SEO for Retail Stores

Updated March 3, 2025

If you’re running an online retail store SEO is important. You’re likely facing a lot of competition from larger companies like Amazon. So how can David fight Goliath without resorting to dirty tricks? Learn these white hat SEO practices, that will get you more clicks by doing SEO for retail, right.

Write Longer Descriptions

As we’ve discussed before long form content ranks well. The longer the content the easier it is for Google to contextualise it, so the more detail you can give them the better. Obviously writing 1,000 words on some products will be easier than others. But where you can create long content, do so.

Make sure that in this longer form content is optimized for the relevant keyword. Including it at least 3 times. If you’re struggling to create long form content for each single product, do a larger amount of content on the product category page, and add what extra detail you can to each individual product.

Also, as a general rule, avoid duplicate content. While this won’t hurt your SEO for retail (if you set up canonical links properly) it will bore anyone that reads your product description.

Don’t Forget Latent Semantic Indexing

Latent semantic indexing is another way search engines try to categorize the relevance of your content to keywords by looking for other related keywords. So if you’re selling sneakers, keywords like sports, basketball, football, and soccer will help the search engine quickly categorize your website.

It will also have a knock on effect with your SEO for longer tail search enquiries. For example, if someone searches for ‘soccer sneakers’ you’ll rank better than you would if your page didn’t mention the sport. Also, thinking of these related keywords will help you create more content to bulk out your product descriptions.

Add Date Modifiers to Offers

If you’re running any kind of seasonal sale or promotion make sure to include the date. Including at least the year is vital as it shows users who don’t use your site often that the offer is current. Again this will have an effect on both the SEO and the user experience. With the search engine knowing to crawl future dates and provide detailed rich snippets.

Rich Snippets

Rich Snippets surfaced a few years ago with the idea that they would work as a kind of extra meta description for the search engine. Using the schema.org markup the rich snippet adds information about a particular product and also enables the reader to rate that product out of 5 stars.

Using the schema markup allows the search engine to quickly read a page. Acting as a kind of map, showing where the important information is, letting the search engine skim through the content as quickly as possible.

As an aside, rich snippets do not change how your site ranks, but they help create detailed search listings, increase CTR and, as mentioned, have indirect SEO benefits like making a page easier to index.

SEO for Retail

With these tips, you can make your online store more competitive. Staying ahead of SEO trends helps to give you a competitive edge. Do you have any SEO tips for retail?