Online store SEO: the five things that decide your rankings

Open any Bulgarian electronics store and read the description of the first washing machine. Now search for one sentence of it on Google, in quotes. You will usually find the same text in twenty other stores, because they all copied it from the importer. That is the most common online store SEO problem we see, and it has nothing to do with the keywords in the page title.

A store is not an eight-page brochure site. It has hundreds or thousands of pages, many of which look almost identical to Google, plus filters that spawn endless URLs and stock that changes daily. That is why Google publishes a separate set of guidelines for ecommerce sites. This article covers the five things that decide whether a store ranks, in the order worth fixing them.

1. Catalogue structure matters more than copy

Searches with buying intent are rarely for one specific product. People type "women's winter boots", "20 inch kids bike" or "mattress 160x200". Category pages answer those searches, not product pages. If "winter boots" does not exist as its own page with a URL, a title and a short text, the store has nothing to rank with, however good the products are.

Google's advice is simple: the menu links to categories, categories link to subcategories, and subcategories link to every product you want indexed. Those links need to be ordinary HTML links, not buttons that only work with JavaScript. If some products cannot be reached by a link, Googlebot may never find them, and the sitemap is a fallback, not a substitute.

URLs are part of the same structure. Google recommends descriptive words in the path: /shoes/womens/winter-boots tells the search engine and the customer what is on the page, while /index.php?route=product/category&path=62_118 says nothing. Each product variant (colour, size) should have its own URL, and every internal link should point to the same form of it, rather than alternating between versions with and without a trailing slash.

In Bulgaria there is one more question: Cyrillic or Latin letters in URLs. Google reads both, but a Cyrillic URL turns into a long string of percent signs and digits the moment someone pastes it into an email or Viber. Our advice is a short, readable Latin transliteration, decided once and applied everywhere.

2. Filters create more pages than you think

Filters by brand, colour, price and size are useful to the shopper and dangerous for indexing. Every combination creates a new URL: /shoes?brand=nike&color=black&size=42&sort=price. According to Google's guidance on faceted navigation, this generates practically infinite URL spaces, and the time the crawler wastes on them is time it does not spend on new, useful pages.

The fix is to decide which combinations deserve a page of their own and to close off the rest. A combination with real search demand, such as "Nike men's trainers", is better off as a proper subcategory with its own title and text. Everything else stays available to the shopper but not to the search engine:

• block crawling of filter URLs in robots.txt, or implement the filters with a # fragment in the URL, which has no effect on crawling at all;
• set a canonical tag (rel="canonical") pointing to the clean category on sorted URLs;
• return a 404 for combinations with no results, rather than an empty page with a 200 status.

Platforms handle this differently. WooCommerce and Shopify ship with acceptable defaults, but filter plugins often break them. On older OpenCart stores this is the first thing we check in an audit, and in our experience it is often the single biggest reason for poor indexing.

3. Product pages: descriptions, photos and out-of-stock items

Back to the washing machine. The importer's description is the same in every store that sells it, so Google has no reason to prefer your page over the other twenty. Rewriting thousands of descriptions is unrealistic, so start with the products that bring in the revenue. Open your sales report: a small part of the catalogue usually makes most of the sales. For those products, write copy that answers the Bulgarian shopper's questions: what the product suits, what is in the box, how soon Econt or Speedy will deliver it and what the warranty covers. That is how the product pages on Oreshko were built: editorial copy written for the brand, one page per product.

Photos bring traffic too. Google Images is a separate channel for products, so name the files after the product rather than IMG_4821.jpg, and fill in the alt text with what the photo shows. Compress them before uploading; more on that in the section on speed.

Out-of-stock products are a classic mistake. Stores delete them, and with them go the rankings the page built up over months. The better approach is to keep the page live with a clear "out of stock" label, an expected restock date if you have one, and links to close alternatives. Use a 301 redirect to the category or to the product's successor only when the item is never coming back.

Customer reviews are content that writes itself, in the language people search in. Ask for them by email a week after delivery and show them on the product page, because that is where Google picks them up for the rating in search results.

