SEO Checklist for eCommerce

We know that you care about appearing in the best possible rankings within Google and other search engines. It makes sense because, no matter how much the look and composition of the SERPs (search engine results pages) have changed, organic traffic remains the most profitable.

That is why we wanted to gather in one post the main aspects you need to make sure you have covered to face search engines with confidence.

Save this URL to your favorites, and let's start.

I am not going to waste your time with a long introduction or explanations you probably already know, but if there is any concept you are not entirely clear on, I encourage you to dive deeper into the SEO content for online stores that we have published on the blog.

The idea of this checklist is that it can be useful to any manager of an online store, both in things you can apply yourself and in others that, depending on the platform you use, you will need to request from your development team.

If you own an online store created with Oleoshop and minimal knowledge, you can implement practically 100% of our recommendations, but if you cannot do them all, do not worry: your page will have improved anyway.

SEO cannot be imagined without this tool. Google provides us with a free resource that allows us to:

I insist on this: signing up for Search Console is essential, the first point to tick off any self-respecting SEO checklist. Not only is it free, but it is also quite simple; here are the instructions and steps to follow.

You can sign up for the consoles of other search engines like Bing Webmaster Tools or Yandex Webmaster. They are similar mechanics and may be useful if your market is elsewhere, but in Spain, considering Google's market share, you do nt need much more.

Although we have already seen that we can get certain information from our online store, it is worth installing an analytics tool to have more complete reports on traffic by sources, channels, and devices, data that we can cross-reference to extract very comprehensive reports.

The level of zoom that Analytics allows, even in real time, is far above the data we extract from Search Console.

Keyword research is critical and indispensable for any SEO optimization of an eCommerce. These words that summarize the search intentions of users influence the website's architecture, content, tags... but also the factors of the so-called off-page SEO.

The analysis of keywords will also define our strategy in Google Ads or the sites where we will seek links for link-building.

As you can see, it is not a minor issue.

The first keywords come from your own business. Imagine you sell "vegan shoes," that is the starting keyword, but you need to go further.

The first place we are going to look is where everyone goes to do so: Google. As you know, when you type, the search engine itself gives you suggestions.

There you have some search patterns to follow (keyword+gender or keyword+location). But wait a minute, do not start doing this manually just yet; there are much more agile solutions.

I mean tools like Ubersuggest or Keyword.io, which in just a couple of clicks give you multiple combinations and a good number of potentially interesting words for your SEO strategy. Moreover, in the case of the latter tool, you can do the same exercise in different search engines.

So far, we have managed to gather a good volume of words. But volume does not serve us much; we should at least know which of those keywords are more relevant, have more searches per month, and how competitive they are.

Again, we have to resort to the search engine par excellence, in this case, to another platform known to all of us who sell online: Google Ads. Within its planning tools, you can find its keyword planner.

When you access, you have two options:

And what numbers does Google Ads give us and why are they so important? Because they give us very relevant information. Let's look in detail:

The domain is very important for an eCommerce´s SEO, or any website.

On one hand, you have the brand, which should always be within the company's domain to prevent third parties from positioning higher for brand keywords.

Incorporating your company's service in the domain name can be a plus, but avoid using domains created solely to manipulate Google results. For example, names like "cheapvegan-shoes.com" give a poor impression of your business.

The shorter the better. This makes it easier for users to remember spontaneously and contributes to creating more friendly URLs, which even rank better in search engines.

It is also important to carefully consider the TLD (.es, .com…) because it is critical for SEO. As a general rule:

If you can, protect your brand and SEO positioning by acquiring all logical variants of your main domain, and if it is out of your budget, at least register the .com and the local domain or domains you need.

Before buying a domain, it is worth investigating a bit more. It might have been used previously, and if it was used unethically, it might have SEO problems.

Imagine they bought poor-quality links that are still active; you would inherit a problem that is not yours.

One simple thing you can do is use waybackmachine to see what was previously indexed on Google. If you want to invest a little money, tools like Ahrefs can provide a complete link profile and show how toxic they are or if, on the contrary, they can be useful by being of quality.

You can read more about how to choose the domain of your online store and the use of IPs and servers in these two articles.

When it comes to implementing keywords on a website, you need to do it strategically with a premise that should not fail: each URL targets a keyword and/or search intent.

This is important because we will always try to concentrate the strength, avoiding having pages within the same domain that compete with each other or directly cannibalize each other, positioning an informational page above a page focused on sales.

