Optimizing e-commerce in 2025: the challenges of SEO, AI, and social media

One user asks ChatGPT for the “best cordless vacuum cleaner under $200.” Another buys an item of clothing directly from a video on TikTok Shop. A third compares product reviews before going to your physical store, checking availability online.

This is a snapshot of the normal operations of digital commerce, which in 2025 will exceed $7 trillion in value, distributed across more than 28 million active online stores worldwide. In short, it is a mature and competitive market, populated by stores that share similar platforms, almost identical price lists, and overlapping campaigns. What makes the difference is the quality of connections—information architecture, user experience, tracking, content, and reputation—the technical precision with which you interact with each platform, and the strategic consistency with which you oversee the various sales and discovery channels.

Optimizing your eCommerce in 2025 therefore means integrating technology and strategy to make every point on the site readable, measurable, and useful for purchasing. Now let’s take a closer look at some useful techniques to implement.

Visibility beyond SERP and beyond Google: the new eCommerce context

Let’s start with some theoretical concepts that describe the new digital reality.

The visibility of your online store is now built on a distributed user journey, which has made the e-commerce funnel no longer linear. A purchase decision can start with a video on Instagram, take shape through a request to artificial intelligence, be validated by reviews on an industry blog, and end with a direct search for your brand.

Your goal then becomes to consistently monitor the multiple points of contact—the famous touchpoints—that a potential customer encounters, optimizing your presence not only for Google SERPs but for all the “surfaces” where your products can appear: Google Images, Google Lens, Google Shopping, Google Business Profile, and Google Maps.

Optimizing your eCommerce means making your products and your brand the most authoritative and accessible answer in each of these contexts, turning every interaction into an opportunity for conversion.

The impact of social media and AI engines on digital commerce

Until a few years ago, all you had to think about was Google: people’s paths were more predictable and largely controlled by the search engine and its surfaces. Today, that’s no longer enough, because there are new players on the scene, and ignoring them would be short-sighted, to say the least.

The new channels represent a change in consumer behavior itself, shifting from an active search for information to a more fluid and conversational discovery, and they mean that you need to extend your presence to all touchpoints where purchasing decisions are made.

Although traffic volumes are still lower, AI engines such as ChatGPT or Perplexity are nevertheless a reality and act as personal search assistants. Users no longer just enter keywords to get a list of links to analyze; they ask complex questions and expect a direct, summarized answer. They ask to compare products, summarize reviews, or find the best option based on specific criteria. Here, your e-commerce site ceases to be a simple destination to click on in a SERP and must become a source of data so authoritative that it is cited and recommended by AI—and to achieve this, you need to take care of SEO for AI or GEO. User trust shifts from knowing how to choose the right link to the validity of the summary provided by the language model.

The third pole is social platforms, which have transformed from entertainment channels to real engines of discovery and sales. Here, the intent to purchase is almost never explicit: users are not always actively looking for a product, but may discover it almost by chance while browsing content. A video, story, or post by a creator can trigger a need and lead to an impulse purchase, often completed without ever leaving the platform. This model reverses the traditional logic: it is no longer the search that guides the user to the product, but the content that brings the product to the user’s attention.

The technical foundation: how to prepare your site for new visibility

E-commerce optimization starts with your website pages, which are the nerve center where almost every interaction converges, regardless of where it originates. This is where the trust generated by AI or the impulsive interest triggered by a video collides with the reality of your infrastructure.

And while we are often tempted to focus our efforts primarily on content production and creativity, what makes the difference is a solid technical foundation—one that ceases to be a simple requirement for “traditional” SEO and becomes the strategic pillar that enables or undermines the entire multichannel experience.

It is no longer just a matter of being “scannable” by a crawler, but of building a digital asset that is inherently high-performing, reliable, and, above all, “communicative” with any algorithmic system.

If you don’t do this, you accumulate “technical debt”: every shortcut or inefficiency will translate into higher costs, slower response times, and, inevitably, a loss of competitiveness and sales in the future. On the contrary, investing in excellent technical foundations means creating an agile platform, ready to capitalize on every new technology or channel, ensuring a flawless user experience that turns visitors into loyal customers.

Choosing a CMS: the engine of your eCommerce

Even before defining the architecture or URL structure, the decision that will most influence the future of your store is the choice of technology platform, the Content Management System (CMS), which is the “operating system” of your store: every recommendation on URLs, structured data, performance, and architecture depends directly on the capabilities, limitations, and characteristics of the platform you choose.

Opting for a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution such as Shopify, which offers simplicity and delegated management, or for an open-source platform such as WooCommerce or Magento, which guarantees maximum flexibility but requires greater technical skills, will determine the degree of freedom, scalability, and ease with which you can implement the necessary optimizations.

Why is this choice so crucial? A rigid CMS can prevent you from modifying the URL structure as you wish, implementing custom structured data without resorting to costly developments, or optimizing the code to improve performance. A non-scalable platform, on the other hand, may work well with a catalog of 100 products, but become an unmanageable bottleneck as your business grows, with slowdowns and problems during traffic peaks such as Black Friday. The problem is not immediate, but rather the work in the medium to long term, because the wrong platform could slow down your growth and require costly and complex migrations in the future.

