Ecommerce SEO: 10 tips to get your webshop ranking

A webshop with hundreds of product pages, filters and stock that changes every day needs different SEO work than a regular website. That work pays off: according to Becom, Belgian ecommerce companies grew by 3.43% in 2025, while total online spending by Belgians rose by 5.4%. The difference mainly goes to foreign players. If your Belgian webshop is not found, you leave that growth to them.

The 10 webshop SEO tips below apply to every webshop, on Shopify, WooCommerce, Lightspeed or another platform.

What is ecommerce SEO?

Ecommerce SEO is search engine optimisation for a webshop: making sure your category and product pages are crawled, understood and shown when someone searches for a product. It is about what a regular website has less of, such as many similar pages, filters, product data and stock. Google has a separate guide for it, with guidelines for URL structure, pagination and structured data.

Google describes its role like this: “Google can help shoppers discover your site at each stage in the shopping journey.” Someone who is still exploring lands on a category or a buying guide; someone searching for a brand and a model lands on a product page. ClickForest provides SEO guidance for webshops of SMEs in Flanders and sees most of the work in what no platform can fill in for you: which search term belongs to which category, how much text a product needs and which filter pages Google may skip.

What does your webshop platform handle by itself?

Every major platform handles part of the technical basics by itself. The table sets out what the official documentation of Shopify, WooCommerce and Lightspeed describes as standard; because WooCommerce runs on WordPress, the WooCommerce cells partly come from the WordPress documentation.

Element	Shopify	WooCommerce (on WordPress)	Lightspeed eCom (C-Series)
Sitemap	Creates sitemap.xml automatically	WordPress has created a sitemap at /wp-sitemap.xml since version 5.5	Submits your sitemap to search engines by default
Robots.txt	Created automatically	Has referred to the sitemap since WordPress 5.5	Blocks /admin, /cart, /compare and /checkout by default
Canonical tags	Automatic, against duplicate content	WordPress sets rel=canonical itself on individual pages, such as a product page	Canonical URL can be set per product
Product schema	Included in Shopify’s themes	Product data in JSON-LD on the product pages	Rich snippets with reviews, image, price, brand, description and stock in all themes
Titles and meta descriptions	Title tags with your store name	Check yourself	Fills in page title, URL and meta description automatically based on your product title and description

“Check yourself” means we did not find it as a standard feature in the official documentation (September 2026). Choosing search terms, writing your own copy, managing filters and completing product data remain your job on every platform. If you are still choosing a platform, our comparison of Shopify and other ecommerce platforms will help. If you work with Shopify, the implementation for each element is in our SEO checklist specifically for Shopify.

How do you do keyword research for a webshop?

Link every category to a broader search term, such as “men’s linen shirts”, and every product to a specific one, such as brand plus model plus colour. Find out which words your customers actually use, in Search Console, in Google’s search suggestions and in the questions that come in at your customer service. Choose one main term per page, so that two pages do not compete for the same search.

How Belgians search determines where you start. In a survey of 1,000 Belgian online shoppers, published by Becom in June 2026, 90% of Belgians aged 18 and over bought something online at least once last year. About the search itself, Becom writes: “The online search usually starts directly on trusted webshops or marketplaces, especially for categories such as fashion and travel. For electronics and DIY products, the search more often begins via search engines.” (translated from Dutch). If you sell electronics or DIY products, Google is your front door. In fashion, you also compete with marketplaces such as Bol, the best known one in Flanders.

A Flemish customer sometimes searches differently from a Dutch one, and for your French version you do separate research. The method is in our keyword research guide; more figures on how Belgians buy online can be found in the ecommerce trends in Belgium.

How do you write product pages that rank?

Write your own text for each product that answers your customer’s questions: what it is, who it is for, what material, what size and how to use or care for it. A fixed word count is not needed, because Google says it has no preference for a number of words. A supplier text that appears on dozens of sites gives Google little reason to choose your page.

