An online store can lose search traffic without a single page breaking. Filters multiply URLs, variants compete with each other, products sell out and come back, and the product data Google reads drifts away from what the page says. A general site audit tool will flag some of this. It will not tell you which of it costs sales.
This is the order we would work through on a store, starting with the checks that decide whether pages can rank at all and ending with the ones that decide how well. Every step can be done with free tools.
Step 1: see what Google has actually indexed
Open the Page indexing report in Google Search Console. It splits every URL Google knows about into indexed and not indexed, with a reason for each exclusion. On a store, three reasons deserve a close look.
- Duplicate without user-selected canonical: usually filter, sort or variant URLs that Google treats as copies of a product or category.
- Crawled, currently not indexed: Google fetched the page and decided it was not worth keeping. Thin category pages and near-identical products land here.
- Discovered, currently not indexed: Google knows the URL but has not crawled it. On a large catalogue this can mean crawling is being spent on the wrong URLs.
Then compare the number of indexed pages with the number of products and categories you sell. Far more indexed pages than products points at duplicates. Far fewer points at pages Google cannot reach or does not value.
Step 2: control filter, sort and variant URLs
Faceted navigation is the problem most particular to online stores. Every combination of colour, size, price and sort order can produce its own URL, and a catalogue of a few hundred products can turn into tens of thousands of crawlable pages.
Decide which filtered pages match something people search for. A page for a brand or a major type inside a category often does. Give those a clean URL, a unique title and a short introduction. Keep the rest out of the index:
- Point variant URLs, such as a colour parameter, at the main product with a canonical tag.
- Block sort orders and filter combinations nobody searches for in robots.txt, which is what Google recommends for facets that should not be crawled at all, per its faceted navigation guidance.
- On Shopify, check that product links inside collections point to /products/ URLs. Many themes link to /collections/name/products/ paths, which are canonicalised but still waste crawling.
Step 3: speed on product and collection pages
Test the templates that earn money as well as the home page. Run a best-selling product and the main collection page through PageSpeed Insights, and check the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console for real visitor data.
Google's passing marks, measured at the 75th percentile of visits, are a Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, an Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds and a Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. On stores the usual causes are oversized product photos, apps and scripts loaded on every page, and images without width and height that push the layout around as they load.
Step 4: product pages worth indexing
A product page copied from the manufacturer says the same thing as every other retailer selling the item, and Google has little reason to prefer yours. Check a sample of your top sellers for:
- A unique description that answers what a buyer asks: size, fit, compatibility, materials, what is in the box.
- A title tag that leads with the product name and its main attribute, under about 60 characters.
- Specifications written out as text, since words inside an image are hard for search engines to read.
- Reviews on the page, since they add fresh, specific wording in the buyer's own terms.
- Descriptive alt text on product images.
Step 5: structured data and the product feed
Product structured data tells Google the price, stock status, ratings, shipping cost and return policy in a form it can use directly. It powers the price and availability shown in search results, and the same product information feeds Google's shopping results and AI Mode.
Test a product page in the Rich Results Test and read the warnings, then check three things by hand:
- The price and stock in the markup match what the page shows.
- Shipping and returns are declared, either in the markup or in Merchant Center settings.
- The Merchant Center feed agrees with both. Mismatches get products disapproved, and they are easy to miss after a price change.
Step 6: collection pages and internal links
Collection pages usually target the broader, higher-volume searches, yet many are just a grid of products. A short introduction written for the buyer, a clear H1 and links to related collections give Google something to rank.
Then check how deep products sit. A product that takes five clicks to reach from the home page gets crawled less and ranks worse than one reachable in two or three. Breadcrumbs, related products and links from blog content all shorten the path.
Step 7: out-of-stock and discontinued products
Stock changes are where stores quietly lose rankings. A product that returns a 404 while it is out of stock loses the links and history it built up, then has to start again when it is back.
- Temporarily out of stock: keep the page, say so, mark it out of stock in the structured data, and show alternatives.
- Discontinued with a clear successor: redirect to the new product.
- Discontinued with no replacement: let it return a 404, and remove internal links to it.
Step 8: readiness for AI search
AI answers draw on the same foundations: pages that are indexed, fast and clearly described. Two extra checks help a store appear in them. The first is plain answers to the questions buyers ask before they buy, on product pages and in a buying guide. The second is presence on the review and comparison sites that AI tools cite for your category. Our guide to answer engine optimisation covers this in more depth.
How to prioritise what you find
An audit of a real store produces more fixes than anyone can make in a month. Rank them by the revenue of the pages they affect. A speed problem on the product template touches every sale; a missing alt tag on an old blog post touches none. Fix indexing and duplicate problems first, then the product and collection templates, then content.
If you would rather have someone run it, our SEO team audits stores on Shopify, WooCommerce and custom builds, and returns the list ranked the same way.