If you’re looking for a guide to ecommerce SEO in 2026, I’ve got you covered. I absolutely love to work with ecommerce clients, and also running ecommerce stores myself, I’m no stranger to knowing what areas to focus on and where to allocate your time in such a fast-moving environment.
If you would prefer to watch the video version of this, you can get that below. Otherwise, let’s get started with this guide!
For those looking for a quick summary of actions, I recommend focusing on the following priority SEO areas for 2026 when it comes to ecommerce stores:
- Commercial and informational content across your website
- Using internal data to inform content opportunities and on-site navigation requirements
- Internal link opportunities
- Digital PR and passive link building approaches
- Real blogger outreach
- AI opportunities and areas of focus
Commercial & Informational Content Opportunities
In 2026, this really needs to be focused on meeting new and existing audiences along their buyer journey. For example, having content strategies based on pillars so you can cover informational content that may be initially quite broad, then closer to a purchase, and then even post-purchase e.g. guides on caring for a product.
You can then use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush to get competitor gap data to see what’s already working for them, and get a sense of the traffic that this type of content is driving.
But, before you starting looking at estimated traffic and volumes, map-out the journey that a visitor will take with the content based on what you already know about your audience.
This could be something like:
- Why buy oversized t-shirts? (Pre-purchase search)
- How to style oversized t-shirts (Pre-purchase search)
- Best oversized t-shirts brands (Pre-purchase search)
- How to wash oversized t-shirts (Post-purchase search)
- Can I put an oversized t-shirt in the dryer? (Post-purchase search)
You should also then not just be focusing on your website when it comes to this form of content planning. It’s very common in 2026 for video and social media results to be indexed for informational searches, so if you’re seeing the likes of YouTube and Instagram Reels showing alongside more ‘typical’ blog posts and guides, then make sure you’re making these to a) support written content and b) capture search opportunities both within the platforms themselves and within the SERP’s.
On-Site Navigation & Internal Data
One of the best things you can do is work with as much internal data as you can get your hands on. Make sure you’ve tracking internal searches in GA4, or you’re using plugins/tools to gather this data for you. Then, match this with Search Console data to see if you’re already getting clicks for content that you don’t actually have.
What I mean by this is, users might be searching for ‘oversized white t-shirts’. You might mention ‘oversized’ on your white t-shirts page, but you don’t have a dedicated category for it.
You could be seeing low clicks or high impressions for an ‘oversized’ query in Search Console, and see in your internal site search data that people are looking for oversized products (which you may have), so it’s the perfect justification to build-out supporting category pages rather than just relying on data from third-party tools. Don’t get me wrong, these tools have their place in keyword research and content planning, but nothing beats your own internal data.
Internal Links
This remains one of the most overlook aspects of SEO for any website, and it’s crucial for ecommerce websites in particular. Why? Because it makes things easier for your users and for search engines to find what they need, and that means more money when you nail this process.
If you don’t have an internal linking process in place, I recommend focusing on the following:
- Introduce breadcrumbs and add relevant BreadcrumbList schema so that you get the relevant SERP features from this
- Add buttons or blocks to category pages that link-out to subcategories, especially if they’re blocked from filtering as standard via the robots.txt. For example, colour and size variants that are popular and you know are popular options
- When planning your content, plan the internal links you’ll be adding to related pages, and also which existing content you’ll be internally linking from to the new content. This way, you’re not having to do this each time a new page is added to your website
- Add internal links to both category and product page content. Ensure you’re updating content on priority commercial pages regularly (Search Console data is great for this), and audit your internal link opportunities at the same time
- Speaking of auditing internal links… You can use Screaming Frog to assess your current internal links to ascertain whether they’re working as intended e.g. are they descriptive enough, are you linking to the right pages, and are there any redirect chains or loops that you’ve left and not addressed?
Digital PR
Some of the best ways to gain links from ‘real’ websites is to show how much of an authority you as the store owner in your niche. Use sites like Qwoted and Editorielle to comment as the expert based on what journalists are looking for.
You can also use sites like If This Then That to setup alerts on X, so if a journalist sends out a #journorequest and it’s specific to your niche, you can get an email, a slack message, a text… whichever approach works best for you. But this is a great way of staying on top of opportunities as soon as requests come through.
You can also look at manually searching opportunities to see what has worked well in the past. Looking at things like “I’m an industry name expert” or “Industry name expert reveals”, and seeing a) what’s being covered at the moment and b) the types of campaigns that have routinely been favoured by journalists in your niche.
These are easily my two favourite options because anyone can do these, you just need a process to look for opportunities and to keep sending relevant campaigns out (because not everything will land).