My recommendation is that, before starting to create pages, you lay out the structure you have in mind in an Excel sheet, and associate each of the defined URLs with that search intent, thinking in entities.

For example, for the page my-domain.com/women-vegan-shoes:

The specific word will be the one with the greatest potential in traffic and business, but the variants within the same semantic framework enrich the content and give depth to the page itself. Although we will talk about that a little later.

If you want to be a bit more visual, you can use prototyping tools like Wireflow or Figma. Very useful for visually presenting the information.

If you are trying to organically position your store for “vegan sandals,” this term should be found in the product page or the selected URL. 

The question is, where and how many times?

Place the keyword at least once within the first 150 characters and repeat it several times naturally. 

Repeating a keyword over and over has not worked for many years and has even become something overtly negative (known as keyword stuffing).

Remember that you write for humans, so every sentence should make sense on its own and, most importantly, help with sales.

All content should always be hierarchized, meaning it should have a structure that determines the importance of each section and their relationships.

In SEO, this translates to headings, which are represented as H1, H2, H3, and subsequent headings. 

The main keyword should always be tagged in the H1, which usually coincides with the title and should be unique. Use the rest of the "H" tags to include variations of the same keyword and others that are closely related to the search intent.

Yes, indeed… images should also incorporate keywords. Google, thanks to AI, is getting better at identifying what is in a photo, but it does not hurt to give it a hand.

Here are two important things you should do:

The best thing about alternative text is that you can write naturally, without forcing the use of articles or removing prepositions. For example: “alt text: Women’s vegan sandals made from recycled synthetic leather.”

Search engine bots navigate pages like a human user would. Therefore, it is important that pages are linked to each other so they can be indexed.

Make sure your content is interconnected, from the menu when appropriate (categories), subcategories with products, other service pages from the footer… and occasionally, link related elements.

These can be products, but having a blog is very useful for creating non-commercial, highly linkable content.

This does not mean link everything to everything; use common sense and aim to create a network of links that makes sense contextually and in terms of content type.

Another important detail is that you should regularly check that these links are active, pointing to pages that are still online, and thus not broken.

Since we were talking about images, every SEO checklist for eCommerce should almost obligatorily include a check for photos.

As you might understand, algorithms do not judge whether images are good or bad—this is more a matter of style and conversion. However, one determinant and ranking factor in SEO is loading speed, which we are going to discuss now.

Believe it or not, the relationship between images and loading speed is often very direct. Images can be so large that, depending on the connection, they may frustrate users or even cause them to abandon the page.

What you might not know is that images can be significantly reduced in size without losing quality or undergoing excessive compression. You should analyze your images before uploading them to ensure:

If your store is already online, do not worry—there are still solutions. First, identify the problem. For this, I recommend creating a free account on GT Metrix.

Among other technical aspects, this tool will inform you if there are issues with your images and even tell you exactly which ones.

Since we are diving into this aspect, which is possibly the most technical in this SEO checklist for online stores, I recommend regularly testing your website with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.

You will receive a detailed report covering all aspects of your page and server that affect download speed.

I emphasize that this is the most technical part, so you will need help to minimize the number of requests, reduce JS usage, and manage CSS...

Regularly review the links your store receives from external sites.

This will determine the ranking of your online store, as each link passes some of that website’s authority to you.

This is either good or bad, depending on the authority of the linking page. Sites unrelated to yours provide less value through their links (it is always better to have links from related sites, though any links are welcome).

However, be cautious, as links can also have a damaging effect: if a website with a negative profile or one that is penalized links to you, you inherit some of that bad reputation, directly harming your ranking.

The downside is that tools for this are paid and generally not cheap. I mentioned Ahrefs earlier because it is the one I use, but others like Sistrix can also be very useful.

For a simple overview, check how many links your domain has, how many domains are linking to you, which countries they are from, and which are do-follow (passing SEO strength) and which are no-follow (not passing SEO strength)... Then, you can examine the links one by one, including which page they come from and where they link to.

The advantage of paying for one of these link-building tools is that you can also research competitors and find new link-building opportunities.

Here is a final tip since this post is already quite comprehensive. I recommend using a crawler whenever possible. A crawler is a tool that essentially navigates your page as a search engine would.

The reports it generates are invaluable for keeping this SEO checklist updated. In minutes, it will provide nearly any information you need about your page.

My recommendation is Screaming Frog, which, for small projects, can even help with its free version.

If you have made it to the end, congratulations—you have learned a lot about the basics of SEO for eCommerce. Try to apply as much as you can from what we have discussed here and let us know your results.