Ecommerce SEO services
Ecommerce SEO for catalogues big enough to break their own crawl budget.
A store with 400 products can easily produce 200,000 crawlable URLs, and then wonder why its category pages get ignored. That is an architecture and caching problem more than a content problem, and it is the part of ecommerce SEO we are genuinely good at.
Read this first
Where we fit and where we do not.
You will find plenty of ecommerce SEO agencies with a wall of store logos. We would rather tell you what our actual background is and let you decide.
Be aware
- We have no store case studies with revenue or conversion numbers, and we will not invent any
- Our platform depth is WordPress and WooCommerce, not Shopify or Magento
- On Shopify we work at the architecture, schema and content level, not deep Liquid development
- We do not run paid shopping campaigns, feed management or marketplace listings
- We do not buy links. Off page work is digital PR and manual outreach, never PBNs
What transfers
- Large template driven catalogues where the template is the whole ranking story
- Faceted URLs multiplying and eating crawl budget
- Caching that will not invalidate on content that changes daily
- Canonical rules across variants, filters and paginated listings
- Schema graphs with duplicate and invalid entities in them
- Migration redirect mapping built from real crawl data
Scope
What the work covers on a store.
Not every store needs all of this. Part of the job is telling you which parts yours can skip.
Faceted navigation
A decision per facet rather than one blanket rule. Which filter combinations are indexable, which are crawlable but not indexable, and which never get a URL at all. Then the parameter handling, robots rules and link level controls that enforce it.
Crawl budget and index bloat
Working out what Google is actually spending its time on, then removing the URLs that add nothing. On large sites this is usually worth more than any new content, because the pages that earn money are already there and just under crawled.
Category and product templates
The template decides how thousands of pages rank, so it gets the attention. Heading structure, above the fold content, internal links out, and whether the useful text renders server side rather than after the crawler has gone.
Product, Offer and breadcrumb schema
Valid Product and Offer markup with availability and pricing that stays accurate, plus BreadcrumbList that matches the real hierarchy. One clean organisation entity, no self serving review ratings, and duplicate entities removed. We have untangled exactly that on one site and closed the Search Console issue with it.
Canonicals across variants
Colour and size variants, view all pages, paginated listings and near duplicate categories. On one site a canonical pointing at a redirect was enough to keep a page on a DR 72 domain ranking for nothing at all.
Caching and Core Web Vitals
Catalogues change constantly, which makes cache invalidation the quiet killer. Plus the usual template weight problems, measured on your real category and product pages. More detail on the technical SEO services page.
Evidence
The strongest card we hold, honestly framed.
The situation
On a high traffic site, live edits were not showing up. Some pages had been serving stale content for 14 to 24 hours. This was not a store, but it is the exact failure mode that ruins prices, stock and offers on a catalogue.
The first question was whether the fault was the file or the cache, so we tested the origin directly with a cache buster. The origin was correct. That ruled out half the possible explanations in a few minutes and stopped the guessing.
Then it got interesting, because there was not one cause. There were four. Some URLs were simply missing from the purge list. A meta deletion path had no hook attached, so removing a value never triggered anything. Location terms existed under two different URL forms, so purging one left the other serving old content. And some curated pages queried content rather than being taxonomy archives, which meant no term based purge loop could ever reach them, no matter how correct that loop was.
All six stale pages matched origin immediately after the fix. If you run a store, read that list again and swap the words: a purge list that misses variant URLs, a stock update path with no hook, filter URLs in two forms, and a merchandised landing page that queries products rather than sitting in a category. That is the same bug wearing different clothes.
The related case is a brute force attack on /wp-login.php hitting 21,626 times a day and taking about 46% of all origin requests, stopped at zero within fifteen minutes with a Cloudflare Managed Challenge and an admin IP allowlist skip rule. The more useful part was proving the attack was not slowing the site down at all, the server was at 7.5% CPU, which stopped a pointless hosting upgrade being bought.
Fit
Worth reading before you enquire.
