SEO in ecommerce is the practice of making your online store more visible in organic search results. When someone searches "buy running shoes Canada" or "best coffee grinder under $100", proper ecommerce SEO gets your product pages ranking above competitors, sending you free traffic instead of relying purely on paid ads. The core difference from regular SEO is the focus on commercial intent and transactional pages. You're optimizing category pages, product pages, and filtered navigation, not just blog posts. Your target keywords include product names, category terms, and buying-focused phrases. A typical ecommerce site might have 500 to 50,000+ indexable pages, so technical SEO becomes critical—crawl budget, duplicate content from filters, and site speed all matter more at scale. Key ecommerce SEO components include technical foundation (fast load times, mobile optimization, proper schema markup for products and reviews), on-page optimization (unique product descriptions, keyword-rich titles, optimized images), internal linking structure (logical category hierarchies, related products), and off-page signals (backlinks, brand mentions, reviews). The financial impact is measurable. For our portfolio stores, organic traffic typically converts at 2–4%, compared to 1–2% for paid traffic, because users searching specific product terms have higher intent. A category page ranking position 3 instead of 8 can mean 15–30 additional daily visitors, which compounds across hundreds of categories. Common ecommerce SEO challenges include thin content on similar products, out-of-stock page handling, managing URL parameters from filters and sorting, and competing against Amazon or big-box retailers. At Ottawa SEO, we prioritize category pages for broad terms, long-tail product pages for specific SKUs, and informational content (buying guides, comparisons) to capture earlier-funnel searches. The goal is sustainable traffic that doesn't disappear when you pause ad spend.