Google does not penalise a copied supplier text, by the way. According to Google, duplicate content is “not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.” The problem is simpler. If the same text appears on dozens of other webshops, Google picks one of them to show, and that is rarely yours. That is why Google asks that content offers “substantial additional value and originality”.

A fictional example of the difference:

• Weak: “High-quality bluetooth headphones with noise cancellation.”
• Strong: “For people who work from home and need some quiet. These over-ear headphones dampen ambient noise with adaptive noise cancellation, sound clear in video calls and last 30 hours with noise cancelling switched on.”

Put the main keyword in your title and in the first sentence, and add specifications as a list so your visitor finds them quickly. Size charts, material and care instructions answer exactly the questions that would otherwise end up with your customer service.

Variants: one page or several?

Both are possible. For variants on one page and on separate pages, Google describes how to link them together with ProductGroup markup, via variesBy, hasVariant and productGroupID; they then become eligible for merchant listings with variant information. If you work with one page, make sure there is one canonical URL. Variants that only exist via a # in the URL are invisible to Google, because Google does not use fragments when indexing.

Sold out or discontinued?

Keep a temporarily sold-out product online and show clearly that it is not available. If a product stays sold out for a long time, Google may treat the page as a soft 404. How long that takes is not fixed:

“There’s no fixed timeframe, and I’m not aware of any specific changes there recently (though I know people are always working on improving our soft-404 handling).”

— John Mueller, Google (January 2021)

If a product is definitely not coming back, redirect the URL to the most closely related product or to the category.

How do you build a category structure that Google understands?

Build a logical tree: link from your menu to your categories, from categories to subcategories and from there to every product. Google itself recommends this setup for webshops. The more internal links a page gets, the more important Google considers it, so also link your bestsellers from your homepage and from your blog articles. Breadcrumbs make that hierarchy visible.

Homepage → Category → Subcategory → Product
example.be/men/shoes/running-shoes/nike-pegasus-41

• Readable URLs: Google itself gives the example of /product/black-t-shirt-with-a-white-collar versus /product/3243. For filters, use parameters in the form ?key=value, and do not put session IDs or tracking codes in your internal links.
• Pagination: Google no longer uses rel=next and rel=prev. Give every page of a long category its own canonical URL, and do not point everything to page 1.
• Text on category pages: a category is the logical landing page for a broader search term. A short text about what it contains and how the products differ helps your visitor choose.

What do you do with filters and faceted navigation?

Keep most filter combinations out of the crawl. Every combination of colour, size, price or sort order creates a new URL, and according to Google faceted navigation is by far the most common cause of the overcrawling that site owners report. Google recommends excluding those URLs via robots.txt. A filter that people actually search for is better turned into a category page of its own.

Gary Illyes of Google wrote in December 2024 that most of those crawl problems could have been avoided with a few good practices:

“Faceted navigation is a great way to help users find what they need on your site, but it can create an SEO nightmare if not implemented carefully.”

— Gary Illyes, Google (December 2024)

• Combinations without search demand, such as sort orders, price ranges or three filters at once: exclude them in robots.txt.
• Filters close to an existing category: a canonical to the category is possible, but according to Google it only reduces the crawl volume over time.
• Filters with real search demand, such as “red sneakers” or a brand within a category: give them a fixed URL, their own title and a short text, so they become a full category.

Check the crawl stats in Search Console to see whether Google loses a lot of time on filtered URLs. Rather not figure it all out yourself? ClickForest provides SEO guidance for webshops of SMEs in Flanders, from filters and structure to product data, and you can outsource the SEO for your webshop.

Which structured data does a webshop need?

A webshop needs at least Product markup on every product page, with price, availability and reviews, plus BreadcrumbList for your category structure and ProductGroup for variants. Organization tells Google who you are. All those types are in the list that Google publishes for webshops. After every change to your theme, test at least one product page with Google’s Rich Results Test.

