How to scale organic growth as an ecommerce brand

Ecommerce SEO is changing fast and often. The simpler days of just ranking your category pages are over, and Google is now focusing more on providing a marketplace-style experience than a standard search result. The US is almost always at the forefront of Google changes, and looking below at how ecommerce search results (SERPs) look in the US, this new(ish) direction from Google is pretty clear to see.

If you compare the above US ecommerce search results to a UK search result, you’ll see that the US have filtering options to narrow your search in the left sidebar, interactive imagery and far more query refinement options at the very top – including to refine by gender, colour, delivery options or even use case.

So, what does this mean for your brand?

It means that you can’t rely on the traditional SEO route to find long-term success as an ecommerce brand anymore. Previously, you could forecast growth based on keyword search volumes + your likelihood of being able to rank in the top positions. That just isn’t the case anymore.

How have Google’s ecommerce changes impacted SEO strategies?

Google’s shift away from traditional SERPs for ecommerce searches has pushed focus away from your category pages (PLPs) and more towards individual products (PDPs) and your brand as a whole. This is a result of Google testing & deploying a number of new SERP features, creating far more link options for searchers to give their click to. 

A typical ecommerce search result will now have a combination of:

• Shopping ads
• Search ads
• Organic listings
• Popular products (free listings)
• People also ask
• People also search
• Explore brands (product sites)
• Images
• Videos
• Discussions & forums
• Related searches

You can expect the majority of these features to appear in every search. 

To give you an insight into how this looks in the UK ecommerce space in 2025, we recently analysed 90,000 transactional ecommerce keywords for a large general merchandise retailer and found that a popular products grid appears on page 1 for 78% of queries.

While some of these have been around for a long time (shopping ads, search ads, organic listings, people also ask, images, videos, related searches), Google has been introducing new features at a rapid rate  over the last 12-18 months.

Unsurprisingly, each of these features will be taking a percentage of available clicks. 

So, where we were once able to forecast growth based on a click-through rate curve for positions 1-10 (not that this was ever perfect!), that won’t work for you anymore.

Why? Because ecommerce results are now packed full of different types of links; product links with images, pricing and reviews, organic links with minimum pricing and delivery information, links to product sites (usually affiliate websites) encouraging users to find the best prices. With all of these available to each searcher, do you think you could accurately forecast CTR for your pages?

Oh, not to mention that Google often changes the position that these features appear in for each search, throwing traditional CTR curves out the window!

How you can use data & automation to drive growth

With all of the above in mind, it’s easy to see why driving growth in the ecommerce space needs a new approach.

At Distinctly, we pair our clients’ data with our suite of proprietary tools to take as much of the guesswork as possible out of ecommerce SEO, minimising the risk of getting caught out by Google’s rapid changes while finding the opportunities that most other brands miss. And this can be your route to scalable growth, too.

While there’s more to it than we could include in this article alone, below we’ve listed the core fundamentals of how you, as an ecommerce brand, can maximise the return on your SEO activity.

Automate the manual foundational work

Now more than ever, it’s important to focus on spending less time doing and more time finding growth opportunities.

Without automation, you’re likely spending a lot of time each month on tasks like these:

• Checking page titles for optimisation opportunities
• Looking for cannibalisation issues
• Reviewing internal linking
• Researching new searches to target
• Looking for performance decay across blogs, PLPs and PDP
• Monitoring your competitors’ performance
• And researching & frameworking content to publish

You should instead be looking to automate as much of this as possible.

The difficult part of managing SEO activity for bigger ecommerce brands is that you need to find issues as quickly as possible without taking too much time away from finding your next growth areas. By automating these ‘checks’, you can get the same output as you would from manual reviews (or better)in a fraction of the time.

In most cases, we’ve been able to reduce our time spent on these areas by up to 95%.

And we’ve achieved these workflow efficiencies by creating our own suite of automation tools & processes, often using a combination of python scripts, Google Sheets apps scripts, custom GPTs, LLM API calls and more. And, by tailoring these tools specifically to ecommerce needs, we’re able to react quickly to market changes and find opportunities as soon as they appear.