Clearly, there is no such thing as the “best e-commerce CMS” in absolute terms, but there is one that is best suited to your goals and resources. When evaluating a platform, you can therefore ask yourself these specific questions with a view to optimization:

• SEO flexibility: Does it allow you to granularly edit every on-page element (title, meta description, URL, heading, alt text)? Can you easily manage robots.txt files and the XML sitemap? Do you have control over canonical and hreflang tags?
• Structured data: Does the platform natively integrate structured data for products and reviews, or does it require the installation of third-party plugins (which can weigh down the site and create conflicts)?
• Performance: Is the CMS known for its speed? What caching and code optimization tools does it offer as standard? How does it handle database queries?
• Ecosystem and integrations: Is there a large market of reliable extensions and apps to manage advanced features (such as marketing automation, logistics, payments) without compromising the stability of the site?
• Scalability: Is the platform capable of handling tens of thousands of products and traffic volumes such as those during peak season without slowing down?

Architecture and navigation: creating a logical path

Then we move on to the upstream setup, the architecture of your site, which is the map you offer to both users and search engines. A logical and intuitive organization allows visitors to find what they are looking for with minimal effort, reducing frustration and increasing the chances of conversion. For search engines, a clear structure allows them to understand the hierarchical relationships between pages, identify the most important content, and distribute authority effectively.

This part is important because confusing navigation forces the user to click too many times to reach a product, increasing the abandonment rate. For Google, a complex structure can lead to incomplete scanning of the catalog, leaving important product pages unindexed.

In practical terms, you should design your structure so that each product can be reached in a maximum of three clicks from the home page. Organize the catalog into balanced categories and subcategories, avoiding sections with hundreds of items and others with fewer than twenty. Use breadcrumbs to allow users to always understand where they are and easily navigate the site hierarchy. Strategically use internal links to signal priority pages to Google: a product linked directly from your home page or from a highly visited blog article will receive a higher importance signal than a product hidden deep within the structure.

With SEOZoom’s Site Builder, you can define categories and links based on keywords and actual volumes, building paths that follow the search intent. A three-level hierarchy and a balanced network of internal links improve the readability of thematic clusters and enhance the most profitable products.

URL structure: the address of each product

Still on the subject of preventive settings—which you will ideally carry with you for a long time!—it’s time to choose the form of the URL, knowing that it is not just a technical address but a first, fundamental element of communication. A well-structured URL informs the user and the search engine about the content of the page even before it is opened.

According to classic SEO rules, which are still useful, clear and “meaningful” URLs are easier for users to remember and share. It may also be useful to include relevant keywords, which can increase the click-through rate (CTR) from search results pages, as the user perceives the address as more relevant. Conversely, complex URLs full of parameters (?id=123&session=xyz) can cause duplicate content issues, dispersing the effectiveness of the ranking and wasting the search engine’s crawl budget.

Therefore, always try to set up readable and descriptive URLs. For example, a URL such as /electronics/tv/samsung-neo-qled-55-inch is infinitely better than /cat.php?id=123&prod_id=567. Use hyphens (-) to separate words, keep URLs as short as possible, and manage parameters via Google Search Console to tell Google how to treat them, thus avoiding multiple versions of the same page being indexed.

Structured data and product feeds to communicate with algorithms

This is an important point for visibility in the age of AI, because structured data and product feeds are the language that allows you to communicate with machines, transforming your pages from simple text into an organized database that artificial intelligence can query and use as a source.

Without proper markup, AI “sees” a price as just a number on a page. By implementing structured data, however, you explicitly communicate “this number is the price, this is the currency, this is the unique product code (GTIN)”. This clarity is essential because it allows systems to correctly classify your brand and products as distinct “entities.”

When a user asks for “the best smartphones under $500,” AI can draw on this structured information to understand whether your products are a relevant answer. HTML tables, in particular, are a powerful tool: for artificial intelligence, a well-made comparison table is gold, because it provides data that is already organized and ready to be used in a comparison response. In practical terms, proceed as follows:

• Implement schema.org: enrich the code of your pages with the most relevant markups for e-commerce, such as Product (for price, availability, reviews), Review (for reviews), BreadcrumbList (for the navigation path), and FAQPage (for frequently asked questions).
• Use HTML tables: when presenting technical specifications or product comparisons, organize them in simple HTML tables. This format has proven to be extremely readable and effective for all artificial intelligence systems.
• Take care of your Google Merchant Center feed: consider this tool as your direct and official channel of communication with Google. The data you send via feed is often considered more up-to-date and reliable than that collected by scanning. To ensure maximum free visibility, enable the “Surfaces Across Google” option in your account.

The impact of performance and Core Web Vitals: on the shopping experience

Once you have made your site perfectly readable and interpretable by algorithms, the focus shifts to the human dimension: the experience of those who browse. All the precision you have put into communicating with machines through URLs and structured data would be in vain if the user, once they land on the page, is faced with a slow and frustrating experience. Performance is not an accessory optimization, but the bridge that connects technical solidity to conversion. Google knows this well, which is why it has translated the quality of the user experience into measurable metrics—Core Web Vitals—and integrated them as a ranking signal.

