SEO that ships by default
Sitemaps, structured data, and clean metadata: what Orbit handles without you thinking about it, and what you still need to do yourself.
SEO for a store is 80% plumbing and 20% writing. The plumbing (the things that tell search engines what your pages are, how they relate to each other, and what each product is) should already be done for you by the platform. It usually isn't. Disclosure first: we build Orbit Commerce, and the next section is what it does for you.
What Orbit handles
Every store automatically generates an XML sitemap covering products, categories, pages, posts and brands, and updates it as you publish. Product pages include Product schema (name, price, availability, images). Category pages include the right structured data for Google to understand them as listings. Page titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags, and Open Graph tags are generated from your content, with sensible defaults that you can override per page if you want to.
Robots.txt is in place. 404s go to a real 404 page. Redirects from old URLs (when you rename a product, say) are handled automatically, so you don't quietly lose the ranking you'd already built. Moving the whole shop from another platform is a bigger version of the same problem, and our guide to changing ecommerce platform without losing your search rankings walks through it step by step.
None of this is glamorous. It's the stuff that, missing, will cap how far SEO can take you, and present, lets the rest of your work actually count.
What you still have to do
Write the product descriptions. Nebula can draft them from the product details for you to edit, and they're the single biggest lever. "Soft wool-blend crewneck, oversized fit, pre-washed for a worn-in feel" beats "Beautiful sweater, perfect for any occasion" in every possible way.
Pick real titles and meta descriptions. The defaults are fine; the ones you write yourself are better, because you know what makes your product different.
Get a few other sites to link to you. This is the hard one. Press mentions, partnerships, suppliers linking from their site: a handful of real, relevant links does more than a thousand fake ones ever could.
Don't obsess over Lighthouse. Page speed matters for SEO, but obsessing over a 97 vs a 100 is a waste of time. The images and the writing will move the needle further.
The bit nobody tells you
SEO is slow. Anything you do this month is likely to show up three to six months from now. That's frustrating, but it also means the work you did last month is starting to pay off now, which is a good reason to just keep going.