SEO for online stores: categories, products and duplicate content

🏬 What is different about a store

One service has one page. A store has categories, subcategories, hundreds of products, filters, sorting and variants. Without control, that becomes thousands of near-identical pages that compete with each other and waste crawl budget.

🗂️ Categories are gold

Categories rank for the phrases with the most searches ("women's trainers", "aluminium windows"). So each should be a real page:

• A unique intro text above or below the products.
• A clear title, meta description and H1.
• A logical hierarchy and path (breadcrumb).
• Internal linking with subcategories and related topics.

🧾 Product pages

1. A unique description, not the supplier text everyone else has.
2. Good photos in modern formats with alt text.
3. Clear price, availability and delivery.
4. Questions and answers, specifications, customer reviews.
5. Product and Offer schema with price and availability. See schema markup.
6. Related products for internal linking.

🔁 Duplicate content and filters

• Use canonical tags for variants and parameters.
• Do not allow endless filter combinations to be indexed.
• For products no longer offered, leave a page recommending related ones or redirect it to the matching category, instead of throwing 404 errors.

⚡ Speed

Stores are often heavy: many images, plugins and scripts. Optimise images, limit plugins and pay attention to mobile checkout. See Core Web Vitals.

📝 Blog and guides

Buying guides, comparisons and advice bring visits before the customer has even chosen a product, and lead them to your categories. To start, also read the online store guide and the SEO optimisation page.