Most store SEO problems come from the catalog's templates, not from missing keywords: filters that spawn millions of URLs, variants Google can't tell apart, and category pages with nothing to say. John Williams fixes the templates so Google crawls the pages that sell and shows your products with price, stock, and shipping in results.
We pair a full crawl with Search Console's indexing and crawl stats reports and, where we can get them, server logs. The question is simple: what share of Googlebot's requests land on products and categories, and what share on filter and sort URLs no one searches for?
Google's guidance is clear. If you don't need filter URLs indexed, disallow them in robots.txt or use URL
fragments. rel="canonical" and nofollow work less well over time. If some filtered
pages should rank, use standard & separators, keep filters in a fixed order, and return a
404 when a combination has no products (Managing faceted navigation). We pick the handful of filter pages with real demand and make them proper landing pages. Everything else
is blocked.
Google infers a page's importance from how many internal links point to it and how many clicks it takes to reach, not from the URL structure. It recommends linking menus to categories, categories to subcategories, and subcategories to every product, and linking best sellers from the homepage (Ecommerce site structure). We map categories to how people search, merge thin ones, and make sure each has unique products and, where it helps, a short buyer-focused introduction.
Each page in a series needs its own URL (for example ?page=2), a plain link to the next page,
and its own canonical, not page one's. Google ignores fragments for page numbers and no longer uses
rel="next" and rel="prev". Its crawlers also don't click "load more" buttons (Pagination best practices).
Product pages where people can buy get merchant listing markup (Merchant listing structured data). For variants, Google wants a ProductGroup with hasVariant, variesBy, and
productGroupID, a unique ID per variant, and a distinct URL that preselects each variant with
the right image, price, and stock. Google also recommends putting Product markup in the initial HTML (Product variants).
Products in Merchant Center can appear in free listings across Google (Merchant Center Help). We match feed prices, availability, and item_group_id (item_group_id) to the page, and add return and shipping policies at the organization level (return policy,
shipping policy).
Good Core Web Vitals means LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP of 200 milliseconds or less, and CLS of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile (web.dev). We fix the product image that is the LCP element, and the review, chat, and personalization scripts that slow interactions on category pages.
Every filter on the site gets one of three treatments. These are the questions we ask to decide.
| Question | If yes | If no |
|---|---|---|
| Do people search for this filter combination (for example "black leather recliner")? | Candidate landing page: clean URL, unique title, internal links | Not indexed |
| Does it return a meaningfully different set of products? | Keep as a landing page | Consolidate into the parent category |
| Is it a sort order, view mode, or price slider? | Block from crawling | Continue |
| Can it combine with other filters without limit? | Allow only the first filter to be crawled; block deeper combinations | Continue |
| Could the combination return zero products? | Return a 404 for empty results | Continue |
variesBy for size, color, or material, and a URL that preselects each variant.
Ecommerce SEO starts with a scoped flat-fee audit and fix plan. The number depends on catalog size, the number of templates, whether logs are available, and which platform you run, so we don't publish a single price. Ongoing work is quoted monthly once the plan is agreed. As our pricing page explains, there's no percentage-of-revenue fee and no long contract.
We work inside your store platform and Google's merchant and search tools. These are the official products we use most.
Google Search Console
Google Merchant Center
Shopify
WooCommerce
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Lighthouse / PageSpeed Insights
Semrush
Bing Webmaster Tools
Cloudflare
Logos via the Simple Icons project. Trademarks belong to their owners; no endorsement implied.
Our own site's audits, published in public, plus guides and tools that apply directly to catalogs.
Send your store URL, platform, and roughly how many products you sell. We'll reply within one business day with what we'd look at first.
The primary sources, standards, research, and tools we rely on for this work. Every link was checked on 2026-10-11. We aren't affiliated with these publishers unless noted.
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