Ecommerce SEO checklist

First: can Google see and index the right pages?

Count your indexable URLs against the pages you meant to publish. If the first number is dramatically larger, you have a crawl waste problem. If it is smaller, you have an indexation problem. Both are more expensive than anything further down this list.

Check that category pages are indexed, that filter URLs mostly are not, and that no robots rule or canonical tag is quietly excluding a section of the store.

Second: is anything competing with itself?

Look for multiple pages targeting the same search. On stores this usually happens between a category and a filtered version of it, or between two categories that mean nearly the same thing to a shopper.

Where you find it, pick one page to win and either merge or differentiate the other. Two half-strength pages rank worse than one strong one.

Third: do the commercial templates work?

Category pages need a heading that matches the search, text that is genuinely useful rather than a paragraph stuffed beneath the products, and internal links to related categories.

Product pages need unique titles, structured data that reflects what is actually on the page, and images with real filenames and alt text.

Fourth: speed on the templates that carry traffic

Test category and product templates, not the homepage. The homepage is almost never where your organic traffic lands, and it is almost always the page that gets tested.

Last: content and links

Only once the structure holds. Building authority to pages that should not exist, or that compete with each other, compounds the problem rather than the result.