• Product: name, price, availability and reviews per product.
• ProductGroup: variants such as colour and size under one product.
• BreadcrumbList: helps Google understand the hierarchy of your webshop.
• Organization: your company details.
• Review: customer ratings on your product pages.

For the webshop of caterer Bastiano, structured data and SEO content led to 35% more organic traffic, and the site ranks in position 1 for “traiteur bonheiden”. How structured data works is explained in our guide to structured data for Google; the technical setup is in the JSON-LD implementation guide.

Why does Google Merchant Center belong in webshop SEO?

Because structured data alone is not enough for every product experience in Google. Google recommends combining structured data on your product pages with a product feed in Merchant Center, because your products then become eligible for most experiences. The Shopping tab requires Merchant Center. The regular search results and Google Images can do without it.

Google puts it literally: “Providing both structured data on web pages and a Merchant Center feed maximizes your eligibility to experiences and helps Google correctly understand and verify your data.” Without Merchant Center, your products do not appear in the Shopping tab, not as product results in Google Lens and not with stock in Google Maps. After connecting your feed, check in Merchant Center whether any products have been disapproved, and resolve those notifications.

Google distinguishes between two types of product experiences. Product snippets are for pages where you cannot buy a product directly, such as a review. Merchant listings are for pages where you can, so for the product pages of your webshop. How you connect a feed differs per platform.

Does that also help in AI search engines?

Yes. Google explicitly names Merchant Center as a way to become visible in AI answers, and according to Google there is no special schema markup for generative AI. The rest remains regular SEO: “The best practices for SEO continue to be relevant because our generative AI features on Google Search are rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems.”

In Belgium it still concerns a small group. According to Becom, 2% to 4% of online shoppers start their search with AI (June 2026), and AI is used more often at a later stage than as a starting point; in December 2025, Becom found that 1 in 5 Belgians regularly use AI when shopping online. Greet Dekocker of Becom added a caveat:

“More and more people buy their Christmas presents online at the last minute. Anyone who uses AI for inspiration or to compare prices would do well to keep a few pitfalls in mind”

— Greet Dekocker, managing director of Becom (December 2025, translated from Dutch)

For now, buying without visiting the webshop mainly exists in the United States. Google lets buyers there check out directly via Google and is extending that to Canada, Australia and later the United Kingdom. In March 2026, OpenAI moved away from payment in ChatGPT and is focusing on finding products, partly via the product feeds of webshops. For a Belgian webshop, that shift towards agentic commerce is therefore mainly a sign of where things are heading. What AI answers mean for your visitor numbers is covered in our piece on zero-click search, and if you want to track AI visibility separately, you will find the approach in GEO for webshops.

How fast should a webshop be?

Fast enough to meet Google’s thresholds for Core Web Vitals: an LCP under 2.5 seconds, an INP under 200 milliseconds and a CLS under 0.1. Those metrics count in Google’s ranking systems, but relevance weighs more. For your conversion, speed does weigh heavily: that is where your customer notices every second of waiting.

John Mueller of Google described the role of page experience in 2021 as follows:

”… it is a ranking factor, and it’s more than a tie-breaker, but it also doesn’t replace relevance.”

— John Mueller, Google (August 2021)

For your revenue, things are different. When Akamai analysed visits to large retail sites in 2017, it found that 100 milliseconds of delay could push conversion down by 7%. The figure is old, so read it as an indication of direction.

• Measure with PageSpeed Insights and follow the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console.
• Use WebP or AVIF for your images and only load images below the fold when they are needed.
• Remove scripts, plugins and apps you no longer use, and work with a CDN if your platform does not provide one itself.
• Also test every template on a smartphone, with buttons large enough to tap with a thumb.

We go into the mobile side in more detail in mobile optimisation for ecommerce. What speed means for your sales belongs under conversion optimisation for webshops.

How do you make product images findable?

