Service
E-commerce SEO: categories first, products second, feeds always
An online shop ranks on its category pages for the searches with volume (“wall-mounted air conditioner”), on its product pages for the searches with intent (a model number), and in Google's Shopping tab and product panels through a Merchant Center feed that costs nothing. Most shops we audit have the order backwards: thousands of thin product pages, category pages with no text, and no feed at all. Our e-commerce SEO service fixes that order, from £399 a month with a 3-month minimum, and starts with the indexing report, because a product Google has dropped cannot sell.
Three numbers to check tonight
- Search Console, Pages report: indexed pages against the number of products and categories you sell. A gap of a third or more is the first job.
- Your best-selling category page: how many words are on it that are not product names. Zero is common, and it is why the page ranks for nothing.
- Search a product you sell in Google and look for the Shopping tab. If your shop is not there, you have no feed, and your competitors are being shown for free.
The four layers of a shop
What the work is at each layer
Category pages
These carry the searches with volume, and they are usually a grid of products with no text. Each category gets a title built from the query data, an opening paragraph that says what the range is and who it suits, a buying guide section below the grid (sizes, compatibility, what changes the price), filters that do not create thousands of indexable duplicates, and internal links from the categories above it. One well-written category outranks fifty product pages.
Product pages
A product page ranks for the model number, the brand plus type, and the comparison searches. It needs the specification in text rather than an image, its own title, product structured data with price, availability and reviews where you have them, and a paragraph that answers what the box does not say. Where products differ only by size or colour, one page with variants beats twenty near-copies that Google drops.
Feeds and merchant listings
A Google Merchant Center feed with correct GTINs, prices, availability and shipping puts every product in the Shopping tab and the product knowledge panel without paying for a click. Free listings need the feed to match the page exactly; a price mismatch gets products disapproved. We build the feed, fix the disapprovals, and keep the feed in step with the site.
Technical structure
Faceted navigation, pagination, out-of-stock handling, canonical tags on variants, a sitemap that matches the live catalogue, and speed on a phone with a hundred product images on a page. This is where shops lose the most: the air-conditioning client had 53 product pages dropped from the index for structural reasons, not content ones.
From a real account
53 products missing from Google, 33 back in a week
The air-conditioning client came to us with 120 pages and 71 of them indexed. The gap was almost entirely products: 53 pages Google had crawled and chosen not to keep. A shop can look fine in a browser with a third of its catalogue missing from Google, which is why the indexing report is the first thing we open.
Within a week of the structural fixes and the resubmission, 33 of the 53 were back in the index. The report gave the number as 33, not 53, because a report that rounds 33 up to “fixed” is how clients stop trusting reports.
What a product page needs
The checklist we hold every product page to
- A title with the product name, the brand and the one attribute people search with (size, capacity, fitment)
- The specification as text, not baked into an image or a PDF
- Product structured data with price, currency, availability and the GTIN, validated
- A paragraph answering the question the box does not: what it fits, what it replaces, what it needs to work
- Photographs of the actual product, compressed, with descriptive alt text
- One canonical URL per product, with variants folded in rather than duplicated
- A link from its category page and from at least one related product
- An out-of-stock state that keeps the page and shows the alternative, never a 404
Where the enquiries come from on a shop
Three routes into a shop, and which one to fix first
A shop gets found three ways. The organic results carry the category and comparison searches, and they are won by category pages with real text. The Shopping tab and product panels carry the product searches, and they are won by a clean feed, because Google shows free listings from the feed and nothing from the page. Google Ads and Shopping ads carry whatever you pay for, and they stop the day you stop.
The order to fix them is indexing, then feed, then categories, then products. Indexing first because a dropped page sells nothing whatever else is done to it. The feed second because it is free visibility that most competitors have not set up. Categories third because the volume is there. Products last, and only the fifty the query data says matter, because the rest are a template job.
Questions about e-commerce SEO
Which platforms do you work with?
Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and custom-built shops. Every platform lets us set titles, write category copy, manage redirects and fix the sitemap; the differences are in how much control we have over speed and structured data, and the audit says what your platform allows before you commit.
We have 3,000 products. Do you write copy for all of them?
No, and nobody should. The query data shows which fifty products and which twenty categories carry the searches; those get written properly. The rest get a template that makes each page distinct (specification, compatibility, delivery) and are left indexable or noindexed on the evidence, not by default.
Do you handle Google Merchant Center and Shopping?
Yes. A correct product feed gets free listings in Google's Shopping tab and the product knowledge panel, before any advertising is paid for. Where paid Shopping makes sense it is run alongside SEO on the Multi-area tier or quoted separately, with ad spend paid by you to Google directly.
Our old products are out of stock. Delete or keep?
Keep the page if it has links or clicks, and show the replacement or the category on it. Redirect it to the closest product if it has neither. Deleting a page with rankings and sending visitors to a 404 throws away what the page earned. We decide per page from Search Console, not per rule.
Can you take a shop that is not indexed at all?
That is the commonest starting point. A Bulgarian air-conditioning client had 71 of 120 pages indexed when we started and 53 product pages missing; 33 came back within a week of the structural fixes. The audit reads your Pages report and says how deep the problem is before you pay anything.
Is one shop per sector the same rule as one business per town?
On the Local tier the rule is one business per town and sector, confirmed personally in the reply. Shops selling nationally compete on product categories rather than towns, so the conflict we check is category overlap: we will not take two shops chasing the same product searches.
Find out how many of your products Google has dropped
Send the shop's address. The audit reads the indexing report, checks the feed, scores the busiest category page, and gives you the order to fix things in.