E-commerce SEO Services

My e-commerce SEO services are for store owners who want more sales from Google without paying for every click. Online stores have problems a brochure site never faces: thousands of near-duplicate product URLs, filters that create crawl traps, products that go out of stock and lose their rankings, and category pages competing with their own products. I fix those at the structural level first, then build the category and product content that turns searches into orders.

Who this is for and the problems it solves

I work with Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and custom-built stores, from small catalogues of a hundred products to stores with tens of thousands of SKUs. The common thread is that organic search should be one of your most profitable channels, and it is not pulling its weight. Typical symptoms:

• Organic traffic goes mostly to the homepage and a few blog posts, not to categories and products.
• Google Search Console shows thousands of pages “Crawled, currently not indexed” or “Duplicate without user-selected canonical”.
• Filter and sort URLs (colour, size, price, ?sort=) appear in Google’s index.
• Product descriptions are copied from the manufacturer, so dozens of other shops show the same text.
• Seasonal or discontinued products are deleted, sending their links and rankings to a 404 page.
• Products are disapproved in Google Merchant Center and never appear in the Shopping tab or free listings.
• The site feels slow on mobile because of heavy themes, apps and uncompressed images.

How shoppers search, and which page should win

The biggest e-commerce SEO mistake is targeting every keyword with product pages. Most buying searches are broad, and Google prefers to show a page with choice for them. Mapping each search type to the right page type stops your own pages competing with each other.

I build this map for your whole catalogue during the audit using keyword mapping, so every important search has exactly one page responsible for it.

What my e-commerce SEO service includes

Category page optimisation

Category pages are usually the highest-value pages in a store and the most neglected. I rewrite titles and headings around the main search term, add a short intro above the products and useful buying advice below them, link to the most relevant subcategories, and make sure pagination and sorting do not create duplicate versions. My guide to category page SEO covers the method in detail.

Product page optimisation

For products, I focus on what helps a buyer decide: unique descriptions that answer the questions customers ask (sizing, materials, compatibility, care, delivery), clear titles that include brand, model and key attributes, descriptive image alt text, and Product structured data with price, availability, reviews and shipping details so you are eligible for rich results. For large catalogues I write templates and rules your team can follow rather than hand-writing ten thousand pages.

Faceted navigation and crawl control

Filters are useful for shoppers and dangerous for SEO. One category with five filters can generate thousands of URL combinations. I decide which filter combinations have real search demand and deserve to be indexable pages (for example “black leather sofas”), and keep the rest out of the index using canonical tags, noindex, robots.txt rules or JavaScript-based filtering, depending on your platform. I explain the options in my article on faceted navigation SEO.

Out-of-stock and discontinued products

I set clear rules your team can apply without asking me each time:

• Temporarily out of stock: keep the page live, mark availability correctly in schema, offer a back-in-stock alert and show alternatives.
• Permanently discontinued with a direct replacement: 301 redirect to the new model.
• Discontinued with no replacement: redirect to the closest category, or return a 410 if the page has no links or traffic worth keeping.
• Seasonal products: keep a permanent URL that is updated each season rather than creating a new one each year.

Google Merchant Center and Shopping visibility

Free product listings in Google Shopping and product results in normal search depend on clean product data. I connect or audit your Merchant Center account, fix disapprovals (price or availability mismatches, missing GTINs, image problems, shipping and returns settings), and make sure on-page structured data matches the feed. Small stores can start with my guide to Merchant Center free listings.

Speed and Core Web Vitals

E-commerce themes are often weighed down by apps, tracking scripts, sliders and oversized images. I audit what loads on category and product templates and prioritise fixes with the biggest effect. If the problem runs deep, it becomes part of my website speed optimisation work.

Platform-specific issues I handle

Shopify

Shopify fixes the URL structure (/collections/ and /products/) and creates a second product URL inside each collection path. The theme usually canonicalises these correctly, but internal links often point at the collection version, which wastes crawl effort. I also deal with tag pages creating thin duplicate collections, variant URLs, app-generated bloat, and the limited control over robots.txt (which can now be edited through a theme template). See my Shopify SEO checklist.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce gives full control, which means more ways to go wrong: product tag archives, attribute archives, unused default category bases, plugin conflicts, and heavy page builders. I clean up the taxonomy so authority is not split across many similar archives, and set up the SEO plugin correctly. My WooCommerce SEO setup guide walks through the order I do it in.

Custom and headless stores

Custom builds often rely on JavaScript rendering, which can hide products and links from Google. I check rendered HTML, internal links, pagination and canonical logic, and write specifications your developers can implement.

My process

Technical fixes on a store with clear crawl problems can show results in a few weeks once Google recrawls. Ranking gains for competitive category terms usually build over 3 to 6 months, sometimes longer in crowded markets such as fashion and electronics.

What affects scope

• Catalogue size and how many categories and filters you have.
• Platform, and whether I can implement changes directly or work through your developers.
• How much content needs writing, and whether your team can handle part of it.
• Number of countries or currencies (if you sell abroad, this overlaps with international SEO).
• Whether you are planning a migration or redesign, which needs careful redirect mapping.

Common mistakes I find on online stores

• Every filter combination indexable, so Google crawls millions of useless URLs.
• Category pages with no text at all, or a long block of keyword-stuffed text pushed below the footer.
• Product schema showing “InStock” when the item is sold out.
• Deleting old products in bulk during a clear-out without redirects.
• Changing every URL during a platform migration without a redirect map.
• Blog posts targeting the same terms as category pages, so neither ranks well.

What I deliver for e-commerce stores

• A full store audit with a prioritised fix list.
• A keyword-to-page map covering categories, subcategories, filters and products.
• Faceted navigation and indexing rules for your platform.
• Category page copy and product description templates, plus rewrites for priority products.
• Product, breadcrumb and organisation structured data checked against Google’s requirements.
• An out-of-stock and discontinued product policy your team can follow.
• Merchant Center fixes and a feed and schema consistency check.
• Monthly reporting on organic revenue, indexed pages and category rankings.

Frequently asked questions

If your store has products people want but Google is not sending buyers to them, request a free e-commerce SEO audit and I will show you where the biggest gains are.