But above all, you need to think of these as factors that directly impact sales, because each of these three metrics describes a potential breaking point in the purchase journey. A slow LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) means that the main image of your product appears late, causing initial interest to fade. A high INP (Interaction to Next Paint) translates into a frustrating delay when the user clicks on “add to cart,” instilling doubt that the site is not working properly. Finally, a high CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) is perhaps the most damaging for eCommerce, because it can cause annoying shifts in page elements just as the user is about to click, leading them to select the wrong size or color and abandon the purchase process.

What can you do? In short, you need to optimize images by compressing them without losing quality (using modern formats such as webp), enable browser caching to speed up visits from returning users, use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to deliver content faster to your users around the world, and periodically analyze your site to remove unnecessary scripts and CSS that slow down loading. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights regularly to analyze your pages and receive specific recommendations on how to improve them.

Variant and offer management: avoiding duplication

A common mistake that plagues many e-commerce sites is the incorrect management of seemingly similar pages, which leads to serious duplicate content issues. This mainly occurs in two scenarios: managing products with multiple attributes (such as size or color) and creating pages for recurring commercial events (such as Black Friday).

The problem is obvious: if you create multiple URLs for the same base product (one for the red shirt, one for the blue shirt, etc.) without a clear hierarchy, you confuse search engines. Google doesn’t know which version to index and rank, and the authority your product gains (through links, traffic, etc.) is fragmented across multiple pages instead of being consolidated on a single one. The same thing happens if you create a new URL every year for Black Friday: you throw away all the ranking work you did the previous year and start from scratch.

The technical solution is to use the rel=“canonical” tag. Assign each variant a unique URL (often using parameters, such as in /cotton-shirt?color=red), but make sure that all these ‘child’ pages contain a rel=”canonical” link tag that points to the URL of the main product page (the “canonical” one). This way, you tell Google that all versions are traceable to a single main product, consolidating all SEO value on it.

Optimization for events such as Black Friday, sales, or seasonal holidays involves using a stable, “evergreen” URL (such as /offers/black-friday), avoiding the inclusion of the year. Before the event, update the page with new promotions. During the rest of the year, don’t delete it: you can use it to show a summary of past offers, insert a newsletter sign-up form to notify users of upcoming discounts, or link to relevant product categories. This way, the page will accumulate authority year after year and will rank more easily as the event approaches.

Launch strategies: getting off on the right foot

If you’re creating a new eCommerce site from scratch, how you present it to the world and to Google can make the difference between a flying start and a bumpy ride. The choice of launch strategy should be weighed based on your business goals, marketing resources, and the state of readiness of your infrastructure.

An unplanned launch can lead to indexing issues, a bad first impression on users, or a misalignment between the technical availability of the site and your marketing campaigns. Choosing the right approach allows you to manage expectations and optimize resources.

There are four main launch models, each with its own pros and cons:

1. Grand reveal. Make the entire site public at once, often in conjunction with a strong marketing push. This is the classic, high-impact approach, but it requires that every single aspect (technical, logistical, content) be perfect from day one.
2. Homepage launch. Initially, only put the homepage online, perhaps with a countdown or a sign-up form. This allows you to start indexing the domain and generating interest while you complete the development of the rest of the site.
3. Launch without product availability. You publish the complete, navigable site, but all products are marked as “sold out” or “unavailable.” The big advantage is that you allow Google to scan and index the entire catalog while you finalize the logistical or contractual aspects.
4. Soft launch. You put the site online without any public announcement. This allows you to test every feature in a real environment, with limited traffic (perhaps only friends, family, or a small group of beta testers), to identify and fix any bugs before the big official marketing launch.

The content and user experience strategy to guide the user to conversion

Okay. Now you have a technically flawless, fast website that is perfectly understandable by algorithms. And you’re only halfway to success.

You’ve built a beautiful, well-lit physical store with open doors, but you still have empty or disorganized shelves and salespeople who don’t know how to answer customer questions. On this solid technical foundation, it is content and user experience that determine conversion. The strategic goal of an e-commerce site, unlike an editorial site, is not to maximize traffic at all costs, but to attract qualified visitors and guide them on a path that ends with a purchase. A smaller number of users who convert is infinitely more valuable than a huge amount of traffic that leaves the site after a few seconds.

Map the customer journey and diversify traffic

You cannot create effective content if you don’t know who you are targeting and where they are in their decision-making process. The first step is to define buyer personas and map the customer journey to understand their informational and transactional needs. For users in the awareness phase, who are still defining their problem, you need to create educational content such as buying guides (“how to choose the best coffee bean machine”) or articles explaining the benefits of a product category. For those in the consideration phase, who are comparing different options, detailed reviews, demonstration videos, and comparison tables are more useful. Only in the decision phase is the user ready for an aggressive, sales-focused product sheet.

Don’t neglect the various touchpoints and do content repurposing: if you’ve written a super-guide for your blog, extract appropriate bites of knowledge – clear, short, factual paragraphs designed to be easily “digested” and synthesized by artificial intelligence – that can be used for AI engines or certain social media posts. Here, in particular, the path is different, and you need to design a “discovery journey.” The user does not search for the product but “discovers” it, and you need content that creates demand and intrigues with visual formats (short videos, carousels) that stimulate impulse buying.

