Paid ads stop the moment the budget does, while a ranking in search results keeps bringing free visits month after month. But SEO for an online store has its own rules: hundreds of products, categories, filters, and items that go out of stock and come back. This is an ordered plan for the first 90 days, in the order we follow with our clients’ stores.
Month one: the technical foundation
Excellent content is useless on pages Google can’t see. Start in Google Search Console:
- Indexing: the Pages report tells you what’s indexed, what’s excluded and why. Product and category pages should be indexed.
- Sitemap: submit it in Search Console, and make sure it includes products and categories only — not cart, account or internal search pages.
- Duplicate content: filters and sorting (price, colour) generate thousands of URLs for the same page. The canonical URL tells Google which one is the original.
- Mobile speed: most of your visitors are on mobile. Heavy images and too many apps are the most common causes of a slow store.
- Out-of-stock products: don’t delete a product page that gets visits; keep it with alternatives, or redirect it to the closest product or category.
Month two: keywords and category pages
The biggest mistake we see in stores is relying on product pages alone. Customers usually search with a broad phrase like “evening dresses” or “granite cookware set”, and the best page for those searches is the category page, not a single product.
Research keywords by buying intent
Group keywords by the searcher’s intent: buying keywords (price, best, buy, delivery), category keywords (the type of product), and informational keywords (how, what’s the difference). The first two belong to store pages; the third belongs to the blog.
Optimise the category page
- A page title and description that contain the main keyword, phrased the way people actually search.
- A short paragraph above or below the products that explains the category and answers a question or two.
- Internal links between related categories, and from articles to categories.
- Descriptive image file names and alt text that describes the product — not “IMG_2034”.
Month three: product pages and content
A product description copied from the supplier appears on dozens of other sites and won’t outrank them. Write a description that answers what customers ask before buying: size, material, use, shipping and returns. And add the real questions that reach you on WhatsApp as an FAQ.
Then start on content: articles that answer the informational questions you gathered in month two, each one leading with clear links to the right category.
How to know the plan is working
In Search Console, watch four numbers: impressions, clicks, average position and click-through rate. Impressions rise first, then position improves, then clicks follow. On one of our clients’ sites, average position improved from 17.4 to 10.7 between two consecutive periods, and average daily impressions rose by more than a third.
SEO compounds over time: technical fixes show results faster, while ranking for competitive keywords takes months of steady work.
Don’t judge SEO after two weeks, and don’t wait a year without measuring. Review the numbers every month, and always compare each period with one of the same length.
