Blog · Aug 11, 2026
Why online stores score lowest on metadata
Online stores averaged 68.3 on metadata, about 20 points behind healthcare. Here is what metadata is and how to fix it where it matters most.
Key takeaways
- Ecommerce sites averaged 68.3 on metadata (173 sites), versus 87.8 for healthcare (1,157 sites).
- Common causes are repeated or auto-generated titles, empty descriptions and missing product markup.
- Start with your top 50 products and your main category pages.
What metadata means
Metadata is information about your pages, mostly invisible to visitors:
- Title tags: the headline in search results and the browser tab, and the most important line of metadata on any page.
- Meta descriptions: the short summary under the headline in search results, usually about 150 to 160 characters.
- Structured data: code that labels things explicitly, such as "this is a product, it costs $X, it's in stock."
Metadata is a quick way for a machine to learn what a page is without reading all of it. Good metadata is a clear label on every box in a warehouse. Bad metadata is 500 unlabeled boxes.
How online stores lose points
- Repeated or generic titles. A catalog with hundreds of products often ends up with near-identical titles ("Blue T-Shirt | Store Name") or auto-generated ones ("Product #4821"). If every page has the same label, every page looks alike to a machine.
- Missing descriptions. Bulk-imported catalogs often have empty meta descriptions, so the snippet becomes whatever text the search engine grabs from the page.
- Missing or incomplete product markup. Schema.org's Product type is designed for name, price, availability and reviews. Some themes include basic product markup, many stores have gaps, and it's worth checking yours.
- Thin category pages. "Shop all shoes" with no descriptive text wastes a page that often gets more visits than any product page.
Healthcare sites, which led our metadata scores, tend to describe procedures, providers and locations in text, and many use SEO plugins that fill in titles and descriptions. We haven't tested why the gap exists, so treat that as a likely factor, not a finding.
The fix, in priority order
- Unique titles for every product. Use product name, a key attribute and your store name: "Men's Merino Wool Sweater, Navy | Your Store." Start with your top 50 sellers.
- Descriptions for your top 50 products. One or two sentences: what it is, who it's for and a key spec. "Full-grain leather wallet, holds 8 cards, ages beautifully" beats an empty tag.
- Check and complete your Product markup. On Shopify, check what your theme already outputs and use the schema validator to find gaps. WooCommerce SEO plugins such as Rank Math and Yoast can add it. The fields that matter are name, price, availability, description and reviews if you have them.
- Describe your main categories. Add 100 or more words to each: what the category covers, how to choose, and links to buying guides.
- Audit quarterly. New products inherit the same gaps, so make titles, descriptions and markup part of your product-creation checklist.
Send to your web person: > Please audit our product pages for duplicate title tags and missing meta descriptions, starting with the top 50 products. Then check that our product template outputs Product structured data (JSON-LD) with name, price and availability, and add descriptive text to our main category pages.
Why it's worth doing
Because many stores share these gaps, fixing yours makes your products easier for any machine to tell apart and describe. We can't promise it changes what any assistant says, but clear labels are the baseline everything else builds on.
About this data: 10,369 small business sites scored in October 2026; industry was identified for about 4,000 of them (ecommerce n=173, healthcare n=1,157). Metadata scores cover titles, descriptions and structured data.