Most stores spend their SEO budget where the leverage isn't. Category pages carry the commercial keywords, hold the authority, and survive when a SKU goes out of stock. We fix the architecture underneath them first, then the templates on top. If you're specifically after the on-page detail, that's covered in our product page SEO guide.
Three patterns account for most of the ecommerce SEO work we take on. If one of them is yours, the audit will confirm it in a fortnight.
We have thousands of pages and rank for none.
Faceted navigation generating filter combinations burns crawl budget on near-duplicates. Google gives up before reaching what matters.
Facet containmentOur category pages are just a grid of products.
No copy, no differentiation, nothing to rank. Category pages target the highest-intent commercial terms and need to earn them.
Category rebuildDiscontinued products 404 and we lose the traffic.
Out-of-stock and end-of-life SKUs need a policy: redirect, keep with alternatives, or retire. Defaulting to 404 throws away earned rankings.
Lifecycle policySequenced deliberately, because each phase depends on the one before it. Numbering here means order, not decoration.
Benchmarks, not promises. Your starting point decides how far and how fast, and the audit gives you both numbers before you commit to anything.
Commercial intent, stable URL, survives SKU churn.
Target after containment, down from the 70%+ we usually find.
Organic revenue per landing page. Sessions alone hide the story.
Benchmarks reflect the standards we work to, not guaranteed outcomes. Crawl recovery shows in log files within weeks; category ranking movement typically takes three to six months depending on authority and competition.
Ours run in three phases: containment of faceted URLs and duplicate product paths, then category architecture and template work, then ongoing lifecycle policy and reporting. Scope is set by catalogue size and platform rather than a fixed tier list, and the audit gives you the numbers before you commit to anything.
Yes, within its constraints. The forced /collections/ and /products/ paths, duplicate variant URLs and limited robots control are all workable. The main fixes are collection page content, template-level structured data, and containing the URLs the filter apps generate.
A small number. Filters matching real search demand like "waterproof hiking boots" deserve indexable pages. The other several thousand combinations shouldn't be crawlable at all. The line is drawn by search volume, not by what your theme happens to generate.
Keep the URL live where the product returns, show alternatives, and mark availability in schema. Permanently discontinued items redirect to the closest equivalent or the parent category. Never mass-404 a catalogue, that's throwing away earned rankings.
All three. Shopify and WooCommerce come with known constraints we work around routinely. Custom builds give more control but usually ship worse faceted navigation defaults. What changes between platforms is implementation, not the diagnosis.
Organic revenue and assisted conversions by landing page, alongside non-brand organic sessions. Total organic traffic is misleading because brand searches inflate it, so we separate brand from non-brand in every report.
Crawl budget recovery from facet containment shows in log files within weeks. Category ranking movement typically takes three to six months depending on domain authority and competition. Anyone promising faster on a competitive catalogue is guessing.
Ecommerce SEO rarely runs alone. These are the three we most often run alongside it.
Crawlability, indexation, site architecture and the render path Google actually sees.
Explore →FoundationProduct, Offer and Review markup that earns price and rating displays, and feeds AI answers.
Explore →FoundationForensic LCP, INP and CLS diagnosis, then the specific fixes that move field data.
Explore →No obligation, no sales sequence. We'll show you what's actually holding your store back and what it would take to fix it.