On-Page SEO Audit for Ecommerce

Most ecommerce SEO audits fixate on product pages. That's the wrong priority. Category pages rank for the high-volume, high-intent terms that actually move revenue: 'women's running shoes', 'leather sofas', 'gaming laptops under £1000'. A well-optimised category page is worth more than 50 well-optimised product pages.

The typical state of a category page on a neglected ecommerce site: no H1, a generic title tag pulled from the category name with no keyword modifier, zero body content beyond the product grid, and a meta description that says something like 'Shop our range of shoes'. Google has nothing to work with. These pages either don't rank or rank poorly for anything competitive.

The introductory content is not filler. It should answer the questions a first-time buyer in this category actually has: what to look for when buying, how to choose between subcategories, what makes your selection different. If you write 200 words of keyword-stuffed boilerplate, Google will treat it as thin content. If you write 200 words that actually help shoppers, Google treats the page as genuinely useful. The difference in ranking is real.

Product page SEO has four components that are consistently wrong on most stores: the title tag, the description, the H1, and the image alt text. Getting all four right on every product page is not glamorous work. It is also the single thing that most directly separates stores that rank from stores that don't.

• —Title tag: [Product Name] + [Key Attribute] + [Brand], kept under 60 characters. Avoid generic titles like 'Blue Trainer | Our Store'. Prefer 'Nike Air Zoom Pegasus 41 | Men's Running Shoe'.
• —Description: write it yourself. Manufacturer copy is used by every reseller on the internet. Google identifies it and filters your page to the supplemental index. Your description should cover fit, material, use case, and anything the product images don't show.
• —H1: the product name, exactly as a customer would search for it. One H1 per page. Do not use the H1 for decorative headings like 'You may also like'.
• —Image alt text: product name + key attribute. Not 'image1.jpg'. Not 'product photo'. If the image shows a navy blue wool coat, the alt text is 'Navy Blue Wool Coat, Front View'.

Reviews are worth a special mention. If you have reviews on product pages, you need AggregateRating schema. Without it, your star ratings are invisible to Google and won't appear in search results. With it, your listing stands out against competitors who don't have stars. Use Google's Rich Results Test on any product page to verify the schema is valid and being picked up.

Heading hierarchy sounds trivial. On real ecommerce sites, it is almost always wrong. The most common pattern: the product or category name sits in an H2 because a developer styled it that way, decorative sections like 'You May Also Like' use H2, and the page ends up with multiple H1s or none at all.

The rule is simple: one H1 per page, containing the primary keyword, matching what a user would type into Google. H2s are for main content sections like specifications, sizing information, materials, and FAQ. H3s are for supporting points within those sections. Headings like 'Related Products', 'Customer Reviews', and 'Frequently Bought Together' should be styled as regular text or at most an H3, because they are navigation elements, not content structure.

A page with under 200 words of real content is thin. That's not always a problem. A product page for a single commodity item with a clear image, accurate specs, and good reviews can rank fine with minimal prose. But at scale, across hundreds or thousands of product pages, thin content degrades domain-level quality signals.

Google's quality algorithms evaluate sites holistically. If 60% of your indexed pages are thin product pages with no descriptions, duplicated titles, and no reviews, that pulls down the perceived quality of the entire domain, including your well-optimised category pages. The solution for large catalogs is not to write unique descriptions for 3,000 products overnight. It is to decide which pages deserve to be indexed at all.

For mid-tier products (worth keeping indexed but currently thin), a structured template works better than trying to write fully bespoke descriptions. A consistent format covering: what it is, who it is for, key dimensions or specs, care instructions or compatibility, and one differentiated selling point. Three to four sentences per section. This turns a 0-word product page into a 150-word page that passes Google's quality threshold without requiring a copywriter for every SKU.

Internal linking is how PageRank flows through your site. Category pages should link to products. Products should link back to their category. Blog posts should link to the category or product pages they reference. If a blog post about 'how to choose running shoes' doesn't link to your running shoes category, that post is earning traffic and not distributing its link equity anywhere useful.

Most ecommerce sites have reasonable product-to-category linking built into the breadcrumb. The gaps are almost always: category pages that don't link to sub-categories, blog posts that link to nothing, and product pages that have no 'related products' anchor-text links, just image-based links that carry no keyword signal.

• —Category pages: link to at least 3–5 relevant sub-categories if they exist, and to 3–5 featured products with keyword-rich anchor text
• —Product pages: breadcrumb link back to category (required), 3–5 related products with descriptive anchor text (not 'view similar')
• —Blog posts: identify the 1–3 most relevant product or category pages and link to them naturally in the body text with specific anchor text
• —Homepage: link to your top 5–8 category pages with exact-match or near-match anchor text, since this is the highest-PageRank page on the site

Every page on your site needs a unique title tag and a unique meta description. This is one of the most basic SEO requirements and one of the most commonly violated on ecommerce sites. The cause is almost always structural: filter pages inherit the category title, search result pages share a templated title, and pagination creates 'Page 2', 'Page 3' variants that all have the same title as page 1.

Duplicate title tags tell Google the pages have the same content and purpose. Google will often canonicalize one version arbitrarily, and not necessarily the version you want. The result is unpredictable ranking behavior and split link equity. For pages that should be indexed (category pages, key product pages), unique titles are non-negotiable.