rapid strides, and it’s not just “advancing” but also “expanding”.
As an eCommerce business owner, you must stay updated with the latest SEO best practices on top of the evergreen recipes like high-quality content and user experience.
So, in this blog post, we’ll share the latest and detailed guide on SEO for eCommerce websites and how SEO is changing with AI advancements — along with the tools and tips to enhance your SEO strategy.
Let’s get started!
What is eCommerce SEO?
In eCommerce, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of implementing various technical and non-technical practices that help your webpages rank higher in search engines like Google and Bing.
SEO is a hugely broad term and covers multiple facets that all contribute towards a common purpose, i.e., increasing the visibility of your brand and bringing traffic to your eCommerce store — without running paid ads. Thus, SEO is considered an organic and cost-effective marketing strategy.
Why SEO Matters in eCommerce?
When searching for anything on Google, how many pages will you go through before clicking on a website? One, two, or three at max, right? That’s why it’s important to rank in those top search results or at least pages.
Here are the key benefits of eCommerce SEO:
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Increase your brand awareness:
When customers are searching for anything related to the products you offer, and your website appears higher in search results, they will come to know about your brand. Especially, when you’re a new brand in the market, brand awareness is a crucial aspect.
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Increase your sales and revenue:
When more customers land on your website in search of a product, they’d explore your offerings. Depending on your conversion rate optimization strategy, many of them end up buying from your brand. Thus, SEO helps boost your sales and revenue numbers.
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Reduce your ad spend
The more robust your SEO strategy and execution, the less you’d need to spend on advertising. After all, SEO is a cost-effective marketing strategy. Why spend thousands on ads when you can attract your target audience with a much smaller budget? That said, SEO may take a longer time, but it’s still a better strategy from a long-term perspective.
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Build your brand authority
It’s not just about visibility and gaining traffic to your site. When implemented right, an SEO strategy can help you build authority in the market. When customers repeatedly see your brand in top search results, they perceive your brand as an authority in your niche.
How eCommerce SEO is Changing in 2025 and Beyond?
The way users search for information has been changing, and so are the SEO practices.
So, let’s briefly understand what factors have brought a major shift in eCommerce SEO and how they’re changing the game.
Google is still the king of search.
Despite all the ongoing trends in the AI space, especially related to ChatGPT, Google is still the number one choice of the global population for search. Here are some interesting findings shared by SparkToro for 2024 search numbers:
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Google's searches per day: 14 billion
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ChatGPT's searches per day: 37.5 million
In fact, ChatGPT is still not even close to Bing or Yahoo Search, let alone Google.
Google holds a whopping 93.57% of the global market share, while other search platforms hold a small portion of the remaining 6.43%.
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Google: 93.57%
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Bing: 4.10%
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Yahoo: 1.35%
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DuckDuckGo: 0.73%
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ChatGPT: 0.25%
The point is — yes, SEO is changing, but Google should be the top priority in 2025 and beyond.
AI is getting involved in eCommerce SEO strategy.
This is one of the most talked-about SEO topics in recent times. At the start of this article, we mentioned that SEO is also “expanding,” and this is why we said that: With advancements in AI technologies and tools, SEO is also expanding its horizons into AI search tools.
Again, Google still holds a prominent position in the search domain, but brands are now also aiming to display their content in popular AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.
Here’s one more interesting aspect to consider in the age of AI-powered search. When responding to search queries, even the AI tools share links to multiple web pages to provide sources and verify the information.
SE Ranking shares the findings on a number of web links provided by AI search tools to support their content or to verify further information:
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ChatGPT: 10.42 links per response
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Google AIOs: 9.26 links per response
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Perplexity: 5.01 links per response
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Bing Copilot: 3.13 links per response
Zero-click content is answering a lot of search queries.
Google recently started showing key summaries for search queries through “AI Overviews”. Also, you must’ve seen its “featured snippets” that provide a highlighted answer from a particular website.