While you build this content asset, which takes time to rank on search engines, you need to diversify your traffic sources. Complement SEO with paid social media activities, email marketing campaigns, and collaborations to generate a steady stream of visitors and sales, avoiding dependence on a single channel.

And remember: your work doesn’t end with the transaction. Go beyond the sale and create post-purchase content such as product tutorials, maintenance guides, or interactive live streams. This not only helps build customer loyalty and reduce support requests, but also encourages customers to leave positive reviews, which will become a key asset in convincing future buyers.

From the home page to checkout: a frictionless journey

Every page on your site is a step in the user’s journey and should be optimized to minimize friction and confusion. The goal is to make the shopping experience so smooth and intuitive that it seems invisible, especially when the user comes from an external channel such as social media or an AI recommendation, where their patience level is very low.

The home page is your virtual storefront. It must answer the questions “Where am I?”, “What do you sell?” and “Why should I trust you?” in less than three seconds. Highlight your top products, use a strong central image, and make the search bar, main categories, and shopping cart immediately accessible. It should be a sorting point that clearly guides the user to what they are looking for.

Category pages should facilitate exploration: offer powerful and granular search filters (by price, brand, color, size, etc.), intelligent sorting (by popularity, new arrivals, price), and high-quality images; always clearly and visibly flag out-of-stock products to avoid frustration. They define the information hierarchy of your site: here, the balance between concise information and commercial storytelling reinforces the perception of competence and consolidates thematic authority.

Pay attention to the checkout process, which is the most delicate moment: every extra field or unnecessary step is a potential cause of cart abandonment. Only request information that is essential for shipping and billing, clearly display payment method logos and security seals, and always offer the option to purchase as a guest. Mandatory registration is one of the main “conversion killers” because it is perceived as an obstacle and a potential source of spam.

Also pay attention to the transition from external channels: when a user arrives from a link in an AI response or a video on TikTok, the experience must be instantaneous and consistent. The landing page must load immediately and have visual and informational continuity with the source from which it originates, so as not to break the “trust pact” and cause immediate abandonment.

Create product pages that convert (the AIDA model)

Product pages are the foundation of your e-commerce site’s informational value. Your copywriting should focus on the elements that matter to the user: features, benefits, and context of use. Including microcontent—reviews, frequently asked questions, usage tips—increases the average time spent on the page and the likelihood of conversion.

Think of it as your digital salesperson: it must be convincing, comprehensive, and persuasive. A classic way to structure it is to follow the AIDA model, adapting it to the multichannel context to guide the user through four psychological stages.

• Attention: capture attention with a clear title and, above all, with high-quality multimedia content. Use professional images from multiple angles, a flawless zoom function, and, if possible, a short video showing the product in use.
• Interest: spark interest with a unique and engaging description. Don’t just list technical features; talk about the benefits, explain how the product solves a problem or improves the user’s life.
• Desire: fuel desire through social proof. This is the most important stage. Highlight reviews and ratings from other customers, include a question and answer section, and, if available, show photos or videos submitted by customers themselves.
• Action: prompt action with a clear, prominent, contrasting-color “add to cart” button. Remove any lingering doubts by displaying key information about shipping, delivery times, and return policies transparently and close to the button.

Basically, to satisfy both AI algorithms and human readers, you can structure your description on two levels. At the top of the page, include a concise, factual, and structured first level (with a table or bulleted list of key specifications), designed to be read perfectly by a machine. Immediately after, develop a second level that is narrative, emotional, and persuasive, aimed at human users, explaining the benefits.

Strategic error management

Inevitably, some users will encounter a 404 error, landing on a page that does not exist due to a broken link or a mistyped URL. Don’t consider this page a simple technical error, but an opportunity for recovery and customer retention, especially with traffic coming from external and varied sources such as social media.

A standard 404 page, with a cold and technical message, is a dead end that almost always leads to abandonment of the site; a strategic 404 page, on the other hand, acknowledges the error and guides the user towards a solution. Include an empathetic message consistent with your brand, a clearly visible search bar, and links to your main categories or best-selling products. To turn a negative experience into a positive one, you could even offer a small discount code to apologize for the inconvenience.

Reputation alert: turning feedback into a strategic asset

Today, authentic reviews, visible ratings, and video testimonials are elements of ranking and, above all, persuasion.

Your reputation is no longer defined solely by what you communicate, but above all by what customers say about you. For potential buyers, reviews represent “social proof” that breaks down barriers of mistrust and guides purchasing decisions. For search engines and AI systems, they are a powerful signal of authority and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T), which helps define the perception of your brand entity.

Brand monitoring therefore becomes a proactive process of building trust, which involves a series of actions such as

• Actively soliciting feedback: don’t wait for reviews to come in spontaneously. Set up a post-purchase email flow to ask customers to leave a review on your site or on relevant external platforms (such as Google Business Profile or Trustpilot). Make the process as simple as possible, with a direct link and a few clear instructions.
• Display reviews (even negative ones): integrate reviews prominently into your product listings. Transparency is key: don’t hide negative feedback. Professional and public handling of criticism (e.g., offering a solution to the customer) demonstrates seriousness and can increase trust more than a string of five-star reviews.
• Respond to every review: Always respond to every piece of feedback. Thank customers for positive reviews and address negative ones in a constructive, non-defensive manner. Every response is an opportunity to demonstrate the quality of your customer service and show future buyers that you are a responsive and reliable company.
• Use feedback as a source of insight: Reviews are a gold mine of free information. Analyze them to understand the perceived strengths of your products, recurring issues, and new needs expressed by your customers. Use these insights to improve your product listings, refine your offering, and generally optimize the entire shopping experience.

