AI & Automation
Personas
Ecommerce
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
When I first started doing SEO for ecommerce sites, I made the classic mistake: treating them like regular business websites. I'd focus on the homepage, write blog posts about industry trends, and optimize service pages. The results? Mediocre at best.
Then I had a wake-up call with a Shopify client who had over 3,000 products. Their organic traffic was stuck at under 500 monthly visits despite having quality products and decent content. That's when I realized something fundamental: ecommerce SEO isn't just different from traditional SEO—it's an entirely different game.
After completely restructuring my approach and implementing ecommerce-specific strategies, we went from under 500 to over 5,000 monthly visits in just 3 months. More importantly, those visits converted into actual sales because we were targeting commercial intent, not just informational keywords.
In this playbook, I'll walk you through exactly what makes ecommerce SEO different and why following traditional SEO advice can actually hurt your online store. You'll learn:
Why homepage optimization is overrated for ecommerce
The critical difference between informational and commercial content
How to leverage your product catalog as an SEO goldmine
The AI-powered content strategy that scaled 20,000+ pages
Why traditional link building doesn't work for product pages
Let's dive into why everything you know about SEO needs to be rethought for ecommerce.
Industry Reality
What Every SEO Guide Gets Wrong About Ecommerce
Walk into any SEO conference or read the top SEO blogs, and you'll hear the same advice repeated endlessly: create high-quality content, build authoritative backlinks, optimize your homepage, focus on brand keywords. This works great if you're a law firm, consulting agency, or SaaS company.
But here's what the traditional SEO playbook tells ecommerce sites to do:
Start with homepage optimization - Make sure your main page ranks for your brand terms
Create informational blog content - Write about industry trends and educational topics
Build high-authority backlinks - Get featured on major publications in your industry
Focus on a few primary keywords - Target 10-20 main terms and dominate them
Optimize for search volume - Go after the highest-volume keywords in your niche
This conventional wisdom exists because most SEO strategies were developed for service-based businesses and B2B companies. These businesses typically have 10-50 pages, clear service offerings, and customers who research extensively before buying.
But ecommerce is fundamentally different. You're not selling a consultation or a software subscription—you're selling physical products that people want to buy right now. Your customers aren't looking for educational content; they're looking for products that solve their immediate problems.
The biggest disconnect? Traditional SEO treats your website like a brochure when ecommerce sites are actually databases. Your product catalog isn't just content—it's your primary SEO asset. Every product page, category page, and collection is a potential entry point for commercial-intent searches.
Where traditional advice falls short: it ignores the reality that ecommerce success comes from long-tail product searches, not broad industry keywords. People don't search for "fashion trends"—they search for "black leather jacket women size M" when they're ready to buy.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
Let me tell you about the project that completely changed how I think about ecommerce SEO. A Shopify client approached me with what seemed like a dream scenario: over 3,000 products, decent brand recognition, and a catalog that covered multiple product categories. On paper, this should have been an SEO goldmine.
Instead, their organic traffic was embarrassingly low—under 500 monthly visits. Their previous SEO agency had followed the traditional playbook perfectly: optimized homepage, created blog content about industry trends, built some backlinks. All textbook stuff.
But here's what I discovered when I audited their site: their 3,000 products were essentially invisible to Google. The product pages had thin descriptions, no optimization for search intent, and were buried under a navigation structure designed for browsing, not searching.
Meanwhile, their blog was ranking for terms like "fashion industry trends" and "how to style outfits"—informational content that brought visitors who weren't ready to buy anything. Classic traditional SEO success that translated to zero business impact.
The site architecture followed the traditional approach I mentioned in my website strategy playbook: everything funneled through the homepage. But this created a fundamental problem—Google couldn't efficiently crawl and understand their massive product catalog.
I realized we weren't dealing with a traditional SEO challenge. This was a catalog optimization problem disguised as an SEO problem. The real opportunity wasn't in ranking the homepage or blog posts—it was in making every single product page discoverable for commercial searches.
That's when I understood the core difference: traditional SEO optimizes for visibility, but ecommerce SEO must optimize for discoverability and commercial intent simultaneously.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
OK, so here's exactly what I did to transform this failing ecommerce site into an organic traffic machine. The approach was so different from traditional SEO that it basically broke every rule I'd learned.
Step 1: Flipped the Content Pyramid
Instead of starting with the homepage and working down, I started with individual product pages and worked up. Every single product became its own SEO target. Rather than competing for "women's jackets" (impossible), we targeted "black leather motorcycle jacket women size medium under $200"—specific, commercial-intent keywords that actual buyers search for.