These features provide a short answer to the query, and it results in getting no clicks to the website link — that’s why it’s called “zero-click content”. But yes, Google does link the answer to the source website, which essentially makes the website rank on the first position.
Search engines are focused on the search intent.
Keyword stuffing has no place in modern-day SEO.
Search engines have become smarter and more powerful than ever before, as they too have started using advanced AI technologies. They understand the search intent so much better, even when the query may not be perfect.
This impacts your content strategy and how you write your content pieces. For example, when writing blog articles, you must ensure that you’re addressing the specific search intent, or else, your content loses the chances of getting ranked for the respective query.
How to Build an SEO Strategy for Your eCommerce Store
Keep in mind that SEO is a long-term game. When creating your brand’s SEO vision, you need to think in years — not days, weeks, or months. Of course, you could set weekly or monthly goals. But don’t expect overnight results.
Here’s the detailed guide along with tips on eCommerce SEO strategy:
1. Review and audit your current SEO status
First things first, you need to identify where you’re currently standing in terms of your SEO game. What are your positive areas and areas of improvement?
You may already have certain SEO aspects in place. So, find out the missing parts and work on them. Prepare a detailed SEO checklist to review your current position and derive action items from the audit outcomes.
2. Consider an SEO-centric tech stack
Your eCommerce tech stack — software or tools you use for building your eCommerce store — plays a pivotal role in your overall SEO strategy.
First off, your eCommerce platform itself has to be SEO-friendly. Shopify resolves that concern as it offers you built-in SEO features along with additional tools in terms of Shopify apps to level up your SEO game.
Here are some of the SEO tools and Shopify apps that you should consider for your tech stack when building with Shopify:
Will cover more tools later in the article.
Pro tip: Even when choosing non-SEO tools or apps, you can keep the SEO aspect in mind. For example, when choosing a page builder app for your Shopify store, you should focus on finding one that helps you create responsive and fast-loading store pages. GemPages takes care of all these aspects for you.
3. Research and implement keywords smartly
Include the most relevant keywords in your content as well as website copy. Researching keywords is one aspect — and implementing them into your website is another. Keywords should flow naturally and not be stuffed vaguely.
When performing the keyword research, consider the search intent of your target audience. Use a keyword research tool depending on your budget.
Best free keyword research tools you can consider:
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Google Search — auto-complete feature
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Google Keyword Planner
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AnswerThePublic
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Amazon — Search function
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Ubersuggest: Free keyword research tool by an SEO expert — Neil Patel
The best-paid keyword research tools you can consider:
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Semrush
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Ahrefs
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Moz
Pro tip: You can leverage AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini for keyword research, search intent analysis, and other suggestions. You can provide the seed or primary keyword, details of the target audience, and the purpose of your content piece in the prompt. That way, you can use AI to generate and analyze relevant keywords optimized for the search intent.
5. Prepare your eCommerce store for voice search
With an increasing number of voice assistant users, you need to prepare your SEO strategy for voice searches. Especially, mobile users often give voice commands on their smartphones to search for items instead of manually typing their search query.
To optimize your site for voice, you need to understand the pattern of how users search through voice. For example, when using voice search, most users tend to speak a long and precise query like a sentence — “What’s the best running shoes for flat feet?” Optimize your content for long-tail keywords.
4. Review competitor websites and analyze their strategy
When you search for keywords related to your products, you’ll find other websites ranking on the search engine. Those are all your competitors. Review their strategies, what keywords they are dominating, what type of content ranks for them, how they’re using keywords, and so on.
Identify the content gaps and fill in those gaps for your readers through your content. For example, identify what keywords they should be ranking for but are not — and create content on those topics.
5. Implement on-page SEO best practices
As the name suggests, “on-page” SEO focuses on the actions that need to be implemented “on your web pages” to enhance their searchability. Here are the key factors that you could work on for your on-page SEO efforts:
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Website content
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Meta title, description, and URLs
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Internal linking
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SEO-friendly content structure
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Images and alt-texts
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Page speed optimization
6. Follow off-page SEO best practices
As you work on your web pages in on-page SEO efforts, on the flip side, off-page SEO covers actions that need to be implemented outside your web pages.