Orchestrate a multi-channel strategy to go beyond organic alone

Today, you need an integrated multi-channel approach even if you run an e-commerce business, because this is the only way to accelerate growth and strengthen your brand, making it less dependent on a single source of traffic—one that is subject to significant variations, such as organic traffic.

In other words, treating SEO, social media, and paid ADS campaigns as separate silos is a strategic mistake that ignores the new reality of the user journey. What you need is to set up all touchpoints in a single cohesive strategy, where each channel supports and amplifies the other.

Take social media: for eCommerce, it has a dual strategic role that goes far beyond simple direct sales. On the one hand, it is a powerful discovery engine; on the other, it is the main tool for building and cultivating a community.

On platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, for example, users are not actively looking for your product, but are in entertainment mode. Your job is to capture their attention with visual content that creates a latent need. Short videos showing the product in use, tutorials, “unboxing” videos, or collaborations with creators can trigger the “discovery journey” and lead to an impulse purchase, often completed within the platform itself. Here, the content doesn’t support the product: the content is the product.

But your social channels are also your brand’s “living room.” This is where you can dialogue directly with customers, offer transparent support, share user-generated content (UGC) to reinforce social proof, and turn buyers into true fans. An active and loyal community not only guarantees repeat purchases, but also strengthens the authority and notoriety of your brand as an entity, sending positive signals that indirectly support your SEO strategy.

The role of ADS: accelerating growth and maximizing visibility

From a multichannel perspective, SEA and ADS strategically complement SEO, becoming an accelerator that allows you to achieve immediate results and act with surgical precision on your target audience.

While SEO is a long-term investment that can take months to bear fruit, ADS, both on Google and on social media, allow you to generate qualified traffic and sales from day one. This is crucial for a new e-commerce site, for launching a product, or for quickly testing the market’s response to a new offering.

They are also your tool for dominating the SERP: being first organically is great, but occupying as much space as possible on the results page is even better. Google Shopping campaigns allow you to appear with images and prices directly above the organic results for commercial queries. At the same time, brand protection campaigns (where you bid on your own keyword) ensure that you capture all traffic directed to your brand, preventing competitors from appearing before your organic result.

Finally, they help you complete the funnel: most users don’t buy on their first visit. Retargeting ADS are the most powerful tool for recovering these visitors. By installing tracking pixels on your site, you can create specific audiences (“users who added to cart but didn’t buy”) and show them targeted ads on social media or the Google Display Network, bringing them back to your site to complete the purchase.

The integrated synergy between SEO, social media, and ads

The keyword is therefore synergy, i.e., the ability of different channels to “talk” to each other and exchange data and insights to improve overall performance.

The flow is

• From SEO to ADS: analyze the conversion data of your organic traffic. Have you discovered that a specific long-tail keyword, for which you rank well, has a very high conversion rate? Create a Google Ads campaign targeting that same keyword to double your presence in SERPs and capture maximum market share.
• From content (SEO) to social ADS: Have you written an in-depth article for your blog that is ranking well and receiving positive comments? Use it as the basis for a social ADS campaign, promoting it to a “lookalike” audience (similar to your current customers). This way, you use an SEO asset to build brand awareness and attract new qualified audiences at the top of the funnel.
• From ADS to SEO: analyze the “search terms report” of your Google Ads campaigns. Here, you will often discover new keywords and long-tail queries with high purchase intent that users are using and that you had not yet considered in your SEO strategy. You can use them to create new content or optimize existing content.
• From social media to SEO: monitor the questions, concerns, and discussions that arise in your social media community. These are invaluable insights for creating new informational content for your blog or enriching the FAQ sections of your product pages, thus intercepting new organic search needs.

Measuring results: essential KPIs for eCommerce

You’ve optimized your technique, prepared your site to interact with algorithms, and started creating content designed for new purchasing paths. But how do you know if all this is working and if you’re getting closer to your business goals? It’s clear that you need to set up a series of realistic and concrete Key Performance Indicators, which you can monitor constantly and effectively to guide every decision and subsequent action.

Especially today—where every action, from rewriting a product description to optimizing speed, requires an investment of time and resources—only data can guide your strategy, because it helps you understand whether the solid technical foundation you have built is actually improving the user experience, whether your content strategy is attracting the right audience or just curious onlookers, and, above all, whether all your efforts are translating into increased revenue. KPIs transform optimization from a set of best practices into a scientific discipline, where every hypothesis is validated (or disproved) by the numbers, allowing you to invest only in what brings real value to your business.

Visibility and engagement KPIs

These metrics measure the effectiveness of the top and middle of your organic sales funnel: they tell you whether you are successfully reaching your target audience through search engines and whether, once they land on your site, this audience is interested in what you offer. Ignoring these KPIs means risking attracting a lot of traffic, but of poor quality.

