Running an ecommerce business is a lot of work. You’re managing all your products, solving your customers’ problems with great services, and trying to grow in a competitive industry. With AI changes coming to SEO as well, it’s hard to know where to start with SEO and marketing. The good news is you don’t have to figure it out on your own.
This guide explores the current state of ecommerce SEO with AI optimization involved and where it’ll be going in the coming years. Read on to learn how to handle your SEO to keep your ecommerce brand thriving.
Ecommerce SEO is the process of optimizing your online store so that your product pages, category pages, and brand pages rank higher in search results. Unlike traditional SEO, which often focuses on blog content and service pages, ecommerce SEO also deals with thousands of SKUs, filtering options, navigation, and constantly changing inventory.
Executing an intentional ecommerce SEO strategy is essential because organic search is one of the strongest revenue channels for online retails. When shoppers search, they’re already showing intent to buy—so ranking higher gives you the chance to be the product they see. Effective ecommerce SEO makes sure the right products appear at the right time for the right customer, which can help both your immediate sales and long-term brand visibility.
Even the most advanced AI tools and content strategies won’t deliver results if your key ecommerce SEO fundamentals aren’t in place. Before scaling product content or experimenting with automation, your site needs a strong technical foundation that helps search engines and AI tools discover and trust your pages. These four essentials make your store findable, fully crawlable, and ready to compete in organic search.
Search engines need clean, discoverable paths to your product and category pages. Use robots.txt and XML sitemaps to guide crawl behavior and make sure the most valuable URLs are included. For very large catalogs, monitor crawl budget and prioritize high-converting or frequently searched products so that they’re indexed quickly and consistently.
Filters, sorting, and faceted navigation can create thousands of parameter-based URLs that look like duplicate pages to search engines. Instead of letting your best pages get lost to crawlers, use canonical tags, “noindex” rules, and URL structure. In addition, check that you don’t have any actual duplicate pages and that could be confusing both your users and the search engines and consolidate those.
Most ecommerce traffic now comes from mobile, so your site must be fast, responsive, and easy to navigate on a phone. Optimize Core Web Vitals at the template level so that your product and category pages load consistently and quickly on any device. Other ways to pick up your site speed include compressing product imagery and streamlining scripts.
Structured data helps search engines understand and display your products more effectively. A good way to help create structured data is to add products, reviews, pricing, and availability schema to your site. This provides your customers and search engines with rich results like star ratings and stock status in search listings. Keep your schema updated to reflect inventory changes so that shoppers receive accurate, up-to-date information before they even click.
AI and SEO go hand-in-hand. AI helps you scale what used to require hours of manual research, writing, and analysis. It can cluster thousands of keywords into logical product and category groups, personalize recommendations based on user behavior, and forecast demand by analyzing past performance and seasonality. AI search SEO allows you to build smarter navigation structures and target intent-based search opportunities more effectively.
AI can also automate repetitive tasks, such as generating product descriptions, meta tags, FAQs, and schema markup at scale. With the right prompts and review workflows, these outputs stay accurate to brand voice while freeing your teams to focus on higher priorities. AI-driven anomaly detection and performance monitoring tools can also surface issues—like sudden ranking drops, broken pages, or out-of-stock items—before they meaningfully impact your company.
However, AI should act as an assistant, not a replacement. Your team and your agency will provide the expert creative direction while AI speeds up the process.
A strong ecommerce SEO content strategy includes more than blog posts. The goal is to help shoppers make confident decisions while signaling relevance and authority to search engines. Here are a few ways to help build out your strategy.
Your blog should focus on topics that closely align with your products and the problems they solve. Target high-intent queries like comparisons, “best of” lists, and how-to content that moves potential customers toward purchasing.. Each article should support a product or category.
Evergreen content (like buying guides and care instructions) builds compounding search value over time. Seasonal or trend-driven content helps you stay relevant during peak shopping windows or product launches. Both matter—evergreen builds foundation and seasonal captures timely demand.
Long-tail content like “how to choose,” “best for,” and detailed FAQs helps potential customers confidently purchase. Some other content types you might want are comparison grids, sizing explanations, and care instructions.
Every piece of content should strategically link to the right product and category pages. Internal linking helps search engines understand relationships between pages and distributes authority where it matters most. Use clear calls-to-view products, related collections, or comparison pages to guide both users and search engines toward your most valuable URLs.
