Visibility
E-commerce SEO
Category and product pages, faceted navigation, out-of-stock handling and the duplication that every store platform creates by default.
What usually goes wrong
Store platforms generate URLs faster than anyone can review them. Every filter combination, sort order and pagination state is a page, and the ones that matter drown in the ones that do not.
You would notice
- Tens of thousands of URLs for a few hundred products
- Category pages that are lists and nothing else
- Product copy identical to the supplier feed and to competitors
- Discontinued products returning 404 with links pointing at them
The work
E-commerce SEO, line by line.
Each line is work that gets done and can be checked afterwards. None of it is a promise about where you will rank — nobody can honestly make that one.
- 01Category pages treated as landing pages, not as lists
- 02Faceted navigation stopped from generating infinite URLs
- 03Product pages with their own copy where the supplier feed duplicates
- 04Out-of-stock and discontinued products handled without dead ends
- 05Review, Product and Offer markup that validates
In practice
Where the URLs come from
/shoes/ canonical, indexable
/shoes/?colour=black canonical -> /shoes/
/shoes/?colour=black&size=42 canonical -> /shoes/
/shoes/?size=42&colour=black same page, different order
/shoes/?colour=black&size=42&sort=price and again
/shoes/page/2/ self-canonical, indexable
4 filters x 6 values = 1,296 crawlable URLs
for one category of 40 products.One category, four filters. The combinations multiply, and every one is crawlable unless something stops it.
Questions
Asked often enough to answer here.
Should filtered pages ever be indexed?
A few should: the combinations people actually search for, like a colour or a brand within a category. The rest should canonicalise to the parent.
What do I do with discontinued products?
If there is a successor, redirect to it. If not, keep the page and say it is discontinued, or 410 it. A silent 404 with links pointing at it wastes what the page earned.
Is duplicate product copy really a problem?
It stops you outranking anyone selling the same item. If you cannot rewrite everything, rewrite the products that make the money.
Also in Visibility
Work that usually travels with it.
- Keyword Research & StrategyThe terms your customers actually type, sorted by what you can realistically win, and mapped to the page that should own each one.
- On-Page SEOTitles, headings, copy, images and internal links reworked so each page is unmistakably about one thing.
- SEO Content StrategyWhat to write, in what order, and which existing pages to merge or retire instead of writing more.
- Local SEOGoogle Business Profile, local landing pages, citations and review signals for businesses that sell inside a map, not a market.
Contact
Want e-commerce seo on your site?
We will look at it and come back with what we would do and what it would cost. If we are not the right fit for it, we will say that instead.