eCommerce SEO Services
Two thousand products, four thousand filter combinations, and a crawl budget being spent on pages nobody should ever land on. Store SEO is an architecture problem long before it's a content one.
Why stores are different
On a normal site, you decide what pages exist. On a store, the platform decides for you. Every filter, every sort order, every variant, and every tag combination can generate a URL, and most stores are quietly running tens of thousands of them without anyone realising.
Google will crawl a portion of your site and then stop. If that budget gets spent on colour filters and out-of-stock variants, your actual category pages get crawled less often, and the pages you need ranking are the ones being ignored.
That's why store SEO starts with architecture rather than content. Most of the work is deciding what should exist, what should be visible, and what should never have been generated in the first place. Once that's settled, the technical SEO fundamentals and content work can actually take effect.
80%
Filters, sorts, search results, and parameter combinations. Useful for shoppers, useless in a search index, and expensive to crawl.
1 in 3
Usually because descriptions came straight from the manufacturer, so hundreds of retailers are publishing identical text.
Most
Not products. People search for what a thing is before they search for a specific model, and categories are where that demand lands.
The usual suspects
These aren't exotic problems. They're the default behaviour of the platforms, and they're costing most stores traffic right now.
Every filter combination generating its own crawlable URL. A category with six filters can produce thousands of near-identical pages, and Google spends your crawl budget working through them instead of finding your new products.
The same text you have is on two hundred other retailers' sites. There's nothing for Google to prefer you for. This is the single most common reason product pages get no traffic, and fixing it at scale is a content writing problem as much as an SEO one.
A heading and a product grid. Nothing explaining what the category covers, how to choose, or what the differences are. These are your highest-intent pages and they're usually the emptiest ones on the site.
Every one returning a 404, taking whatever links and rankings it had with it. Products go out of stock permanently all the time, and there's a right way to handle that which isn't deletion.
The same shirt in eight colours, each on its own indexable URL, splitting the ranking signals eight ways so none of them ranks. Canonicalisation exists for exactly this and is almost never configured.
Apps, tracking scripts, review widgets, and unoptimised product images stacking up until the page takes six seconds. Usually a development fix rather than an SEO one, which is why having both teams in one place matters here.
The work
Content on a store with broken architecture is money spent on pages Google isn't reliably reaching.
LAYER 01
Deciding what exists, what gets crawled, and what gets indexed. Everything else depends on this being right.
LAYER 02
Where most of the commercial search volume actually sits, and where most stores have done the least work.
LAYER 03
Handled at scale rather than one at a time, prioritised by which products are actually worth the effort.
Platforms
Knowing the specific quirks matters more than general SEO knowledge here. If you're building or replatforming, our eCommerce development team handles the structural side.
Fast and reliable, but opinionated about URLs in ways you can't fully override. Most Shopify SEO is working within those constraints rather than fighting them.
Watch for: duplicate collection URLs, forced /products/ and /collections/ paths, and app scripts quietly destroying page speed.
Fully controllable, which cuts both ways. You can fix almost anything, and almost anything can be misconfigured by a plugin you installed for something unrelated.
Watch for: attribute pages indexing themselves, plugin conflicts creating duplicate content, and hosting that can't handle the query load.
Powerful at large catalogue scale and unforgiving when configured badly. Crawl and indexation problems here are usually the largest we see.
Watch for: layered navigation generating enormous URL sets, and multi-store setups duplicating themselves across domains.
How we work
On a catalogue of any size, prioritisation matters more than thoroughness. You can't optimise everything, so it has to be the right things.
STEP 01
What exists, what Google is actually visiting, and where the crawl budget is disappearing.
STEP 02
Indexation rules, canonicals, and parameter handling before any content work starts.
STEP 03
Categories and products ranked by margin and demand, so effort goes where it pays back.
STEP 04
Content and optimisation rolled out in batches, tracked against revenue rather than rankings.
It isn't priced separately. Store work sits inside an SEO engagement, scoped around catalogue size, platform, and how much technical debt there is to clear. Pricing and what's included are on the main SEO page.
Related services
Common questions
Not all of them. On a two thousand product catalogue that's an enormous cost for very little return on the long tail.
We identify the products with real search demand and margin, usually somewhere between five and fifteen percent of the catalogue, and write those properly. The rest get structured data and consistent formatting rather than bespoke copy.
If it's coming back, keep the page live and say when. Deleting it throws away rankings you'll want again.
If it's gone permanently, redirect to the closest alternative or the parent category. A 404 loses whatever links and authority that URL had accumulated, and on an established store that adds up quickly across hundreds of discontinued lines.
They do different jobs. Shopping captures people who already know roughly what they want. Organic categories capture the research stage that happens earlier, which is where you influence what they end up wanting.
When we run Google Ads alongside SEO, the two feed each other. Shopping data shows which products actually convert, so we know which categories deserve months of organic effort rather than guessing at the start.
Technical and indexation fixes can move things within four to eight weeks, sometimes faster, because you're unblocking pages rather than building new authority.
Category rankings in a competitive market take four to six months. Bigger catalogues take longer simply because there's more to work through.
Before, and it isn't close. A replatform without a proper URL mapping and redirect plan is the fastest way to lose years of accumulated rankings in a single afternoon.
Get us involved while the new structure is being designed rather than after it's live. Our development team handles migrations with SEO reviewing the architecture before launch, which is specifically why this doesn't go wrong for our clients the way it does when two separate companies are involved.
Yes. We write the specifications in enough detail that your developer can implement them without needing to understand the SEO reasoning behind each one.
If they're slow to act on them, we'll tell you, because on stores the technical fixes usually carry more of the result than anything else we do.
Thirty minutes on your catalogue and platform. We'll tell you what's structurally broken and what to fix first.
Or email hello@culmen.digital