Here are the key factors that you could work on for your off-page SEO efforts:
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External link building
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Social media
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Public relations
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Guest posting
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Influencer marketing
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Online communities
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Customer reviews
We’ve covered both topics — on-page and off-page SEO — in more detail in our guide: An Extensive Shopify SEO Checklist for Beginners.
7. Enhance your product pages from an SEO perspective
We often talk about optimizing product pages to increase the conversion rate. However, you should also focus on optimizing them for search engines. After all, conversion will come into the picture only after you get visitors to view your product, right?
We already learned about the on-page SEO best practices. Implement those practices into your product page descriptions, meta titles, meta descriptions, and images. It will help your product pages to rank higher.
8. Optimize your site architecture for search engines
Make it easy for search engines to navigate and understand information on your website. So, let’s understand how search engines work with this graphic shared by Semrush — one of the most popular SEO tools.
If you have a proper site architecture, search engines can easily fetch the webpage. This graphic from Backlinko shows how you should structure your site pages.
Keep it simple and logical. Create a logical hierarchy of your store pages, whether those are product pages, blog posts, or any other store pages. URL structure should also be hierarchical as well as easy to understand. Keep it short though.
Create a logical relationship between your pages with proper internal linking. Also, make sure to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console.
9. Create backlink-worthy content
Getting backlinks from quality sites can help build authority for your website and create a positive impression for search engines.
But how do you get those backlinks? Create strategic and high-quality content that other websites would love to link to in their articles. For example, when you create a report based on your own survey or research, other websites would link to your report for valuable insights.
And when you get backlinks from reputable sites, it gives Google an indication that your website has reliable and valuable information. Thus, it enhances your website’s authority, which eventually helps you rank higher in search results.
10. Implement Robust Technical SEO
Technical SEO focuses on enhancing your site's technical elements linked to the backend.
We’ve already covered some technical SEO practices, such as optimizing the site architecture and submitting a sitemap to Google and Bing. Here are some more best practices for technical SEO:
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Eliminate any duplicate content issues and use canonical tags wherever necessary.
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Keep your website fast and mobile-friendly. Ensure your site is optimized for Core Web Vitals.
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Review your robots.txt file and make sure that access is allowed to all important pages.
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Fix any broken link issues.
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Use hreflang tags if your website content is published in multiple languages.
11. Work on Local SEO
Local SEO is all about increasing the visibility of your business to local customers. Here are some of the important steps you should take to cover your local SEO:
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Set up and optimize your Google Business profile.
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Make sure your business information is registered in local business listings and directories.
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During your keyword research, focus on local keywords as well. Create location-specific content to rank higher on those keywords.
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Customer reviews also play a crucial role in enhancing your local search visibility.
12. Leverage AI tools to handle your SEO efforts
We discussed many best practices for SEO in this article. But the amazing thing in this era is that you can leverage AI for many aspects, especially technical and bulk activities.
Apart from keyword research, you can use the power of AI in the following areas:
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Generating alt-text for bulk images
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Fixing broken links
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Schema markup creation
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Analyzing your traffic data for insights
Final Thoughts on eCommerce SEO
If you’re looking at your eCommerce business from a long-term perspective, SEO is non-negotiable. While the algorithms and techniques may keep on changing, the significance of SEO will remain intact in the future too.
You just need to make sure that you’re keeping yourself and your store updated with the latest updates. That’s why it’s also advisable to perform your store’s audit at regular intervals. You can hire a freelance professional to perform a detailed SEO audit for your eCommerce store.
To learn more about other eCommerce marketing strategies, trends, and best practices — check out more resources on the GemPages Blog. Also, join the GemPages Facebook community to network and learn from like-minded entrepreneurs and experts.
FAQs About eCommerce or Shopify SEO
