Ecommerce SEO: the full-stack playbook
Ecommerce SEO is a stack: crawl and indexation at the base, then on-page optimisation of collections and PDPs, then off-page authority, then local, international and Answer Engine Optimisation for AI Overviews. Skip a layer and the layers above cap out.
Most ecommerce SEO advice online is written for content sites. Product sites break the rules faceted URLs, out-of-stock handling, variant canonicals, seasonal collections, review corpora and need their own playbook.
This hub is that playbook. Each layer of the stack has its own guide, its own service page for the teams who want us to run it, and its own set of measurable outcomes so you know when a layer is "done".
Guides, playbooks and case studies
Crawl budget, indexation, log files, Core Web Vitals, faceted nav, canonicals.
Title, H1, PDP copy, schema, image alt, internal linking at scale.
Digital PR, HARO, brand mentions, unlinked mention recovery.
GBP, local landing pages, citations for click-and-collect and showroom brands.
Hreflang, ccTLD vs subfolder, cross-market currency and stock signals.
Structuring pages to be quoted by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews.
Verifiable stats, named authors, outbound citations the LLM-friendly page shape.
Hub → guide → glossary → case study the topical model AI search rewards.
The playbook, step by step
- 01Crawl + index audit
Baseline Sitebulb/Screaming Frog + GSC coverage export. Output: index-worthy vs waste-worthy URL list, canonical + noindex changes.
- 02PDP + collection template pass
Rebuild templates for the top 20% of pages driving 80% of the traffic. Schema, copy, review corpus, internal links, image alt.
- 03Authority build
Digital PR campaigns tied to data or opinion never PBNs. Target 3-6 real editorial links per month, measured on referring domains.
- 04Local + international layers
Layer GBP, hreflang and market-specific stores only after the base layers hit target.
- 05AEO + GEO layer
Rewrite every commercial page to answer-first shape: ≤60-word direct answer, definitional block, named evidence, FAQ.
Frequently asked questions
How long does ecommerce SEO take to work?
Technical fixes: 30-60 days. On-page rewrites on top pages: 60-90 days. Authority + category dominance: 6-12 months. This is normal SEO compounds.
Do we still need backlinks in 2026?
Yes. Links remain a top-3 ranking factor for commercial queries. What changed is the source quality bar links from real editorial coverage still work; PBNs and directories don't.
What is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)?
Structuring content so answer engines (Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude) can extract and cite it. Short direct answers, definitional blocks, named evidence, FAQ schema.
How is GEO different from AEO?
AEO is about being extractable. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is about being cited verifiable stats, named authors, outbound source links, original research.