SEO – Ecommerce

Selling the same product as everyone else

An online store has a problem an ordinary website does not. You are usually selling something a dozen other retailers also sell, often using the description the manufacturer gave all of you. Search engines have to pick one of those pages, and there is no reason for it to be yours unless you give them one.

That is what ecommerce SEO is for. It is less about chasing one big keyword and more about making a catalogue legible: the right pages competing for the right searches, and the rest getting out of the way.

Where the work actually goes

• Category pages before product pages. Someone searching "waterproof hiking boots" wants a choice, not one boot. Category and collection pages are usually the pages that can rank, and they are usually the ones nobody has written anything on.
• Product copy that is yours. The manufacturer's blurb is on a hundred other sites. Even a few honest lines of your own — sizing, what it suits, what it does not — beats a duplicate.
• Structured data. Price, availability, and review ratings marked up properly, so your listing carries the stars and the price rather than a bare blue link.
• Faceted navigation. Filters can spin one category into thousands of near-identical URLs and burn a crawler's time on pages that can never rank. Getting this wrong is one of the most common causes of a store that simply is not indexed.
• Discontinued and out-of-stock lines. Deleting a page throws away whatever it had earned. Redirect it or keep it, but decide deliberately.
• Speed on the templates. A slow product template is slow on every product you sell.

An honest word about scale and time

Nobody optimises five thousand product pages. The work goes into the handful of category and brand pages that can realistically earn traffic, plus the technical fixes that lift the whole catalogue at once. And this is slower than advertising: expect movement on longer, more specific searches first, and the competitive terms to take considerably longer — or not to come at all, if the market is one you cannot yet compete in. We would rather say that up front than bill you for a year to find out.

The plans below are a starting point rather than a fixed menu. Tell us the platform you are on and roughly how many products you carry, and we will come back with a recommendation and an exact price.