What sets store SEO apart from brochure site SEO
A service business site has a few dozen pages, each written one by one. An online store generates hundreds or thousands from a handful of templates: one page per product, one per category, one URL per filter combination. Ecommerce SEO means working on those templates rather than on each page in isolation, because a mistake in the product page template repeats across the whole catalog, and so does an improvement.
- 1TemplatesFix one product or category template, and the whole catalog is fixedLever
- 2A living catalogSold-out products, sales, filters: every change countsTo monitor
- 3SalesWe measure revenue, not just rankingsMeasurement
The catalog is constantly moving. New products arrive, others sell out, prices and stock change daily, and sales open up temporary pages. Each of these changes has a consequence for Google: a page that disappears without a redirect, an empty collection that gets indexed, a filter that creates thousands of nearly identical URLs. SEO for an online store is therefore managed over time, at the pace of catalog updates.
Measurement isn’t the same either. A service page aims for a contact request; a category page aims for a sale. We track revenue from organic search, conversion rate and average order value for visitors coming from Google, in addition to rankings and clicks. To connect these numbers, we wrote an article on SEO KPIs.
This page complements our SEO agency page: the overall method stays the same, but here it applies to a catalog, platform constraints and sales goals.
What our service covers, page type by page type
Each type of page in a store answers a different search. You don’t work on a product page the way you work on a category page, or on a buying guide the way you work on the homepage.
Category and collection pages
These are often the pages with the most potential, because they answer broad queries like “women’s hiking boots” or “standing desk.” We define the site structure from real searches, one category level for each need that has demand, and for each we write a title, a useful introduction and, when relevant, advice copy placed below the product grid.
Product pages
A product page needs to rank for specific queries: model name, SKU, a sought-after feature. We work on the template (title tag, heading, displayed attributes, reviews, FAQs), then on the copy for the products that matter most, starting with the ones that sell or have the strongest demand. The rest get clean copy, without duplicating the manufacturer’s description.
Catalog technical SEO
Crawling, indexing, canonicals, pagination, filters, redirects, mobile load speed of the templates: everything that determines whether Google sees the right pages and ignores the rest. This is the part that depends most on the platform.
Structured data and Google Merchant Center
Product and Offer markup sends Google the price, availability, reviews, shipping costs and return policy. Google describes these fields in its documentation on product data. We also check the feed sent to Merchant Center, which powers free listings in the Shopping tab: a lever often overlooked by stores that don’t advertise.
Editorial content
Buying guides, comparisons, care tips: these pages capture the searches made before a decision and send visitors to categories through internal links. We only suggest them when there’s real demand and a product to recommend behind them.
Authority and links
A store earns links through the brands it carries, trade publications, bloggers in its industry and its own advice content. We target sites your customers read, never paid link networks.
Where store SEO gets stuck
The same problems come up from one catalog to the next, whatever the platform. They’re what we look for first during the diagnosis, using a crawler such as Screaming Frog and the indexing reports in Google Search Console.
- Faceted navigation: every combination of size, color, price and brand can produce a separate URL. Left open, these URLs eat up the time Google spends on your site and dilute the useful pages. You need to decide which filters deserve an indexable page, because they match a search, and which should stay invisible. Google devotes an entire page to managing faceted navigation.
- Variants: one item offered in five colors shouldn’t become five competing product pages. Depending on the case, variants are grouped on a single page, or variants with their own demand get their own page.
- Manufacturer descriptions: the copy supplied by the brand shows up word for word at dozens of retailers. Google then has no reason to prefer your page over an older competitor’s.
- Sold-out or discontinued products: a temporary stockout doesn’t justify deleting the page; a permanently discontinued product redirects to the model that replaces it, or returns a 404 or 410 if there’s no equivalent. The two opposite mistakes, redirecting everything to the homepage or leaving hundreds of empty pages, both cost traffic.
- Pagination and sorting: pages 2, 3 and beyond of a category must stay crawlable so products deep in the catalog get discovered, without sort options multiplying duplicates.
- App and theme bloat: reviews, pop-ups, recommendations, chat and tracking tools each add their own scripts. The product page template gets heavier and mobile load times slow down.
- Indexed internal search: the store’s search results pages don’t belong in Google, but they often get in through links or a misconfigured sitemap.
- Migrations: changing platforms or themes changes most URLs. Without a redirect plan tested before the switch, a store can lose in a few days the traffic it built over several years.
Shopify, PrestaShop, WooCommerce: different constraints
The CMS sets some of the rules. Some things take two clicks to fix, others require a developer or a module. We adapt the action plan to what your platform actually allows.
Shopify
Shopify enforces fixed URL prefixes (/products/, /collections/, /pages/) that can’t be removed. The same product is reachable at both /products/name and /collections/category/products/name: the canonical tag points to the first URL, but the theme often links to the second, which sends mixed signals. We fix these links in the theme’s Liquid code, adjust the robots.txt.liquid file when filters or technical pages need to be excluded, and inventory the installed apps to measure their effect on speed. For stores selling in several countries, the Shopify Markets setup (subfolders, languages, currencies) gets a close check.
PrestaShop
On PrestaShop, the first settings concern URL rewriting: enabling friendly URLs, removing numeric IDs where possible, defining the format for products and categories. A product’s combinations (size, color) share one page, but some configurations generate extra URLs that need canonicalizing. The faceted navigation module produces filter URLs that have to be checked one by one, and speed depends heavily on caching, hosting and the number of active modules. Finally, we make sure the sitemap only contains the pages meant to be indexed.
WooCommerce, Magento and others
WooCommerce inherits WordPress’s strengths and weaknesses: a lot of freedom, but SEO, caching and filter plugins that sometimes step on each other. Our WordPress SEO page covers that side in detail. We also work on Magento (Adobe Commerce), whose layered navigation raises the same faceted navigation questions on a larger scale, and on other platforms on the market, after checking what their configuration allows.
