E-commerce SEO

E-commerce SEO is mostly an architecture problem wearing a content costume. Most stores do not rank badly because their copy is weak; they rank badly because thousands of near-identical URLs are competing with each other, category pages have nothing on them for Google to read, and the pages that matter most sit four clicks from the homepage.

What we actually do

We start with crawl and index control, because on a large store that is where the wins are. Faceted navigation generates near-infinite URL combinations from filters and sort orders, and left unmanaged it burns crawl budget on pages that will never rank while diluting the ones that should. We work out which facets deserve an indexable page — the ones with real search demand, like a size or colour people actually search for — and make sure the rest are cleanly excluded.

Then the category pages, which are the highest-value and most neglected template in most stores. Category pages are where commercial search intent lands, and they typically ship with a product grid and nothing else. We give them content that earns the ranking without pushing products below the fold, and internal linking that pushes authority to the categories that make money.

Product pages get structured data — Product, Offer, AggregateRating — so listings can show price, availability and review stars in results and be read accurately by AI assistants. We also handle variant consolidation so twelve colourways do not compete as twelve pages, and put a policy in place for discontinued lines so expired products redirect rather than accumulating as 404s.

Platform work

We work across Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and BigCommerce, and each has its own structural quirks — Shopify’s forced /collections/ and /products/ paths and its duplicate product URLs, WooCommerce’s default permalink and pagination handling, Magento’s layered navigation. Knowing them saves months of diagnosing a platform default as if it were a mystery.

How we report it

Reporting is on revenue, not rankings alone: organic revenue and conversion rate by landing page type, category-level ranking movement on commercial terms, index coverage trends, and Core Web Vitals — which matter more here than almost anywhere else, because product pages are heavy and slow ones lose money measurably.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should category pages or product pages be the focus?

Category pages, usually. They match the way people search — someone searches “womens running shoes” far more often than a specific product name they do not yet know — and they carry more internal authority. Product pages matter for branded and model-number searches, and for AI assistants pulling specifications, but the volume sits with categories.

How should I handle out-of-stock or discontinued products?

It depends on whether it is coming back. Temporarily out of stock: keep the page live with correct availability in the structured data, because deleting it throws away accumulated authority. Permanently discontinued: 301 to the closest replacement, or to the parent category if there is no replacement. Letting them 404 in volume wastes crawl budget and loses whatever links they had earned.

Does faceted navigation hurt SEO?

Unmanaged, badly. Filters and sort orders multiply into thousands of URL combinations, most of them near-duplicates, and Google spends its crawl budget on them instead of your real pages. Managed properly it is an asset — a handful of high-demand filter combinations make excellent landing pages. The work is deciding which ones earn a URL.

Do I need unique descriptions for every product?

For products only you sell, yes — they are a genuine differentiator. For manufacturer-supplied descriptions on products a hundred other retailers also list, rewriting all of them is rarely the best use of the budget. Prioritise the products that drive revenue, and put the effort you save into category pages, which have more to gain.

Will SEO work alongside our paid shopping campaigns?

Yes, and the two share plumbing. Clean product data, accurate structured data and fast pages improve both organic listings and Shopping feed quality. Search-term data from paid campaigns is also one of the best sources of proven commercial keywords to target organically, which shortens the guesswork considerably.