Whether it’s a reactive campaign or it’s more typical expert commentary, one thing I like to do when it comes to building an outreach list is:
- Look at the journalists consistently covering the types of campaigns you’ll be wanting to do
- Use a tool like Hunter or Journo Finder to build an outreach list, and do this for each campaign
- You can then track who is actually interested, who puts your campaigns live, and who to remove from future outreach lists
It takes time, but it’s really worth it. I’ve done a full video on digital PR for link building here (and I also have a specific ecommerce link building guide):
Passive Link Acquisition
Who wouldn’t want to earn links without actually having to do outreach? This method has been one of my favourites over the years, and it’s really simple (but does take effort to do well).
Essentially, journalists and publishers want to cite data sources from websites they can trust. But, this doesn’t actually need to be your data. So long as you cite the sources correctly, link to them and attribute them properly, you can build a fantastic resource that journalists want to link to, without actually using any of your own data. Sites like Statista and industry studies are great for finding data, your job is to create the most comprehensive resource that make it as easy as possible for journalists to find the stats they’re looking for, and attribute a link to your resource accordingly.
And, to actually do the research, literally just think about your niche and where you’re able to gather data. If you sell gardening products, then a ‘UK gardening stats 2026’ data hub is the perfect type of thing to be creating. And you’ll be surprised about the data you can find on very niche topics.
You can then internally link to your commercial pages by building an internal hub of authority within your site, rather than just relying on external links pointing to specific pages. It just gives that nice bit of variety to your link building approaches and positions you as a niche authority well.
And, you can also do this with things like online tools and calculators. They may not get links in the same way, but they can get them, and also bring relevant traffic to your site. You can even use AI to build simple tools, so the actual hard part isn’t something you need to stress about.
I recommend creating a ‘Tools’ section of your website, and have supporting content and internal product links on the pages to give them a commercial element, as well as any supporting articles that relate to the tool. Definitely something to add to your passive link building to-do list.
Blogger Outreach
When I say blogger outreach, I don’t mean just going buying a bunch of links from the cheapest guest post sellers that you can find. It helps to really have a process that is predefined, so that you can vet proper bloggers that are relevant to your niche, and get the types of links that are actually going to carry real value.
One approach that you can take is as follows:
- Search for something that a blogger in your niche would be writing. For example, in the fashion niche, this could be something like ‘best oversized hoodies for men’ or ‘the best comfy joggers for remote workers’. Ideally, you want to find publishers outside of the bigger name brand publications.
- Then, you can reach out to them directly to see about existing article inclusions or writing new posts for them as an expert in the niche(s) they’re covering. But, you can take this one step further…
- Put their site into Ahrefs and look at who they’ve linked-out to in the last few months. What you’re looking for are similar ecommerce brands to you, whether they’re direct competitors or not. What this then means is a) if they’re linking to them, then they’re likely to link to you too and b) you can then look at the referring domains of those sites in Ahrefs and find other bloggers they’ve worked with, that you otherwise wouldn’t find just from doing manual searches
Consider also how you want to work with bloggers. Do you want to send them products, go for sponsored posts, a blend of the two? I recommend keeping your options open and going into this with the aim of building relationships with bloggers and influencers over the long-term.
AI considerations
For me, this boils down to what LLM’s are citing as sources, and the averages that they’re focusing on per-sector when it comes to getting information.
For example, we know that LLM’s prefer fresh content, focus on relevance in relation to query fan-outs, and rely heavily on sites like YouTube as a source.
You’ll also see smaller bloggers and publishers being part of sources for ‘best’-type searches, so when you’re doing your publisher outreach work, don’t be put off if you’re seeing lower DR sites. If it’s being cited and is relevant, and passes your link vetting checks, then get it added to your outreach list. Worry less about DR, and more about sites with steady traffic with online presences that suggest ‘real’ people behind the website (and not some poorly disguised private blog network).
Speaking of query fan-out, this also then relates back to my first point on content planning and understanding audience search journeys at various buying stages. LLM’s fan-out queries in much the same way as users when looking for answers to specific product questions, so going ‘broad’ and proving authority stands to benefit LLM presence as much as it does for internal link opportunities for users when they’re on the site (from one related article to another) and within traditional search results.
Conclusion
We’re in a really exciting time in SEO this year, and ecommerce retailers have such a good opportunity to make the most of organic visibility opportunities that aren’t just website-specific, but all stem from your SEO research and user data.
It can seem like a lot to cover, but the real wins come from having processes in place, being in this for the long-term and focusing on building a really strong brand organically. And, SEO is a huge part of this, whether it’s website-specific or being visible outside of your typical website SEO efforts.
Want to speak to me about opportunities specific to your website? Drop me an email and I’ll be more than happy to chat.
