The E-Commerce SEO Checklist We Run Before Every Store Launch

Architecture first

Category structure decides what can rank. Every commercially valuable search term needs a page that exists before launch, not one added later once someone notices the gap. Map keywords to categories, subcategories and filters before the developer builds anything.

Faceted navigation

This is where most stores quietly destroy their crawl budget. Decide which filter combinations should be indexable landing pages, which should be canonicalised to the parent, and which should be blocked entirely. Get this wrong and you can generate a hundred thousand near-duplicate URLs from a two-hundred product catalogue.

Product page essentials

Unique descriptions, Product and Offer schema with price and availability, review markup once you have genuine reviews, image alt text, and a variant strategy that does not split ranking signals across ten near-identical URLs.

Migration safety

If you are replatforming, the redirect map is the single highest-risk deliverable. Every old URL needs a destination, redirects need to be single-hop, and you need a crawl of the old site saved before you switch.

Tracking before launch, not after

GA4 with enhanced e-commerce, Merchant Center feed validated, Search Console verified on all property variants, and server-side conversion tracking if you are running paid. Adding tracking after launch means losing the baseline you needed to prove the work.