Off-page SEO helps build the authority, trust, and credibility that search engines use to determine which brands deserve top rankings. For ecommerce sites, it’s about earning signals that show your products are valued by real customers. Here are a few strategies to boost your off-page SEO:
As you scale, SEO needs often evolve beyond basic optimizations. Deciding whether to manage SEO in-house or to partner with an agency depends on your specific needs and goals. Most ecommerce SEO agencies offer technical audits, on-page optimization, content strategy, link-building, and performance reporting. They often bring specialized experience with product feeds, schema markup, faceted navigation, and large catalog indexing—areas that can be difficult for generalist marketers to manage.
If rankings are flat or your internal teams are stretched thin, an agency can help. Other common signals it might be time for agency help include frequent site changes, large or rapidly growing product catalogs, and the need for structured testing to improve performance.
When you need agency help, 97th Floor takes a strategic, outcome-driven approach that can change the way your company handles SEO. Rather than applying surface-level fixes, we optimize information architecture, content ecosystems, and product discovery workflows to influence full-funnel performance. Our team combines expert strategy with AI-supported execution to scale insights, reduce manual lift, and align SEO outcomes with real results.
Search engines need clear signals about which version of each page is intended for each audience—otherwise, rankings can become diluted and customers may land on the wrong currency, language, or shipping region. International ecommerce SEO helps you make sure shoppers see the right page for their location. Here are a few tips to get you started:
While position improvements matter, the real SEO impact shows up in revenue, conversion rates, customer lifetime value, and product discoverability. The goal is not simply to rank—it’s to drive profitable, sustained growth from organic search. Below are a few ways to track how well your SEO strategy is working:
When SEO goals map directly to revenue and merchandising priorities, it becomes a scalable lever for long-term ecommerce growth.
Even experienced teams can run into challenges when scaling product catalogs and content. Recognizing and resolving them early can help you grow sustainably and reach your customers effectively. To up your SEO strategy, make sure you avoid:
Ecommerce SEO is shifting from static keyword targeting to dynamic, personalized experiences powered by AI and real-time intent signals. AI search engines are getting better at predicting what shoppers want before they explicitly say it. That means personalized recommendations, dynamic product rankings, and individualized search results will become standard—requiring ecommerce brands to optimize for user intent and behavior.
Another development on the horizon is voice commerce and conversational queries.
As voice assistants and conversational interfaces evolve, queries are becoming longer and more natural. You’ll want to be ready to handle question-based searches, comparisons, and instructional content to meet shoppers where they are.
Shoppers increasingly search using images, screenshots, and voice—often all in the same product search. Product pages in coming years will need rich visuals, clean metadata, and structured information to perform well in visual and AI-driven environments.
Expect search results to look more like curated guides than lists of blue links. AI-driven shopping assistants will become commonplace, pulling product data, reviews, inventory, and pricing from multiple sources at once. Brands that invest now in structured data, differentiated content, and flexible content pipelines will be positioned to lead the next era of ecommerce discovery.
Ecommerce SEO focuses on optimizing product and category pages, managing large catalogs, and ensuring search engines can crawl dynamic filtering and sorting systems. Traditional SEO typically prioritizes informational content and service pages, while ecommerce SEO must directly support conversions.
AI helps cluster keywords, generate product descriptions, forecast demand, and detect performance anomalies. It accelerates execution and improves decision-making—but it works best when guided by human experts.
Ecommerce SEO services improve product discoverability, but handling it alone can be hard. Agencies bring technical expertise, scalable content systems, and strategic testing frameworks that align SEO performance with your revenue goals.
Include unique, helpful product descriptions, relevant keywords, high-quality images, accurate structured data, and customer reviews. Keep your pages loading quickly and maintain clean internal linking so that both customers and search engines understand the product’s value and context.
Track organic revenue, conversion rates, customer lifetime value, and category-level visibility—not just rankings. Strong ROI shows up in sustained traffic improvements and lower cost of acquisition compared to paid channels.
97th Floor builds SEO strategies with your team that align with merchandising, user experience, and long-term revenue objectives. We combine technical expertise and AI-supported execution to help your company create sustainable growth—not just temporary ranking gains.
