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.

We report organic revenue, not sessions

Traffic is not the number that pays your bills. A category page can gain visitors and lose revenue if the wrong terms are ranking, so we report against organic revenue and organic orders from day one, alongside the traffic figures that explain the movement, not instead of them.

This changes what a campaign chases. Ranking a high-volume, low-intent term looks good in a traffic report and does nothing for your order count. We prioritise the category and product pages that convert, which is not always the same list as the pages with the most search volume, and we tell you when those two lists disagree.

Monthly reporting shows organic revenue against the previous period and the same period last year, so seasonal ecommerce businesses can see genuine growth rather than a seasonal bounce dressed up as one.

Month by month

Month one is audit and architecture: a full technical and content audit, a category structure review, and a Merchant Center feed hygiene check, so the site’s foundations are sound before we build on them.

Months two and three rebuild the category and product-detail-page templates and fix the structured data (product schema, availability, pricing) so search engines can read stock and price correctly, which matters as much for AI shopping surfaces as for classic organic results.

Months four to six move into content hubs and link earning: non-brand category and buying-guide content that captures demand your product pages cannot rank for on their own, backed by outreach that builds the authority those hubs need to compete.

Ranking movement typically starts appearing from month three, with organic revenue gains compounding from month four onward as the architecture and content work reinforce each other.

SEO vs paid: cost per order

Paid shopping campaigns have a cost per order that never falls below your cost-per-click floor. Every order costs roughly the same whether it is your first or your thousandth. Organic SEO has the opposite economics: the upfront investment is fixed as a monthly retainer, from £1,250 a month, and cost per order falls as rankings compound, because incremental orders from an already-ranking page cost nothing extra to acquire.

We are not a substitute for paid shopping, and we do not sell it as one. The two channels work well together. Paid keeps volume steady while organic authority builds, and as organic orders grow, paid budget can shift to the terms and seasons where it earns its keep rather than propping up baseline demand.

We report organic orders and organic revenue every month specifically so you can compare that cost curve against your paid figures yourself, rather than taking our word for which channel is doing the work. Book a call to talk it through.