Ecommerce SEO
Categories that rank, products that get cited, in Google and in ChatGPT.
Ecommerce SEO is search engine optimisation for online stores: making your category and product pages findable in Google and in AI search engines such as ChatGPT and Perplexity. It is a different craft from SEO for a regular website, because a store consists of hundreds or thousands of pages that either reinforce or cannibalise each other.
Zalm Partners runs ecommerce SEO from Rotterdam for stores across the Netherlands and Belgium. Our proof is public: the web shop of Uitgeverij Wilde Haren holds 27% visibility in Google AI Overviews and ranks above Bol.com in AI answers about children's books. A publisher of two people, no media budget.
Why ecommerce SEO is a different craft
A services website has twenty pages you can polish one by one. A store has thousands, mostly generated from templates. The work therefore lives in systems rather than pages: which categories exist, how they relate to each other, and which template rules set titles, descriptions and structured data for everything at once.
On top of that come problems a regular site never faces. Products that sell out and come back. Filters spawning thousands of URL variants of the same page. Supplier descriptions that are word-for-word identical on two hundred other stores. Leave those three unmanaged and Google decides which version of your store counts, and Google rarely decides well.
Category pages: where the revenue lives
In nearly every store we audit, the writing effort goes into the homepage and the blog, while the commercial search query lands on a category page. People shopping for a product search in the plural: not one specific book, but children's books about space. That question belongs to a category page.
So we build category structures from search data instead of from the warehouse system. Every category gets its own query, a text that answers it, and internal links to the best-fitting products. For Wilde Haren this produced a content coverage of 69%, the highest across our current projects, and an average Google position climbing from 11 to 7.
Wondering what this means for your site?
Ask usProducts in AI answers: the new shop window
Ask ChatGPT for a gift idea and you get brand names and product advice without ever seeing a results page. For stores this is threat and opportunity at once: a threat because clicks from Google are under pressure, an opportunity because these answers are not yet locked up by the biggest players.
Wilde Haren shows what is possible: within the measurement period its citation share grew from zero to 4%, with 11% visibility in ChatGPT as number one in its market, above Bol.com and Bruna. AI models reward stores that answer questions concretely and keep their product data in order. That is exactly the work we set up, as part of organic growth.
Engineering: the foundation under every ranking
Content cannot compensate for what engineering breaks. Every project therefore starts on the technical side of the store, from load speed to crawlability.
- Canonicals and filters: one countable version per page
- Structured data on products: price, stock, reviews
- Load speed, judged on the mobile experience
- Internal links from categories to products and back
- Handling of sold-out and discontinued products
If your store runs on Shopify, platform-specific choices come into play; we cover those separately on our Shopify SEO page.
What does ecommerce SEO cost?
The investment depends on the size of your product range, the technical state of the store and the competition in your niche. A store with fifty products in a quiet market needs a different programme than a ten-thousand-item catalogue up against Bol.com and Amazon.
We work with a monthly fee agreed up front. After a first conversation we dig into your store and send a proposal with an honest estimate of the growth path, in Google and in AI search engines. If we think the opportunity is too small for the investment, we tell you that too.
Frequently asked questions
The principles overlap, but the scale and the problems differ. Ecommerce SEO is about template optimisation across thousands of pages, category structure, duplicate control for filters and variants, and product data that search engines and AI models can read. On a regular site you optimise pages; on a store you optimise the system that generates them.
Technical fixes often show effect within weeks, especially on stores with clear crawl problems. Growth at category level usually takes three to six months, and building authority in a competitive market takes longer. In AI search engines movement sometimes comes sooner, because the pecking order there is not yet settled.
No, that is rarely the best use of budget. We start with the categories and the best-selling products, where the effect per hour of work is largest. Supplier copy on the rest of the range is tackled in phases afterwards, starting with products that already earn impressions but no clicks.
Yes. The method is platform-independent; only the execution differs per system. We work a lot with Shopify and know WooCommerce and the common Dutch platforms well enough to know where the levers sit and where the pitfalls hide.
Yes, in two ways. With structured data, ratings become visible in search results, which lifts click-through. And reviews add a steady stream of fresh, unique text to pages that are otherwise static; AI models use them too when judging and recommending products.
An intro call is usually planned within days, and a full programme typically starts within two to three weeks of sign-off. Fill in the form below; we reply within one working day.
Related pages
Where is your store leaving revenue behind?
Get in touch and tell us where your store stands today in Google and in AI search engines, and where revenue slips away. We dig into your store and come back with insights and a concrete game plan with next steps. We reply within one working day.