• Organic traffic: this remains the starting point, but it must be interpreted critically. An increase in traffic is only positive if it correlates with an improvement in other KPIs. On its own, it is a “vanity metric.”
• Average ranking for commercial keywords: don’t just monitor total traffic. Identify keywords with a clear intent to purchase your flagship products and track their ranking over time. Ranking first for “how to clean suede shoes” is different from ranking first for “buy suede shoes online.”
• Impressions and CTR: Impressions tell you how many times your site appears in search results, measuring your potential visibility. CTR, on the other hand, tells you how many people choose to click on your result. A low CTR despite good rankings could be a sign that your meta titles and meta descriptions are not persuasive enough.
• Engagement rate: this metric (which in Google Analytics 4 has replaced the old “bounce rate”) tells you how many users actively engage with your site after landing on it. A low engagement rate is a powerful warning sign: it indicates that you are attracting the wrong audience or that the landing page does not meet the expectations created in SERP.
• Pages per session and average duration: these metrics help you understand whether users are exploring your catalog or just making a “hit and run” visit. Growing values indicate effective site architecture and genuine interest in your offering.
• Add-to-cart rate: this is a key micro-conversion. It measures the percentage of visitors who, after viewing a product page, decide to add it to their cart. It is the most direct KPI for evaluating the effectiveness of your product pages.

Performance KPIs (paid and social channels)

When your strategy extends beyond organic, you need specific metrics to evaluate the performance and profitability of each channel.

For ADS campaigns, you can check:

• ROAS (Return On Ad Spend): this is the fundamental KPI. For every dollar you invest in advertising, how many dollars of revenue do you generate? A positive ROAS is the main indicator of the sustainability of your campaigns.
• CPC (Cost Per Click) and CPM (Cost Per Mille): these measure how efficiently you are buying traffic. Monitoring them helps you optimize your bids and ad creativity.
• Impression Share: for Google campaigns, this metric tells you what percentage of relevant searches your ads were shown for. It is an indicator of your dominance on the paid SERP.

On the social media side, monitor

• Engagement rate: the sum of likes, comments, and shares divided by the number of followers or impressions. It measures the health of your community and the resonance of your content.
• Referral traffic: measures how many users arrive at your eCommerce site from your social channels. It is the bridge that connects your community building activities to your sales goals.

Conversion and business KPIs

These metrics measure the final part of the funnel and the economic health of your eCommerce business. These are the KPIs that are of most interest to anyone running a business, because they directly link optimization activities to business results: sales, profits, and sustainable growth.

• Conversion rate: this is the most important metric in e-commerce. It measures the percentage of visitors who complete a purchase. A low conversion rate, despite good engagement, often indicates problems in the checkout process or a lack of trust (few payment options or unclear shipping costs, for example).
• Average Order Value (AOV): tells you how much a customer spends on average per transaction. Working to increase AOV (through cross-selling, up-selling, or free shipping above a certain threshold) is one of the most effective ways to increase revenue without necessarily increasing traffic.
• Cart Abandonment Rate: measures the percentage of users who add products to their cart but do not complete the purchase. It is the main indicator of friction in your checkout process. Analyzing exactly where users leave is critical to identifying problems and implementing strategies to recover carts.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): calculates how much it costs you, on average, to acquire a new customer, adding up all your marketing and sales costs. Comparing CAC with AOV gives you a clear initial indication of the profitability of your campaigns.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): this is the most strategic KPI. It measures the total revenue you can expect from a single customer over the entire duration of their relationship with your brand. Focusing on CLV encourages you to invest not only in acquisition but also in retention, creating a more stable and profitable business model in the long term.

Read CAC and CLV together, analyzing them by channel to understand which ones bring you the most profitable customers over time. The goal is to have a CLV that is significantly higher than the CAC.

Finally, there are two last values that we can define as brand KPIs, which can “tell” the overall and synergistic impact of all your marketing activities, indicating the health and awareness of your store in the long term.

• Branded search volume: an increase in the number of people searching directly for your brand name on Google is the strongest signal that your brand awareness activities (often driven by social media and ADS) are working.
• Direct traffic: the number of users who type your website URL directly into their browser. It is an indicator of brand recall and loyalty.

Putting the strategy into practice: the workflow in SEOZoom

How do you navigate this complexity? All stages require operational and practical support that spans multiple fronts—traditional SEO, dialogue with AI engines, and presence on social channels—and abandons isolated tactics and insights.

You need SEOZoom, which today acts as a strategic intelligence hub whose data and analytics also fuel and make your social and ADS activities more effective. It is not just a set of tools, but a data-driven working methodology designed to transform optimization from a “minefield of trial and error” into a structured and measurable discipline.

The underlying philosophy is to treat SEO as an investment to build an asset that accumulates value over time, unlike paid advertising, whose effects disappear when the budget runs out.

1. Creating the project (defining the playing field)

Every effective strategy stems from a clear vision of the context. Before diving into the analysis of individual keywords or the optimization of a page, we suggest you create a project, a fundamental strategic act: this means defining the scope of your analysis, establishing a starting point from which to measure progress, and transforming a data platform into a customized dashboard for your business. A particularly powerful approach, especially if you are starting from scratch or want to attack a new market, is to create your first project not on your site, but based on one of your direct competitors who is already achieving the results you aspire to. This move gives you an immediate information advantage: even before analyzing your performance, you already have a complete picture of a winning strategy, with the keywords that generate the most traffic for your competitor, the pages that form the backbone of their organic visibility, and the sections of their site that work best. This way, you’re not starting from a blank slate, but from a successful model to analyze, understand, and ultimately surpass.