Our four-step process
A store can’t afford to wait through six months of recommendations before seeing any change. The work is broken down so that the fixes that unlock the most pages go first.
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01
Catalog diagnosis
A full crawl of the store, a review of the indexing and performance reports, a review of the templates (home, category, product, search, cart) and the platform’s constraints. A full SEO audit can serve as this first step when the site has never had one.
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02
Prioritized roadmap
Each workstream is ranked by the search demand it affects, the margin on the products involved, the implementation effort and the seasonality of your sales. A holiday collection gets prepared in summer, not in December.
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03
Implementation
Copy for priority categories and product pages, precise tickets for your developers or your web agency, QA before going live, link building. We can also work directly on the theme or configuration if you give us access.
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04
Measurement and new priorities
A monthly report ties the work done to sales from Google, category by category. What works gets extended to the rest of the catalog; what doesn’t gets revisited.
At every step, you know what’s been delivered: diagnosis report, workstream table with the order of execution, copy templates for categories and product pages, a redirect plan during a migration, and a dashboard that reads data directly from your Search Console and Analytics.
Get recommended when shopping starts in an AI
Some buyers no longer start with a list of links. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Mode which vacuum to choose for an apartment with a cat, and get a selection of products with commentary, sometimes with a direct link to the store. Google’s AI Overviews also show products in their answers.
These assistants draw on the same sources as traditional SEO: complete product pages, accurate and consistent specifications, up-to-date structured data, reviews, and mentions in comparison articles or trade publications. A product page that specifies neither dimensions, nor compatibility, nor warranty has little chance of being cited against a competing page that answers those questions.
We track your brand’s and products’ presence across a series of buying questions specific to your market, then fix what’s missing on the site and beyond it. This work falls under Generative Engine Optimization, which we carry out hand in hand with the store’s SEO.
How much does ecommerce SEO cost?
We don’t publish a single rate, because two stores of the same size can require very different work. The quote is put together after a first look at the site, and it details what’s included, project by project or month by month depending on the format chosen. Here’s what makes the amount vary.
| Factor | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Catalog size | The number of categories and product pages to write or revise, and the volume of URLs to check. |
| Platform | What can be set in the admin and what requires development on the theme or modules. |
| Starting technical state | A store cluttered with indexed facets or broken redirects needs a heavier initial project. |
| Industry competition | Up against marketplaces and big retailers, it takes more content and links to earn a spot. |
| Copywriting | The share of category, product and guide copy that we write, or that your team handles. |
| Languages and countries | Each additional market adds its own searches, content and technical checks. |
| Implementation | Whether we work on the store ourselves or write instructions for your developers. |
Three formats come up most often: a one-time store audit, ongoing monthly support, or a targeted project such as a migration or a launch in a new country. The first conversation, with no commitment, is about understanding your catalog and telling you whether SEO is the right lever at this stage.
How to choose an ecommerce SEO agency
An agency used to brochure sites can miss what costs a store sales. Before signing, a few questions help you judge whether it really knows online retail.
- Can it explain how it will handle your filters, variants and sold-out products, on your specific platform?
- Does it measure its work in sales and revenue, or only in rankings and visits?
- Can it show you an anonymized sample roadmap or monthly report?
- Who writes the product and category pages, and how does it avoid mass-produced copy?
- Has it already prepared a store migration, with a redirect plan and a post-launch check?
- How does it earn links, and on what kinds of sites?
- Do your Merchant Center, Search Console and Analytics accounts belong to you, even if the relationship ends?
These questions apply to us too. If your store isn’t live yet or needs to be rebuilt, the question comes up earlier: the choice of theme, site structure and URLs is made during ecommerce website development, and that’s when SEO is cheapest to build in.
Your questions: Ecommerce SEO
Can’t find your question? Ask us
What is ecommerce SEO?
It’s search engine optimization applied to an online store: making categories and product pages visible in Google results and in AI assistants, fixing the technical issues specific to catalogs such as filters and variants, and measuring results in sales rather than just visits.
How is ecommerce SEO different from SEO for a brochure site?
In scale and movement. A store produces thousands of pages from a handful of templates, and its catalog changes every week. The work therefore focuses on page templates, indexing rules and managing products that come and go, in addition to content and links.
How long does it take for store SEO to drive sales?
Technical fixes that unlock indexing for many pages often have a first effect within a few weeks, once Google has recrawled the pages. For new copy and link building, plan on several months, longer in an industry dominated by big retailers. The roadmap sets milestones to track progress before then.
Does every product page need unique copy?
For the products that matter, yes: original copy that answers buyers’ questions helps the page stand out from retailers that reuse the manufacturer’s description. On a very large catalog, you prioritize the SKUs that sell or have demand, and improve the rest through the template.
Is Shopify good for SEO?
Shopify offers a sound technical foundation and fast hosting, but it enforces fixed URLs, creates duplicate URLs between collections and products, and slows down quickly as apps pile up. Configured properly, it ranks very well; left at its defaults, it misses opportunities.
Do you need an agency that specializes in Shopify or PrestaShop?
Above all, you need an agency that knows your platform’s limits and how to work around them. A single-CMS specialist is useful for heavy development work; for SEO, knowing how catalogs work matters as much as knowing the tool.
One-time project or monthly support?
A one-time audit works for taking stock or preparing a migration. A store whose catalog changes constantly gets more out of monthly support, which keeps pace with new collections, seasons and platform changes.
Do you work with stores that sell in several countries?
Yes. Country versions add questions of languages, currencies, hreflang tags and URL structure. Our international SEO page explains how we handle them.