This works well if
- You run WooCommerce and the store already gets meaningful traffic
- Your category pages are the money pages and they have stalled
- Search Console shows a huge gap between discovered and indexed URLs
- You are planning a replatform and want the redirect map done carefully
- Prices or stock go stale in cache and nobody knows why
- You are an agency needing the technical layer under an ecommerce account
Probably not a fit if
- You need deep Shopify Liquid theme development or a custom app
- You are on Magento and need engineering rather than SEO architecture
- The store is brand new with no traffic. Products, content and links come first
- You want product feed management, shopping ads or marketplace work
- You want a case study from a store exactly like yours before you commit
How it runs
Find the leak, agree the plan, build it.
Crawl and index reality check
What exists, what Google knows about, what it bothers to visit, and what earns anything. On a big catalogue the gap between those four numbers is usually the whole story.
Free first call, 20 minutesPrioritised plan
Facet rules, canonical rules, template changes and content work, in order of what it is worth, with the risky items flagged. Including the items we think you should skip.
You approve before we startImplement on staging, verify live
Rules like this can take a section out of the index if they are wrong, so anything structural goes through staging with a tested rollback path, then gets checked on production.
Time logged as it is spentFAQ
Questions clients actually ask
Is your platform depth WooCommerce or Shopify?
WordPress and WooCommerce, clearly. That is where we write code, work in templates and know what breaks. On WooCommerce we can go all the way down to the theme and the query layer.
On Shopify the technical surface is smaller and more constrained, so the work is mostly architecture, templates, schema and content rather than code. That is still most of what moves rankings, and plenty of Shopify stores need exactly that. But if you want deep Liquid theme development or a custom app built, a Shopify specialist fits better and we will point you at that instead of stretching.
Magento is the same honest answer: we can advise on the SEO architecture, we are not Magento developers.
Do you have ecommerce case studies with revenue numbers?
No, and we are not going to invent any. Our documented work is on a high traffic directory site plus theme development and technical SEO, not on stores.
What transfers is the hard part of ecommerce SEO: large template driven catalogues, faceted URLs multiplying out of control, caching on content that changes constantly, canonical rules across variants and pagination, and schema graphs that fight each other. Those are the same problems whether the objects are products or listings. If you want someone who can show you a revenue chart from a store like yours, that is a fair thing to want and we are not that supplier.
What usually causes an ecommerce site to plateau?
Most often the site is spending its crawl budget on URLs that should never have existed. Filter combinations, sort parameters, session junk and paginated variants can turn 400 real products into hundreds of thousands of crawlable URLs, and the category pages that actually earn money get visited less as a result.
Second most common is category and product pages competing with each other, or with a blog post targeting the same term. Third is a template so heavy that the content arrives after the crawler has stopped caring.
How do you decide what to do with faceted navigation?
Per facet, not with one blanket rule. A colour or size facet is normally noindex and nofollow with the parameter blocked at the crawl level. A facet with genuine search demand behind it, like a brand within a category, sometimes deserves a real indexable page with its own copy and its own canonical.
The decision comes from search demand data plus your log files and crawl stats, not from a preference. Then it gets implemented and checked, rather than written down and handed over.
Do you do link building for stores?
Yes, and only the earned kind. Digital PR and manual outreach, data led campaigns built from something your store actually knows, plus backlink audits and disavow decisions. DR growth is the outcome of that, not the product being sold.
What we do not do is buy links, use PBNs or touch link farms. We have identified paid link and PBN networks in profiles and told owners to decline them. Detail on the link building page.
Can you help with a replatform or a migration?
Yes, and this is where stores lose years of equity in a weekend. The redirect map gets built from real crawl data and real traffic data rather than from a spreadsheet of what someone thinks exists, then checked against the staging build before launch, then monitored afterwards.
Old product URLs, discontinued lines, filter URLs that earned links and paginated pages all need a decision. Most botched migrations we have looked at went wrong because nobody decided what happens to those.
What does this cost?
Technical SEO and strategy is £90 to £110 an hour, development £90 to £100, content £50 to £70, and mixed work runs at a £95 blended rate. Minimum engagement is four hours and an audit starts at £900.
For a store, the usual starting point is an audit, because the answer to "why is traffic flat" is genuinely unknown until someone looks at the crawl data. Full detail on the rates page.
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Send us a category URL.
One category page and a sentence about what is not working is enough for a first read. We will tell you whether the problem is crawl budget, templates, cannibalisation or something else entirely.