Step 2: Built the AI Content Engine
Here's where it gets interesting. To optimize 3,000+ products manually would take years. So I developed what I call an AI-native content workflow. I created a system that could generate unique, SEO-optimized content for every product at scale.
The workflow included:
Exporting all product data into structured CSV files
Building a knowledge base with industry-specific information
Creating custom AI prompts that understood the brand voice and SEO requirements
Implementing automatic internal linking between related products
This wasn't about replacing human expertise—it was about scaling human expertise. The AI could generate thousands of product descriptions, but only because I fed it the right knowledge and constraints.
Step 3: Programmatic Collection Pages
Traditional SEO would create 5-10 category pages. I created 200+ programmatic collection pages targeting every possible product combination: "summer dresses under $50," "business casual shoes size 8," "vegan leather handbags."
Each collection page was automatically populated with relevant products and optimized for specific search queries. This created hundreds of new entry points into the catalog.
Step 4: Commercial Intent Mapping
Instead of keyword research, I did commercial intent research. I identified every way someone might search for products in their catalog, then created content that matched that intent exactly. No educational fluff—just direct paths from search to purchase.
The key insight: ecommerce SEO isn't about ranking higher for the same keywords as competitors. It's about finding all the uncontested keyword spaces where your products can dominate.
Catalog Optimization
Every product page became an SEO landing page with commercial-focused optimization and automated internal linking
Scale Through AI
Used custom AI workflows to generate 20,000+ unique product descriptions across 8 languages
Programmatic Collections
Created 200+ automated collection pages targeting specific product combinations and buyer intents
Commercial Mapping
Replaced traditional keyword research with commercial intent mapping for buyer-focused optimization
The results were dramatic and happened faster than I expected. Within 3 months of implementing the ecommerce-specific SEO strategy, organic traffic jumped from under 500 to over 5,000 monthly visits. But more importantly, these weren't just vanity metrics—the traffic converted.
Here's what changed:
Product page visibility increased by 800% - Individual products started ranking for long-tail commercial searches
Collection pages captured 40% of new traffic - Programmatic collections ranked for specific product combinations
Commercial intent keywords dominated - Moved from ranking for "fashion trends" to "buy black leather jacket"
Internal linking boosted catalog crawling - Google discovered and indexed products 300% faster
The timeline was crucial: traditional SEO changes often take 6-12 months to show results. But ecommerce SEO improvements can happen much faster because you're targeting less competitive, more specific keywords.
Most surprising outcome? The blog traffic actually decreased, but revenue from organic traffic increased dramatically. We'd traded informational visitors for commercial visitors—exactly what an ecommerce business needs.
This project taught me that ecommerce SEO success isn't measured by domain authority or broad keyword rankings. It's measured by product discoverability and commercial traffic volume.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
After running this experiment and several similar projects, I've identified the core differences between traditional SEO and ecommerce SEO that every online store owner needs to understand:
Scale Changes Everything - Traditional sites optimize 10-50 pages; ecommerce sites need to optimize thousands. Manual optimization becomes impossible.
Commercial Intent Wins - Educational content brings browsers; product-focused content brings buyers. Prioritize commercial keywords over informational ones.
Catalog Structure Matters More Than Links - Internal navigation and product relationships impact SEO more than external backlinks.
Long-Tail Keywords Are Gold - "Red running shoes size 9" converts better than "athletic footwear" and is easier to rank for.
Homepage Is Not Your Priority - Product and collection pages should get most of your optimization attention.
Technical SEO Complexity - Product variants, inventory changes, and catalog updates create unique technical challenges.
Automation Is Essential - Without automated systems, ecommerce SEO becomes unsustainable at scale.
What I'd do differently: Start with automation from day one. I spent too much time trying to manually optimize before building scalable systems.
Common pitfall: Don't abandon all traditional SEO principles. Brand building and authority still matter—just not as your primary focus.
This approach works best for stores with 100+ products. Smaller catalogs can still benefit from traditional SEO methods combined with ecommerce-specific tactics.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS companies selling to ecommerce: Focus on integration pages, use case scenarios, and ROI calculators. Create content that speaks to specific ecommerce challenges rather than generic business problems.
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores: Prioritize product page optimization over blog content. Implement programmatic SEO for collections. Use AI to scale content creation. Focus on commercial intent keywords and buyer journey mapping.