SEO for an online store from scratch: a plan for the first 3 months
Light SEO · SEO for e-commerce
SEO for an online store from scratch: what to do in the first 3 months
Free traffic from Google doesn't appear on its own – and it doesn't take magic either. Here is a real plan for the first three months: what gets done, in what order and when to expect the first results.
3 months
week-by-week work plan
80%
of the result comes from the technical foundation
4–6 months
until noticeable traffic
Month one
Technical foundation and structure
A catalog structure built around demand. We analyze HOW people search for your products and build categories around those queries: "Decking boards" and "Facade boards" instead of "Products". Category = search query.
SEO-friendly, human-readable URLs. site.ua/terasna-doshka/ instead of site.ua/cat?id=17. This is done at the start – changing URLs later means losing rankings.
Technical audit. Speed, mobile version, duplicate pages, robots.txt, sitemap, product structured data. Without this, everything that follows works at half strength.
Google Search Console + Analytics. We connect them right away – so that a month later there is something to compare with.
Month two
Meta tags and category content
Keywords by category. We collect key queries with their search volume: "buy", "price", commercial long-tail modifiers. We prioritize them by demand and competition.
SEO templates for Title/Description. For hundreds of products, meta tags are generated by templates – we set them up once, and every new product page comes out optimized.
H1 with an exact-match keyword. We align category headings with the target queries – this is the fastest ranking boost.
Copy for top categories. Useful descriptions that answer the buyer's questions – how to choose, what the differences are, how delivery works – in place of 10,000-character "walls of text".
Month three
Expansion and the first links
Filter pages. "Brown decking board", "4-meter board" – filter pages for low-volume queries bring the hottest traffic.
The first links. Business directories, industry platforms, partners. Gradually and with no "1,000 links for UAH 500" packages – Google penalizes that.
A blog for informational queries. "How to choose...", "what is the difference between..." – articles collect traffic at the selection stage and lead visitors to the catalog.
The first results snapshot. We compare rankings and impressions with the starting point and adjust the plan for the next quarter.
Anti-tips
Three things to AVOID at the start
🚫
Buying links in bulk
"1,000 links in a week" to a young domain is a direct route to a penalty filter. A link profile grows gradually.
🚫
Expecting results within a month
SEO is an investment with a 4–6 month horizon. Anyone who promises "top rankings in 30 days" is selling thin air.
🚫
Generating text for the sake of text
Long sheets of "buy cheap Kyiv" text under every category no longer work. The text has to answer the buyer's questions.
Want your first 3 months to go according to plan, with no guesswork?
We lay the SEO foundation while the store is being built: a structure built around demand, SEO-friendly URLs, meta tag templates, structured data. After that we run the promotion with honest monthly reports on rankings and traffic.
📝 Get an SEO plan for my store
Free consultation. We will show you, using your niche, where the traffic will come from
