E-commerce SEO starts with a solid site architecture. Your category pages should target commercial keywords like "men's running shoes" while product pages chase long-tail terms like "Nike Pegasus 40 black size 10." Most e-commerce sites fail because they rely on manufacturer descriptions that appear on 50 other retailer sites. Write unique product descriptions for your top revenue generators first, then scale to mid-tier products. For the long tail, even 2-3 unique sentences beats duplicate content. Technical SEO makes or breaks e-commerce sites. Faceted navigation creates thousands of useless URLs that waste crawl budget. Use robots.txt or noindex on filter combinations, canonical tags pointing to clean URLs, and implement hreflang if you serve multiple countries. Your site speed directly impacts conversion, so lazy-load images below the fold, compress everything, and run on a CDN. Google's Core Web Vitals aren't a nice-to-have when you're asking people to enter credit card details. Structured data is non-negotiable. Product schema shows prices and availability in search results, which lifts click-through rates 15-30% in competitive verticals. Add review schema if you collect ratings. BreadcrumbList schema helps Google understand your hierarchy. Content strategy for e-commerce differs from regular SEO. Category descriptions should sit below products to avoid pushing buying options down the page. Build buying guides and comparison pages to capture informational queries early in the funnel. A guide on "best winter tires for Canadian climates" can rank and funnel users to your tire category. Link building focuses on getting your collections and guides cited. Product pages rarely earn organic links. Reach out for roundups, sponsor local events, and create data-driven content retailers in adjacent niches want to reference. At Ottawa SEO, we've seen Canadian e-commerce sites double organic traffic in 8-12 months by fixing technical debt first, then systematically replacing duplicate content, then building links to pillar collection pages. The sequence matters more than most founders expect.