Free SEO resource
Ecommerce SEO checklist
Free ecommerce SEO checklist with 32 checks for product pages, category structure, schema and site speed, plus an XLSX product page audit and PDF.
Thirty-two ecommerce SEO checks in five groups, tickable on this page, plus an Excel product page audit template and a printable PDF. Product pages are group one because they are what Google Shopping, rich results and AI search actually index, and most ecommerce SEO problems are not ranking problems. They are product page problems: missing schema, duplicate descriptions copied from the manufacturer, thin category pages that exist only for navigation, and faceted URLs that create thousands of near-duplicate pages Google wastes crawl budget on.
- Best for
- Anyone running an online store who wants product pages to rank in search and shopping results
- Includes
- 32 tickable checks + Excel product page audit + printable PDF
- Time to use
- 3 hours for a first pass on a 500-product store
Free to download and use in your own client work. No email address required.
Ecommerce SEO has one structural advantage and one structural problem, and they are the same thing: scale. A store with 500 products has 500 pages that could rank. It also has 500 pages that could be thin, duplicate, or misconfigured, and fixing them one at a time isn’t a strategy.
This checklist works at the template level: fix the product page template, the category page template, and the site architecture, and every page improves at once.
The checklist
Tick these here (progress saves in your browser), or take the PDF.
Product pages 7
Category pages 6
Site architecture 6
Technical ecommerce 6
Schema and rich results 7
The five groups
Group 1: Product pages. Unique titles, unique descriptions (not the manufacturer’s copy), Product schema with price, availability and reviews, original images with descriptive alt text, and a clear purchase path. Each of these is a template-level fix: get it right once in the product page template and it applies to every product.
Group 2: Category pages. Category pages aren’t just navigation. They are the pages that should rank for head terms (“running shoes,” “wireless headphones”). That means they need content above the product grid: a 100-to-200-word introduction that answers what this category is and who it is for, and internal links to the top products and to related categories.
Group 3: Site architecture. Flat hierarchy (every product reachable within three clicks from the homepage), logical URL structure (/category/subcategory/product/), breadcrumbs with BreadcrumbList schema, and an XML sitemap that includes products and categories but excludes faceted URLs.
Group 4: Technical ecommerce. Faceted navigation is the biggest technical problem unique to ecommerce. Filters for colour, size, price and brand create thousands of URL variations that are all near-duplicates. Canonicalise them to the unfiltered category page, or block them in robots.txt, or both. Leaving them open wastes crawl budget and creates duplicate content at scale.
Group 5: Schema and rich results. Product schema gets your price, availability and rating into search results. FAQ schema on product pages (genuine FAQs, not manufactured ones) can capture additional SERP real estate. Review schema requires real reviews from real customers.
The product page audit template
The workbook has one row per product and the checks as columns, so you can see which products need attention at a glance.
Preview of the file
Manufacturer descriptions are the biggest problem
Most product pages in most stores use the same description the manufacturer provides to every retailer. Google sees 50 stores with the same 200 words and indexes the one with the most authority. If that isn’t your store, your product page is effectively invisible.
You do not need to write 500 words of original copy per product. Two or three sentences that answer “why buy this from us” and “what does this product not do” are enough to differentiate the page. Scale this with a template: “[product name] is [one-sentence description]. We chose to stock it because [reason]. It isn’t the right choice if [honest limitation].”
Start with your best-sellers
Do not try to rewrite 500 product descriptions at once. Start with the 20 products that generate the most revenue or the most search impressions (check Search Console). Rewrite those, measure the impact over 60 days, then work outward. The Pareto principle applies harder in ecommerce SEO than anywhere else.
Faceted navigation: the crawl budget trap
A store with 200 products, five colours, four sizes and three price brackets has 200 x 5 x 4 x 3 = 12,000 potential URL combinations from facets alone. None of those combinations is a page worth indexing. All of them consume crawl budget.
The fix depends on the platform:
- Shopify: faceted URLs use query parameters by default, which Google mostly handles. Add canonical tags to be safe.
- WooCommerce: use robots.txt to block
/product-category/parameters, or set canonical tags in the SEO plugin. - Custom builds: implement
rel="canonical"on all faceted pages pointing to the unfiltered category page.
Where this fits
Run the technical SEO checklist first if you haven’t already. Ecommerce sites have more indexing problems than content sites because of faceted navigation, and technical SEO catches those. The on-page SEO checklist applies to every product and category page individually. For the site structure underneath it all, the site architecture guide covers category hierarchy and internal linking.