SEO gets talked about like it’s one big thing. In practice, it’s several disciplines working alongside each other, and two of the most important sit right at the base: technical SEO and on-page SEO. They sound like they might be the same thing. They’re not. Below, we dive into what separates them, and why both matter.
Most SEO content either assumes you already know the basics or buries you in terminology before you’ve had a chance to get your bearings. This isn’t that. We’ll cover what each discipline actually involves, how it affects your visibility in Google, and what it means for an eCommerce store in practice.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It’s the practice of making your website more likely to appear in search results when people type in queries relevant to what you sell. The goal is visibility, and visibility drives traffic, and traffic drives revenue.
Google uses hundreds of signals to decide which pages appear in which positions. Technical SEO and on-page SEO are two ways you influence those signals. Get one right and you’ll see some improvement. Get both right and the difference is considerably larger.
Technical SEO: the part most people never see
Technical SEO is about making sure search engines can find, crawl, and understand your website. It has nothing to do with the words on your pages. It’s about the infrastructure your site is built on.
Google sends out automated bots, sometimes called crawlers or spiders, to explore the web. They follow links, read pages, and report back so Google knows what your site is about and whether it’s worth ranking. If your site has technical problems, those bots struggle to do their job. Pages that can’t be crawled can’t be indexed. Pages that aren’t indexed can’t rank.
What does technical SEO cover?
The scope is broad. Some of these will be familiar; some might be new territory entirely. The essentials are listed below:
- Site speed and Core Web Vitals
- Mobile usability
- Crawlability and indexation
- XML sitemaps
- HTTPS security
- Duplicate content
- Structured data (Schema markup)
- Canonical tags
- Broken links and redirects
- Faceted navigation issues
For eCommerce stores, technical SEO gets complicated quickly. A catalogue with 5,000 product pages creates far more opportunity for issues than a ten-page brochure site. Duplicate content and sluggish load times are all far more likely to surface at scale.
Worth remembering: technical SEO is what lets Google see your site at all. If the foundations are broken, nothing else you do will fully compensate for it.
A note on faceted navigation
One issue that catches a lot of online retailers out is faceted navigation: the filter menus that let shoppers sort by colour, size, or price. They’re brilliant for usability. Handled badly, they can generate thousands of near-identical URLs and confuse crawlers. It’s one of those eCommerce-specific technical problems that needs careful attention, and it’s exactly the kind of thing our technical SEO service is built to address.
On-page SEO: telling Google what each page is about
Once Google can crawl your site without obstruction, it needs to understand what each individual page is actually about. That’s where on-page SEO comes in.
On-page SEO is everything you do to the content and structure of a page to make it more relevant to specific searches. It’s the discipline most people picture when they hear “SEO”, but it goes considerably deeper than keyword placement.
Google has become remarkably good at understanding context and intent. The old approach of repeating a keyword throughout a page until it felt unnatural stopped working years ago. Today, good on-page SEO means creating content that genuinely answers what someone searching actually wants to know.
The on-page elements worth your attention
Not every element carries equal weight, but these are the ones that consistently make a difference.
Title tags are the blue clickable lines you see in search results. They should include your target keyword and give someone a reason to click. You’ve got roughly 60 characters, so make every word count.
Meta descriptions have little influence over rankings, but they affect whether someone clicks your result over the one above or below it. A well-written meta description is essentially a free advertisement in the search results.
Headings signal the structure of your content. Your H1 should reflect the main topic of the page. H2s and H3s break up content into sections Google can understand as subtopics. Good heading structure also makes your page far more readable for actual humans, which matters just as much.
Product and category page copy is where eCommerce stores consistently underinvest. Many retailers use manufacturer descriptions, meaning dozens of other sites have the identical text. Others write almost nothing at all. Unique, considered copy on category pages in particular can move rankings meaningfully, because those pages tend to capture high-intent searches at scale.
Internal linking deserves more credit than it gets. Adding links between your own pages helps users navigate, and it signals to Google which pages you consider important. A blog post linking to the relevant category page passes what SEOs call link equity: essentially a small vote of confidence that travels through your site’s structure.
Technical SEO vs On-Page SEO
Sometimes it helps to see both side by side. Here’s how technical SEO and on-page SEO differ across the same areas of concern:
| Area | Technical SEO | On-Page SEO |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Site infrastructure | Page content and structure |
| Audience | Search engine crawlers | Crawlers and human readers |
| Main tools | Screaming Frog, Google Search Console | Ahrefs, SurferSEO, Search Console |
| eCommerce risk | Duplicate pages, crawl budget waste | Thin copy, missing title tags |
| Responsibility | Developer and SEO specialist | Content writer and SEO specialist |
Focus
Audience
Main tools
eCommerce risk
Responsibility
So, which one matters more? The answer is both. That sounds evasive, but it’s the honest answer.
Technical SEO is the baseline. If your site is slow, full of crawl errors, or generating hundreds of duplicate URLs, on-page work won’t rescue it. You can write the sharpest product descriptions on the internet, and they still won’t rank if Google can’t access them reliably.
Once the technical foundations are solid, on-page SEO is what drives actual rankings. That’s where you show Google your page is more relevant and more useful than the 50 others targeting the same keyword.
In practice: audit technical SEO first. Once Google can crawl and index your site without obstruction, focus on on-page. Both in good shape is where organic growth becomes predictable rather than accidental.
What about off-page SEO?
You might already be aware there’s a third type: off-page SEO. This covers everything that happens outside your own website, primarily backlinks, which are links from other sites pointing to yours. Backlinks act as endorsements in Google’s eyes. The more credible and relevant the site linking to you, the stronger that signal.
Off-page SEO is worth a post of its own, but it’s useful to know that technical and on-page SEO are prerequisites for it. Backlinks can’t fully compensate for a site Google struggles to crawl or pages it doesn’t understand. According to Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO, all three areas work together as a system, and a weakness in any one of them limits what the others can achieve.
Why eCommerce makes SEO more complex
A site with ten pages has minimal SEO complexity. A store with ten thousand product pages and seasonal catalogue changes is a different challenge entirely.
At that scale, technical issues multiply. A single canonicalisation mistake can affect thousands of pages at once. A slow product template loads poorly across the entire catalogue. Pagination handled incorrectly can burn through Google’s crawl budget on pages you’d never want to rank anyway.
On-page issues multiply too, including thin descriptions replicated across hundreds of near-identical product variants and blog content that sits disconnected from the products it could be driving traffic towards. This is why eCommerce SEO needs both disciplines working in coordination, not separately.
Not sure where your site stands? We can map the technical and on-page picture for your store, and show you exactly where the opportunities are. Get in touch with our expert team to find out more.
