Start with a real ecommerce site, even if it's a small test store on Shopify or WooCommerce with 20-50 products. You learn fastest when you can immediately apply concepts like optimizing title tags for commercial intent, writing product descriptions that rank, and structuring category pages. Theory without implementation teaches you nothing about crawl budget issues or faceted navigation problems that only appear at scale. Focus on these core areas in order: product page optimization (unique content, schema markup, image optimization), category page strategy (how to rank collections without cannibalizing product pages), technical architecture (handling out-of-stock items, pagination, filters), and internal linking patterns that push authority to money pages. Read Shopify's SEO documentation even if you use another platform because they explain fundamentals well. Follow technical SEO practitioners on Twitter who share real problems and solutions, not generic listicles. Practical learning beats courses. Set up Google Search Console and monitor actual impressions and click data for commercial queries. Install Screaming Frog and crawl a 500+ product site to see how messy real ecommerce architecture gets. Learn schema.org markup for Product, Offer, AggregateRating, and Breadcrumb because Google relies heavily on structured data for ecommerce results. At Ottawa SEO, we learned the hard way that ecommerce SEO differs fundamentally from content SEO. A blog post can rank with mediocre technical setup if the content is strong. An ecommerce site with perfect content fails if your canonical tags are broken, your faceted navigation creates infinite crawl paths, or your site speed tanks on mobile. You need both content skills and technical rigor. Watch for platform-specific quirks. Shopify handles certain technical elements automatically but limits others. WooCommerce gives you complete control but requires more manual configuration. Magento and BigCommerce sit somewhere between. Spend 40% of your time on technical foundations, 40% on content and keyword strategy, 20% on link building. Most beginners flip this ratio and wonder why their perfectly written product descriptions don't rank.