Ecommerce SEO
An online shop has a problem no other site has: it generates URLs faster than Google can crawl them, and most of them should never have existed.
Faceted navigation is where crawl budget dies
Every filter combination on a shop creates a URL. Colour, size, price band, brand, sort order: multiply those together and a two-hundred-product catalogue becomes four hundred thousand crawlable pages, almost all near-duplicates. Google spends its budget there instead of on your category pages. Deciding which facets deserve indexing, which get canonicalised and which get blocked outright is the highest-leverage work in ecommerce SEO, and it's almost never done.
Categories earn the rankings, products close the sale
People search for "waterproof walking boots", not a specific SKU. The category page is the page that can rank for that, which means it needs real content above and below the grid, not just a product wall. Product pages are for the long tail and for the moment someone already knows what they want. Treating both the same way gets you neither.
Common questions
What should I do with discontinued products?
It depends on whether the page has links and traffic. Permanently gone with no equivalent: 410. Replaced by a newer model: 301 to it. Temporarily out of stock: keep the page live and say so, because deleting and recreating it loses everything it had earned.
Does this work on Shopify and WooCommerce?
Yes. Shopify constrains URL structure more than most platforms and needs workarounds, but faceted navigation, category content and structured data are all addressable on both.
Keep reading
- Search engine optimisationRanking first on Google isn't luck and it isn't a bigger budget. It's architecture, content and patience, applied in the language each customer is actually searching in.
- Conversion rate optimisationDoubling your traffic is slow and expensive. Doubling the proportion of it that buys is often a fortnight's work, and nobody does it first.
- Core Web Vitals and site speedA green lab score on your laptop means very little. What counts is the measurement Google takes from real visitors on real connections, and that number is usually much worse.
- Content and keyword strategyPublishing more is not a strategy. Most sites already have too many pages and too few that answer a question somebody is actually asking.