Get the most from your Google Search Console (GSC) data

GSC is your best friend. While it isn’t perfect and we (unfortunately) don’t get 100% of our data, we’re given enough to find growth areas fast – if we use it efficiently.

Tying this into point 1 above, if you can schedule & automate the exporting & analysing of your GSC data (at page + query level), then you can get great insights to work with, including:

• Finding new high-intent landing pages to create
• Finding new keyword targeting to introduce to existing pages
• Identifying which of your queries and pages are coming into their seasonal peak
• Understanding which queries are seeing an increase or decrease in CTR (these are the signs of changing SERPs)

To make the most of your data and achieve the above areas efficiently, we recommend using a keyword clustering tool or creating your own tool as clustering keywords into targeting groups gives you much better insights than reviewing your data at query level.

Extra tip: Combine your daily rank data with your GSC click & impression data to calculate your real-world CTR curve for positions 1-10. Having this and running the data quarterly will help you easily spot changes to CTR (which = changes to traffic & revenue!).

Build a deep understanding of your market online

We really can’t recommend doing this enough. A lot of brands fall down by failing to truly understand the online market they’re in. Analysis needs to go beyond keyword research and knowing what your target keyword search volumes are.

This underpins our approach to ecommerce SEO, and has helped us mitigate some of the risk that comes from Google updates and helps us find those 1% wins that accumulate to long-term sustainable growth.

You can achieve most of what you need here by scraping the SERPs regularly across as large a keyword set as possible (focusing only on keywords that are closely associated with your brand & products).

Extracting SERP data on scale will show you:

• Which SERP features are most visible and for which categories/keyword types


• Who the most visible brands are in your space
  • Remember – the brands you consider to be your competitors within the market as a whole may not be your top online competitors
• How your brand is positioned in the wider market online and how competitive you are organically (i.e. your share of voice / online market share)

Extracting, stacking and analysing this data frequently (monthly is usually fine) will give you a wealth of insights that your competitors may not have, including:

• Visibility changes across search features.
  • As well as changes in where each feature is ranking on page 1 (this helps you forecast changes to CTR, traffic & revenue as well as finding queries that you can predict to have a high CTR).
• Visibility changes across all domains in your space.
  • This helps you track who Google is favouring and which brands are declining. You can learn a lot about what could work for your brand by reviewing this regularly.
• Changes to your brand positioning in the market over time. You can break this down to category or even page level and get really granular insights. This is also a great way to monitor the ongoing performance of your SEO activity.

You can also pair this data with Google’s keyword search volume data to monitor year-on-year search volumes, looking for keywords, topics or even categories that are trending up or down. This helps you to understand if search behaviours in your market are changing, which in turn helps you react fast and effectively.

Test everything!

Test as much as you can, as often as you can. From page optimisations, new schema types for rich results, page title messaging for CTR, internal linking & placement of links and more.

Don’t assume that what works for other brands in your space will work for yours. Test and measure changes to sample groups of pages before deploying site-wide changes, and you’ll be able to spend more time, resources and budget on areas that are going to give you a better ROI.

And lastly, create internal processes for managing your data

Having all of this data at your fingertips is great, but it’s just as important to have the internal processes in place to store, manage and use that data over time.

We recommend using Google’s own BigQuery platform to store your Google Search Console data to bypass the 16-month data limit that’s native to GSC. There are also 3rd party tools available that can store this data for you. This gives you the option to look over historic data, looking for trends or changes in your search data.

You’ll be amassing a lot of extracted SERP data over time if you implement the above areas, and if you’re a mid-to-large brand with a lot of keywords to track, this can scale up fast! So, find the solution that works for you – whether it’s storing the data in siloed Google Sheets or Excel documents or using a data warehousing solution. You’ll want to track this data over long periods to keep a close eye on how search results are changing over time and use this to forecast the impact on your performance.

While ecommerce SEO is changing and is at times fairly unpredictable, you can still drive serious growth for your brand by perfecting your foundational SEO and bringing advanced data & automation into your toolkit.