2. Technical audit (checking the health of the site)

Once you have defined the competitive perimeter, the focus shifts to your platform. Before planning new content or positioning strategies, you need to be absolutely sure that your eCommerce site is a technically efficient machine, free of obstacles that could slow down search engine crawling or frustrate your users’ experience. There is no point in trying to accelerate if the engine has problems. The next step, therefore, is to launch SEOZoom’s SEO Spider, which, like an advanced crawler, navigates your site exactly as Googlebot would, to give you a complete map of its technical health. The SEO Spider analysis provides an in-depth diagnosis that allows you to identify issues invisible to the naked eye, such as broken links that disperse authority, redirect chains that slow down loading, or important pages mistakenly blocked from indexing via robots.txt files or noindex tags. The spider report is your operational to-do list for resolving any crawlability issues and preparing the ground for the next phase of strategic analysis, with the assurance that every page of your site is accessible and technically optimized.

3. Strategic analysis (understanding where to take action)

Now that you know your e-commerce site is technically sound and accessible, you can move from troubleshooting to identifying opportunities. This is the stage where your focus shifts from “how the site works” to “what to do” to make it grow. Strategic analysis allows you to understand where to take action with maximum impact and minimum effort. The first step is to consult the domain analysis to identify Pages with Potential to get a list of pages that already rank for relevant keywords but are on the second or third page of Google. These are your “quick wins”: pages that, with targeted content optimization, can quickly rise to the first page and start generating traffic and sales. Next, broaden your view of the market. Using Keyword Infinity and Question Explorer, map the entire universe of queries, clearly distinguishing between informational queries (which will fuel your blog content marketing strategy) and commercial and transactional queries (which will guide the optimization of your product and category pages). For the latter, competitor analysis focuses on SERPs: study which sites compete for your most important sales keywords, analyze their product pages, pricing strategies, multimedia quality, and social proof management. The result of this phase is a clear action plan: you know which existing pages to optimize for quick gains and have a clear picture of the level of competition on your most strategic commercial pages. But this analysis is not only useful for SEO: the list of commercial keywords with high purchase intent becomes the basis for creating ultra-targeted ad groups on Google Ads. And the questions and problems you discover from users become an inexhaustible source of ideas for creating useful and engaging content for your social channels.

4. Content optimization (building the perfect response)

With a clear action plan based on technical and strategic analysis, you can now move on to the execution phase: content creation and optimization. This is when you turn the opportunities you’ve identified into concrete assets for your e-commerce business. However, it is essential to take a two-pronged approach, clearly separating the workflow for informational content from that for commercial pages, as the objectives and tools to be used are different.

• For informational content (blogs, guides, insights): the goal here is to attract qualified traffic to the top of the funnel, build your brand’s authority, and, where relevant, position yourself in AI Overview. Starting with the questions and topics you discovered in Phase 3, you can use the Editorial Assistant to structure and write comprehensive, in-depth articles. Once you have created the content, you can use the AI Engine for strategic verification: the tool will not give you textual suggestions, but will simulate how your text would be interpreted by AI algorithms, indicating the buyer personas that the content is aimed at. If the personas identified do not match your target audience, you know that you need to refine the text to make it more focused and understandable, both for users and for machines. Here too, the work done for organic traffic enhances other channels: the in-depth articles and guides you create for your blog, once optimized and positioned, become the perfect assets to promote through paid social media campaigns to reach a wider and more qualified audience.
• For commercial pages (product sheets, categories), the goal is not to appear in an AI Overview, but to rank for transactional queries and, above all, to convert visitors into customers. To this end, SEOZoom provides you with a set of AI tools specifically for eCommerce, allowing you to optimize every detail in a granular way. The workflow becomes much more structured:
  1. Define your audience: before you even start writing, use the Create Buyer Personas tool to generate a detailed profile of your ideal customer based on your product’s characteristics. This will guide the tone of voice and topics of all subsequent text.
  2. Optimize the category: for the category page that will host the product, you can use Category Texts to generate an SEO-optimized description that introduces it and contextualizes it correctly in the eyes of search engines.
  3. Build the product sheet: for the product page, the work becomes an assembly of specific components, created with dedicated tools. You can use From Datasheet to Text to generate the main description based on the technical characteristics, Product Page Headline to create a persuasive H1 title, and From Product Description to Datasheet to create a clear bulleted list with specifications (perfect for both user readability and AI comprehension). These elements, generated by the tools, become the basis that you will then refine and assemble to build a page that follows the AIDA model, is unique, and speaks with your brand’s voice.

