Technical SEO for eCommerce: Top Common Mistakes Stores Make to Fix in 2025

March 31, 2025

Many eCommerce brands use search engine optimization only to some extent, while many don’t bother about it at all, probably thinking that their business isn’t really tied up to organic search. It’s in vain because not all potential buyers look up the products they want to buy directly on eCommerce platforms. For many of them, the journey begins in Google, where they explore and compare available options.

With that being said, not putting sufficient effort into SEO can make you miss out on those prospects. Besides, search engine optimization isn’t only about brand awareness and discoverability. It’s also about building trust and securing positive user experience, which is linked to bigger sales and greater buyer loyalty.

Technical SEO, in particular, is what serves as the building block of UX and, yet, is overlooked by online stores the most. In this article, we’ll walk you through technical SEO for eCommerce by exploring the top mistakes that might be slowing your growth.

The Massive Role of Technical Optimization in Your eCommerce SEO Strategy

For many eCommerce brands, search engine optimization begins with targeting keywords and optimizing their content and, in fact, ends there too. And this is important. Keywords are like flags that match your products to relevant searches and help potential buyers explore them. You can use keyword and content optimization tools like Surfer SEO or find more advanced Surfer SEO alternatives to find the keywords that will boost your visibility. But what about the technical side of the matter?

Although many stores overlook the technical elements in the process of eCommerce website optimization, its importance spreads far beyond how people find you. Technical optimization defines the experience and interactions of shoppers with your store. When a prospect lands on a product page that loads slowly, is hard to navigate through, or has other technical errors, they will likely bounce from it, leading to traffic and reputational losses.

Top 9 eCommerce Technical SEO Mistakes to Avoid

1. Slowly Loading Pages

Improving page speed is one of the ultimate things you can do to improve your rankings today and, at the same time, gain greater trust and loyalty from shoppers. Slowly loading stores tend to lead to high bounce rates and abandoned carts. Not to mention the negative impact on your overall image.

If you’ve made this mistake, use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to check if your loading speed is good and quickly detect errors. Then, implement the needed changes, such as caching, a content delivery network (CDN), image optimization, and others to boost this performance metric.

Extra note: Apart from loading speed, there are also other performance metrics that directly impact UX and rankings. You need to test and optimize your site according to Core Web Vitals to get the most out of your SEO for Shopify.

When you drive people to your online store, you want them to stay there for as long as possible, exploring different items and making a purchase. This, however, is less likely to happen if buyers find your site navigation crooked and can’t navigate through it seamlessly.

In case your store is running on the base of Shopify, you have a few navigational best practices already built into it. These include a logical hierarchy of categories, readable URLs, pages with no iframes, etc.

However, according to the SEO Shopify help center, there are a few extra things you can do to improve structure and navigation for greater rankings and user experience:

Create descriptive image file names.
Implement internal linking with descriptive anchors.
Optimize store menus for more intuitive navigation.

3. Neglecting Internal Links

Though we mentioned it in the process of discussing store navigation, a lack of internal linking is such a massive mistake made in SEO for Shopify and other eCommerce platforms that it deserves a separate mention.

Links are like breadcrumbs that encourage site visitors to hop from one page to another. They help them stay on your pages for longer and discover more product offerings, which can eventually lead to more sales.

4. Lack of Mobile Friendliness

In order to make sure that you don’t lose mobile users, you need to implement a responsive design that adapts to shoppers’ devices and makes their experiences just as smooth as on desktops. If your store is built with platforms like Shopify or WordPress, you can overcome this mistake by selecting a responsive theme that’s friendly for mobile devices.

Additionally, you need to simplify the navigation and checkout for smaller screens and meticulously test your store to confirm its proper performance.

5. Allowing Duplicate Content

Similar or identical pieces of content found under different URLs can be incredibly confusing to search engines and cause lower rankings. Additionally, duplicate content can appear boring to users and show that you’re being sloppy about your content.

Due to these reasons elimination of duplicate content is one of the core elements of SEO Shopify. When filling your store’s pages, be sure to craft original content for each.

6. Not Using Schema Markup

Speaking about the big mistakes in eCommerce technical SEO, we have to speak about schema markup. In a nutshell, schema represents bits of descriptive code added to different elements on the page to enrich your results in search engines.

Adding it can help your store contain additional information, such as ratings, reviews, and prices, right in search engine result pages (SERPs). This can eventually result in more clicks and conversions.

7. Blocking Search Engines With Robots.txt or Noindex Tags

Both robots.txt and noindex tags get in the way of search engines when they are crawling and indexing your site. In a nutshell, robots.txt files tell search engine crawlers which pages they should and shouldn’t crawl (not index). Noindes tags, in turn, inform them which pages you don’t want to be indexed. The issue arises when you combine these two tags. Robots.txt blocks search crawlers from crawling specific pages, and if there is a noindex tag present, they won’t be able to see it. As a result, your store may lose visibility and receive a diluted index presence.

To avoid this, you need to use both tags thoughtfully. For example, it might be wise to use noindex tags to eliminate indexing of invaluable pages or those that contain duplicate content. Most importantly, you shouldn’t use these tags on important pages in order not to lose their visibility.

8. Improper Handling of Out-of-Stock Products

Managing the pages with out-of-stock products is a part of technical optimization for eCommerce that applies solely to this niche. And it is an important part of success. The thing is that finding SERP results that lead to out-of-stock pages can be rather irritating to users, which might lead to poor user experience, higher bounce rate, and, eventually, loss of page value.

Yet, you clearly can’t avoid having some out-of-stock occurrences in your eCommerce business. So you just need to learn how to handle these pages right without harming your SEO:

If products are permanently out-of-stock, consider removing it from your XML sitemap and delete all links pointing to it so that it’s not indexed and seen anymore. However, if this page is high-value (aka, receives lots of organic traffic or contains high-value backlinks), consider using redirects.
If products are out of stock temporarily, don’t change the status of their pages to maintain their value. However, be sure to clearly specify that the product is out of stock and give users a chance to be notified when it’s available again.

9. Not Optimizing Product Descriptions Well

It may not be a technical mistake, in particular. Yet, overseeing product descriptions can greatly hinder all the rest of the efforts you put into SEO for eCommerce product pages.

Product descriptions give you an opportunity to engage users and indicate the value and benefits of the items you sell. Additionally, they let you integrate keywords that will help you boost rankings. So don’t neglect this when handling SEO Shopify or optimizing stores built on other platforms like WordPress. Also, don’t forget about the power of local optimization so that you capture the right audiences within your area of operation.

Conclusion

SEO for large eCommerce sites comes with its own specs. Yet, it plays just as large a role as in other types of businesses and shouldn’t be overlooked if you are aiming for growth.

After reading this guide, you will know about the most prominent technical mistakes that online stores make. Each of these errors might be holding you back from achieving your full potential and building a prosperous business that makes sales. So don’t hesitate to use this knowledge to strengthen your SEO and make sure buyers find you and convert!