SEO (Search Engine Optimization)SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of improving a website so it ranks higher in unpaid search results and brings in more organic traffic.
Last updated: June 9, 2026
SEO is the ongoing work of making a website easy for search engines to find, understand, and trust, so it shows up when customers search for what you sell. Because those clicks are unpaid, the traffic is essentially free once a page ranks, and it tends to be people already looking to buy.
It splits into three areas. On-page SEO covers titles, descriptions, and the content itself. Technical SEO is about whether search engines can crawl the site, how fast it loads, and how clearly the code describes each page. Off-page SEO is mostly links and reputation from other sites.
For an e-commerce store, the highest-leverage pieces are usually product and collection metadata, image alt text, and schema markup, since those are what help search engines tell your thousands of similar product pages apart. Worth knowing for 2026: the old meta keywords tag does nothing, and rich results only appear when a page genuinely has the data behind them.
Related terms
Organic traffic
Organic traffic is the visitors who reach your website through unpaid search results, rather than through ads or other paid placements.
Rich snippet
A rich snippet is an ordinary search result dressed up with extra detail — star ratings, price, stock status — pulled from the structured data on the page. It doesn't change your ranking, but it makes your listing far more clickable.
Schema markup (JSON-LD)
Schema markup is structured code you add to a page, most often in a format called JSON-LD, that describes the page's content to search engines using the shared vocabulary from Schema.org.
Search Engine Results PageSERP
A search engine results page, or SERP, is the page a search engine shows in response to a query. It lists organic results alongside ads and features like featured snippets, image packs, and AI overviews.
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