Making an Online Store Easier to Find and Buy From

Many of the stores we work with have invested heavily in product pages, while category pages and on-site search have received less attention. That can limit how easily shoppers discover products and how well the site supports broader search visibility.

We analyzed the top five results for 379 commercial product keywords across six US retail sectors, and category pages held 43 percent of position-one rankings, more than any other page type. For plain product terms like “hiking boots” they dominate outright, while “best X” searches mostly go to review publishers. Which keywords you chase decides which pages deserve the work, and for many stores that means categories first. That is the argument behind the Start Here guides below.

Start With What You Are Seeing

Store problems present as symptoms rather than topics, so it is usually faster to start from what looks wrong than from a subject list.

What you are seeing	Where to start
Product pages collect impressions and almost no clicks	Product page SEO
A broad category term brings up the wrong page, or nothing	Category page SEO
Categories follow the internal catalog rather than how people shop	Categories built for the business or the customer
You cannot tell which page type deserves the work	What 379 product keywords showed
A shopping feed underperforms, or nobody configured it	Feed strategy
The search box returns nothing for things you sell	Choosing a search engine
A product is out of stock, or gone for good	Out-of-stock URLs
You run NetSuite SuiteCommerce	The SuiteCommerce guides

Category and Product Pages

Category pages match shoppers who are still deciding, and product pages match people who already know what they want, so the two earn traffic differently. That difference is how the guides are split. Category page SEO covers the hierarchy, the listing, filters, pagination and the URL decisions underneath them. Product page SEO covers product information, structured data, variants, reviews and keeping a Merchant Center feed consistent with the page.

The pattern we correct most often is categories organized around the internal catalog rather than the words customers use when they search. Rewriting the description text does not fix that; the structure has to change first.

When a product is unavailable, what to do depends on whether it is coming back. The guide to out-of-stock URLs covers the temporary case, where keeping the page live protects the rankings and links it has earned rather than throwing them away.

Choosing What to Build Next

The 43 percent above is an average across six sectors, and the sectors disagreed enough that the average is the wrong number to plan from. Outdoor gear was dominated by category pages. Home fitness went the other way, with editorial content holding nearly half the top five. Planning from the average would send a fitness retailer to build category pages for searches that reward buying guides.

The check that replaces the guess takes an afternoon. Pull your top product keywords, run them, and count which page type holds the first few positions. That ratio is the content plan, and the full study shows the method and how far the verticals diverged.

Feeds and Shopping

A feed is a second copy of your catalog with its own rules. The titles in it are matched against shopping queries almost literally, so attribute order changes which searches you appear in, and a title written for a person scanning a page performs differently than one written for the feed. Start with feed strategy if you are deciding how to manage one, product titles for Shopping and Performance Max if the feed exists and is underperforming, and how Shopping ads work if the whole channel is new. Many merchants leave the feed at whatever the platform exported.

What the Search Box Tells You

The queries your search box collects show what shoppers want in their own words, including the misspellings, which makes the search log worth reading before any keyword tool. When a results page returns nothing for a common misspelling, the lost sales do not show up in standard reports, which is why the problem tends to go unnoticed. If you are choosing or replacing a search engine, the guide on picking one covers that decision.

Where AI Fits

People have started asking ChatGPT and its rivals what to buy. It is early, and anyone selling a reliable playbook is ahead of the evidence. What is already clear: clean structured product data and pages that answer real buying questions help in search and in AI answers alike, so the work is not wasted either way. The guide to getting products found in AI search covers what is reasonable to do now, and which parts of it the evidence actually supports.

If You Run SuiteCommerce

The SEO principles do not change on SuiteCommerce, but the place you diagnose a problem often does. Client-side navigation can undercount pageviews in GA4. Breadcrumbs disappear when an item has no primary category. Redirect behavior matters more than usual on a migrated catalog, and what you can fix may depend on NetSuite product data rather than the storefront.

These guides cover setting up 301 redirects, assigning a primary category so breadcrumbs resolve, and three GA4 problems the platform creates on its own. Those are pageview tracking, attribution, and bounce rates after the 2018.2 GTM bundle. Each exists because we hit the problem on a real build and could not find the answer written down anywhere, and they all sit together on the SuiteCommerce topic page. If you are not on NetSuite, skip them.