Ecommerce SEO in Nepal

Short answer, if that is all you need: get your category pages ranking rather than pouring effort into product pages, bring faceted navigation under control before it eats your crawl budget, mark up products correctly with NPR and honest availability, keep out-of-stock pages alive, and build your festival landing pages on permanent URLs two to three months ahead. Cash on delivery changes what your trust content has to do.

The marketplace question, first

Nepali retailers often ask whether to sell through a marketplace or on their own store. Either or both can work; the decision should come from margin, demand, fulfilment, and customer-acquisition data.

A marketplace gives you buyers who are already there, and takes commission plus ownership of the customer relationship. Your own store gives you margin, customer data, repeat purchase and a brand that compounds — and no traffic at all unless you build it.

Your own domain can publish buying guides, comparisons, category explanations, and policies beyond the constraints of a marketplace listing. That gives it a chance to answer earlier research queries, while the marketplace may contribute discovery through its own audience. Measure both rather than assigning each a guaranteed role.

Category pages carry more than product pages

If your category pages are bare grids while product pages repeat supplier copy, the site may not answer either broad or specific searches well. Review query data before deciding where content work belongs.

Category pages can match product-type queries, while product pages can match exact models and attributes. Category pages also receive internal links from their products. Map actual queries to the page type that best answers them instead of assuming one page type always ranks better.

A useful category page has concise guidance that helps somebody choose, sensible subcategory links, and products that match the heading. Product pages need accurate, original information that adds value beyond supplier copy, such as compatibility, dimensions, delivery, warranty, and local availability.

Faceted navigation, the silent killer

This is a potentially damaging technical problem and is easy to miss without a crawl.

Every filter combination typically produces its own URL. Five filters on one category can generate thousands of crawlable, near-identical pages. Google spends its crawl budget on those instead of your real pages, ranking signals split across duplicates, and the category page you wanted to rank is buried under variants of itself.

The symptom is a store reporting thousands of indexed pages and almost no organic traffic. The fix is to decide which filter combinations have real search demand — a colour or a size that people genuinely search for — and allow only those to be indexable, then manage the remaining combinations according to Google's faceted navigation guidance. This is not a content problem and no amount of blogging will compensate for it.

Product structured data, done accurately

Product markup on product pages with name, image, description, SKU, brand, price, priceCurrency and availability, following Google's Product structured data requirements. BreadcrumbList makes the hierarchy legible, while Organization describes the store itself.

Two errors worth testing are priceCurrency left as USD when prices are in rupees, and availability hardcoded to InStock. Compare the rendered markup with the visible page and product feed; any mismatch should be fixed at the data source.

Out of stock, and what not to do

When an item sells out, keep the page and change the availability in the markup and on the page, offering alternatives, a restock notification, or a route back to the category.

Deleting the page discards every ranking and link it earned, and it will earn them again slowly when the product returns. Redirect only genuinely discontinued products, and redirect them to the closest equivalent or the parent category — not to the homepage, which Google routinely treats as a soft 404 and ignores.

Dashain, Tihar and the festival window

Dashain and Tihar may be important sales periods for your category. Confirm that with your own revenue, inventory, and search data before setting the campaign plan.

Publish early enough for crawling, merchandising, promotion, and fulfilment testing. The right lead time depends on your site's crawl history, campaign calendar, inventory, and historical demand.

More importantly, it should live on a permanent URL that you reuse and update every year. Creating a fresh page each season means starting from zero annually while last year's page sits orphaned, still indexed, competing with the new one. One durable URL accumulates links, history and authority year after year. This is a small decision that compounds substantially.

Cash on delivery changes the trust problem

If your order data shows meaningful use of cash on delivery, that reshapes what your pages have to do.

The buyer's anxiety is not primarily about payment security, because they are not paying yet. It is about whether the product will arrive, whether it will match the photographs, whether anyone will answer if it does not, and how long delivery takes to their specific location. Delivery inside the valley and delivery outside it are different promises, and a store that states both plainly converts better than one that says nothing.

So the pages that matter commercially include the ones nobody thinks of as marketing: a real return and exchange policy, a delivery page with honest timelines by region, a contact page with a phone number that a person answers, and visible payment options for the buyers who do want to pay online. These also earn the long-tail searches — delivery charge, return policy, warranty — that competitors hiding the information cannot rank for.

Speed, on the devices people actually buy from

Category pages loading dozens of full-resolution images are the norm rather than the exception, and the audience is largely on mobile data. Compression, modern formats, correctly sized images and explicit dimensions do more for revenue here than any single content change. The detail is on the technical SEO page.

Common questions

Daraz or my own store?

Use either or both based on measured margin, demand, fulfilment, and customer-acquisition performance.

Category or product pages?

It depends on the query. Map broad product-type queries to useful categories and exact model or attribute queries to accurate product pages.

Why is my store indexed but getting no traffic?

Crawl for duplicate filter URLs, inspect indexation, and compare product copy with supplier and competitor pages. Those are common, testable causes, but not the only possibilities.

When do I prepare Dashain pages?

Publish early enough for crawling and promotion based on your historical data. Reuse a permanent URL when the page serves the same intent each year.

What do I do with sold-out products?

Keep the page, update availability honestly, offer alternatives. Redirect only if the product is genuinely discontinued.

Related

Crawl budget, indexation and speed sit on the technical SEO page. If you also have a physical shop, local SEO covers the map pack. For paid acquisition alongside organic, see Google Ads and Meta Ads, which for most Nepali stores is where festival-season budget actually goes. Full list of services.