5. Continuous monitoring (measuring, iterating, and defending your positioning)

The digital landscape is constantly changing. It may sound like a cliché, but think about it: competitors update their strategies, algorithms evolve, user behavior changes, and SERPs are enriched with new features. Your optimization work never ends with the publication of content, but moves on to monitoring, understood as an active process of intelligence gathering that allows you to collect data, measure the impact of your actions, defend the positions you have acquired, and identify new opportunities. It is at this stage that the KPIs you have defined become your operational dashboard to fuel the next optimization cycle. Here are some tips:

• Track strategic keywords, but analyze the SERP: in addition to checking your position, observe how the results page changes. Has an AI Overview appeared where there wasn’t one before? Are video or image results increasing? SERP analysis tells you not only where you are, but in what context you are competing, suggesting how to adapt your content strategy.
• Use Monitored Pages for your critical assets: for an eCommerce site, some pages are more important than others (best-selling products, main categories). Keep a close eye on them with Monitored Pages. This tool gives you an overview of the health of these URLs, cross-referencing ranking, traffic, and potential data, allowing you to take immediate action if one of your key pages loses visibility.
• Analyze Section Performance: monitor the performance of entire sections of your site. Comparing the performance of your blog to that of a specific product category helps you understand where your efforts are generating the greatest return and where you need to take action.

If you also want to keep track of the traffic generated by AI, you need another focus, and with AI Overview by SEOZoom, you can track and “quantify” your presence in static overviews, the ones that Google shows to thousands of people. If you lose a position you had gained, it is a clear sign that a competitor has produced content that is perceived as better by the algorithm. This is your trigger to go back and improve your page: identify what worked and what didn’t, and you’ll have new input for your next “Phase 3” of strategic analysis, in a virtuous and continuous process of analysis -> optimization -> monitoring -> new analysis.

From this work, you also gain crucial insights to guide your overall strategy. For example, do you find that a product converts exceptionally well from organic traffic? This is a strong signal to allocate budget to a Google Shopping campaign dedicated to that product, to maximize visibility and dominate the SERP. Or, do you notice that an informational topic consistently attracts high-quality traffic? You can decide to create a series of social content (videos, carousels, live streams) dedicated to that topic to strengthen your authority.

FAQ: frequently asked questions about e-commerce optimization

We started with an analysis of the new digital context and went through every step necessary to build a competitive e-commerce business: from the technical foundations to the orchestration of a multi-channel strategy, from the creation of content that dialogues with AI to the measurement of results.

A clear picture has emerged: optimizing an online store in 2025 is no longer a linear application of rules, but a continuous strategic process that requires an overview and the ability to adapt. Precisely because the path has become so complex, it is natural for specific doubts and operational questions to arise. This final section is not a simple summary, but a practical tool for addressing the most common issues that arise when moving from theory to action.

• How long does it take to see the results of SEO on my e-commerce site?

Optimization is a long-term activity. In a competitive industry such as e-commerce, it usually takes several months before you see a visible impact on ranking and organic traffic. This is why it is essential to combine SEO with a multi-channel strategy (social media, ADS) to generate results in the short term while you build your organic assets.

• Should I leave sold-out products online?

Yes, in most cases it is the best choice to preserve the SEO value (ranking, links) that the page has accumulated. Be sure to clearly communicate to users that the product is out of stock and, if possible, offer them an alternative or the option to be notified when it becomes available again. If an item is permanently out of stock, set up a 301 redirect to the replacement product or the most relevant category.

• Structured data or Google Merchant Center: which should I focus on?

You don’t have to choose: the most effective strategy is to use both in synergy. The Google Merchant Center feed is your direct and most reliable channel of communication with Google for product data. The structured data you insert into your page code, on the other hand, reinforces this information and is essential for activating multimedia results in SERPs and communicating with AI engines.

• How do I optimize my e-commerce site for voice searches?

Optimization for voice search is based on the ability to answer questions expressed in natural language. The most effective strategy is to create detailed FAQ sections within your pages (both category and product) and in-depth articles on your blog. Use the FAQPage structured data to help search engines unambiguously recognize the “question and answer” structure of your content.

• Does it still make sense to have your own website or is it better to sell only on marketplaces (Amazon, TikTok Shop)?

Yes, having your own eCommerce site is more important than ever. Marketplaces are excellent channels for visibility and sales, but you operate according to their rules, with their commissions and without real control over customer data. Your website is the only digital asset you own and control 100%. It is the center of your brand strategy, the place where you can build a direct relationship with customers and maximize profit margins. The best strategy is to use marketplaces as an acquisition channel, but always aim to bring users to your website to build loyalty.

• With the advent of AI and social media, is SEO for e-commerce still important?

Yes, it’s even more important, but its role has evolved. SEO today is no longer just “optimization for Google,” but the art of making your content and products perfectly understandable to any algorithmic system, whether it’s a traditional search engine, conversational artificial intelligence, or the internal search function of a social media platform. All the technical foundations (speed, structured data) and quality content you create for SEO are the basis that allows your brand to be visible and effective on all other channels.

• Should I invest more in social media and ADS or in SEO?

It’s not an exclusive choice, but a matter of synergy and timing. ADS are an accelerator: they bring you immediate results but disappear when you stop paying. Social media is essential for brand awareness, discovery, and community building. SEO is a long-term investment: it takes longer to bear fruit, but it builds a lasting asset that generates traffic and sales at an increasingly lower marginal cost. The winning strategy integrates both: use ADS to get immediate data and sales, social media to create awareness, and use the insights from both to fuel an SEO strategy that guarantees sustainable growth over time.