4. Structured data: price and stock straight in Google

Structured data is a short block of code on the page that tells Google exactly what the product is, what it costs, whether it is in stock and how customers rated it. According to Google's documentation on Product structured data, the page can then appear with price, availability, rating, shipping and return details right in the results, before the customer has clicked. Google adds that the more properties you provide, the more enhancements the page is eligible for, and that showing them remains at the search engine's discretion.

WooCommerce and Shopify add basic Product markup on their own, but often with an empty rating, no shipping details and the wrong currency after a theme change. Run a few product pages through Google's Rich Results Test and see what is missing. The same data can also go into a free product feed for Google Merchant Center, which Google says makes your products eligible for more of the ways they can appear in Search.

5. Speed is part of SEO and part of sales

Google measures three page speed and stability metrics called Core Web Vitals. According to web.dev, the good thresholds are: the main content loads within 2.5 seconds (LCP), the page responds to a tap within 200 milliseconds (INP) and elements do not jump around while loading (CLS of 0.1 or less). This is measured on real visitors, 75% of page loads have to meet the targets, and mobile is assessed separately.

For stores this is more than a technical score. Deloitte's study Milliseconds Make Millions measured that a 0.1 second improvement in mobile site speed led to 8.4% more conversions and a 9.2% higher average order value for retail sites. A faster category page does more than rank better. It sells more on the same traffic.

The usual culprits are the same everywhere: 3 MB product photos uploaded straight from the camera, thirty plugins for three features, sliders and chat widgets on every page, and cheap shared hosting under a catalogue of thousands of items. When we build an online store, we keep Lighthouse scores above 90 even on a category with 200 products, because that is the difference a shopper on a phone can feel.

The verdict

Online store SEO is mostly housekeeping: clear categories, closed-off filters, your own copy for the products that sell, complete structured data and fast pages. None of it is secret and none of it needs an "SEO package" of bought links. Do it in this order, because each step makes the next one count: there is no point writing descriptions for pages Google cannot reach, or speeding up a store where half the URLs are duplicates. Do not expect results in days. For a new store, think in months, not weeks. And if your platform cannot produce clean URLs, canonical tags or decent structured data, it is probably time to move to a new platform rather than add another plugin.

Frequently asked questions

How much does online store SEO cost?

It depends on whether you are fixing an existing store or building a new one. On a new store, most of what this article describes (structure, URLs, markup, speed) should be part of the build rather than a separate bill afterwards. How we price a build is on our pricing page, and the market ranges are in our guide to what an online store costs in Bulgaria. On an existing store, start with an audit, because the price depends on how many of the five basics are missing or done badly.

How long before online store SEO shows results?

Technical fixes (filters, canonical URLs, markup) take effect fairly quickly once Google recrawls the pages. Ranking category pages for competitive searches takes months. For a new store, treat the first months as an investment and track organic sales in GA4, not just positions.

What should I do with out-of-stock products?

Keep the page. Mark the product as out of stock, show a restock date if you know it and link to similar products. Redirect (301) only if the product is gone for good, and redirect to the closest replacement or the category, never to the home page.

Cyrillic or Latin letters in store URLs?

Latin transliteration. Google indexes Cyrillic URLs without trouble, but they turn into unreadable percent-encoded strings as soon as they are copied or shared. Decide the transliteration rules once (ж = zh, ц = ts, and so on) and apply them to every category and product.

Is WooCommerce or Shopify better for SEO?

Both can rank very well and both can fail completely. The difference is in the setup: filters, URLs, theme, images. Shopify gives you less control over URLs (the /collections/ and /products/ segments are fixed), while WooCommerce gives you full control and full responsibility for speed. We compare them in detail in WooCommerce vs Shopify for Bulgaria.

Does an online store need a blog?

Only if the articles help shoppers choose and link to your categories: "how to choose a mattress", "which winter tyres suit city driving". Buying guides like these catch searches before the purchase and pass internal links to the categories. A blog of general company news does nothing for the store.