Give every photo a descriptive file name and an alt text that says what is on it, without stacking keywords. Use sharp product photos and put images that Google would otherwise miss in an image sitemap. Image search is big: according to Google, Google Lens grew by 65% year on year and by June 2025 had already counted more than 100 billion visual searches that year.

• File name: Google itself gives the example my-new-black-kitten.jpg instead of IMG00023.JPG. For a webshop, that becomes for example nike-air-max-90-white-mens.jpg.
• Alt text: “Nike Air Max 90 white men’s sneakers” says what can be seen. Google warns that alt texts full of keywords may be seen as spam.
• Format: Google supports JPEG, PNG, WebP and AVIF, among others.
• Google Lens: for product results in Lens, you need a feed in Merchant Center.

How do you build authority with content and links?

With content that answers a buying question and with mentions on other sites. Buying guides, comparisons and care guides attract searchers who are still choosing, and link internally to your categories and bestsellers. You earn links from outside with something others want to mention: a brand you distribute, local press, a sponsorship or a guide with information of your own.

Examples of content that works for webshops:

• Buying guides: “Which running shoe suits your running style?”
• Problem and solution: “Preventing blisters when running”
• Comparisons: “Nike or Adidas: which running shoe for beginners?”
• Season: “What do you wear for running in winter?”

Link from those articles to the categories and products that go with them; Google itself recommends linking bestsellers from blog articles as well. Reviews count twice: according to Becom, online reviews and price comparisons play a decisive role for Belgian shoppers, and reviews on your product page give you a steady supply of new, unique text.

If you combine your SEO with advertising, you learn from your campaigns which search terms sell; how the two fit together is explained in our guide to combining SEO and SEA. If your webshop does not rank despite all that work, find the cause with why your website is not ranking in Google.

How do you do SEO for a bilingual webshop in Belgium?

Give your Dutch and French versions each their own URL, for example with a /fr/ folder, and connect them with hreflang tags for nl-be and fr-be plus an x-default. Every language version refers to itself and to all other versions. Do separate keyword research for French, because the best French search term is not always the literal translation of your Dutch one.

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="nl-be" href="https://www.example.be/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-be" href="https://www.example.be/fr/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://www.example.be/" />

Google is strict about this: “Each language version must list itself as well as all other language versions.” If the return link is missing, Google may ignore the annotations. So check in the page source of a product whether both language versions refer to each other, and always have a machine translation checked by someone who speaks the language well.

A few choices come with it: a folder, a subdomain or a separate domain per language, your currency and payment methods, and a translation that sounds like Belgian French. A folder such as /fr/ keeps all language versions on the same domain, which keeps management simple.

Do you also have a shop, showroom or pickup point?

Then local SEO comes into play. According to Google’s guidelines, a Google Business Profile is only possible with an address that customers visit, or if you work at your customers’ locations. A pure webshop is therefore not eligible. If you do have an address, it pays to optimise for searches such as a product plus your municipality. For that, read our guide to local SEO in Belgium.

Where do you start with SEO for your webshop?

Start with what delivers the most for the least work: check in Search Console which categories already get impressions, give those their own title and text, and check whether your product schema and your filters are in order. Then come product copy, Merchant Center, speed and your French version. Measure the result in organic revenue per category; visitor numbers alone say little.

Every month, track your organic revenue and conversion rate per category in Google Analytics 4, and your impressions, clicks and positions per category and product in Search Console. Keep an eye on the Core Web Vitals report and the crawl stats there as well. SEO for a webshop is ongoing work, because every new product, every new filter and every platform update changes something. After an update or a new app or plugin, go through the elements from the platform table at the top again.

Would you like us to take a look? ClickForest provides SEO guidance for webshops of SMEs in Flanders, from keywords and structure to product data and AI visibility, and promises no timeframe or first place. What such a programme costs is covered in what SEO and GEO cost. Take a look at our SEO support for your webshop or tell us where your webshop stands today.