Spend ten minutes browsing Irish online shops—especially those selling premium or luxury goods—and you’ll spot a problem instantly: the websites look polished, but behind the scenes they’re practically invisible to search engines. The surprising truth is this: Ecommerce SEO in Ireland isn’t dead. It’s simply not being practiced.
And that’s exactly where smaller, sharper retailers can win. Search engines don’t care how big your brand is. They care about technical quality, relevance, and user experience. When established retailers ignore the basics, they leave wide open gaps for smaller competitors who are willing to implement them.
Below is a snapshot from a study of luxury ecommerce sellers in Ireland I've done over last weekend. What I've seen is both shocking - and full of opportunity for those willing to act.
Only 1 in 10 Irish ecommerce sites use descriptive products image filenames – and it shows
Search engines can’t "see" an image, but they can read the filename. If your image is called IMG_8273-final-FINAL.png, Google learns nothing. If it’s called gold-diamond-pendant-necklace-ireland.webp on the other hand, you’ve instantly added clarity, context, and keyword relevance.
Yet only 10% of retailers I've visited use descriptive filenames. And here’s the kicker:
The one retailer that consistently uses descriptive image filenames also consistently tops the SERPs for the targeted keywords.
This isn’t coincidence—it’s evidence. Image optimisation isn’t a “nice-to-have”; it directly impacts search visibility.
For small retailers, this creates an easy win: invest a few minutes renaming and optimising images, and you can outrank much larger competitors who overlook the basics
Only 2 in 10 use product schema markup – and it shows
Product schema is what powers rich results like:- star ratings
- price displays
- in-stock/out-of-stock labels
- product details
These enhancements can increase click-through rates by 20–30% but only 20% of luxury ecommerce sites in Ireland use any product schema markup at all.
And it gets even more interesting: The retailers who do use Product Schema correctly consistently appear at the top of the SERPs - often outranking big, established brands and this strongly hints that Google is using product schema as a ranking factor in ecommerce, not just a display enhancement.
Put simply: Structured data doesn’t just improve how your result looks, it can improve how your site ranks.
Although many online retailers switched to Google’s recommended .webp image files, there are still established Irish brands sabotaging themselves—and their online visibility
Many retailers proudly switched to .webp ... but then undo their progress by uploading massive, uncompressed files. Luxury brands, in particular, invest heavily in stunning photography - only to cripple their own websites with 3–8MB images.The result?
- Slower pages
- Lower rankings
- Lost customers
- Higher bounce rates
And the impact isn’t small.
According to global studies:
- 53% of users abandon a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load
- Every 1-second delay can reduce conversions by 7%
- Google openly prioritises fast-loading sites in search rankings
Yet in Ireland, proper compression remains rare—even among high-end retailers with the most to gain from speed improvements.
This is another huge opportunity for smaller shops: optimise speed and you gain an instant, measurable ranking advantage.
8 in 10 use keyword-focused H1s, but only 1 in 10 optimise H2–H4 headings
Almost every ecommerce site knows to put a keyword in the H1. But after that? Most give up.
Only 10% of Irish retailers optimise supporting headers (H2–H4)
That’s a major missed opportunity because Google uses your subheadings to understand:
- context
- relevance
- page structure
- depth of content
Failing to optimise H2s, H3s, and H4s means leaving semantic SEO power on the table.
For smaller retailers, this is another easy win: structure your content properly, and you can outrank larger competitors who treat their product pages as afterthoughts.
Back to the initial question: Is Ecommerce SEO in Ireland dead?
Short answer: Not even slightly. Long answer: Ecommerce SEO in Ireland it’s simply ignored, underused, and widely misunderstood.
And that’s great news for smaller ecommerce brands: big retailers might have bigger budgets—but they’re slow, outdated, and weighed down by technical debt. Small retailers are lean, flexible, and able to execute quickly.
When 90% of competitors aren’t even doing the basics, the opportunity is enormous.