Most e-commerce SEO advice concentrates on product pages. In practice the category page is usually the one that ranks, converts and gets ignored. Store SEO is mostly architecture: which pages exist, which are indexable, and which are allowed to compete.
What this covers
- category and subcategory architecture
- faceted navigation and parameter control
- product page content and structured data
- out-of-stock and discontinued product handling
- internal linking between related products
- platform migrations without losing rankings
Faceted navigation is the main risk
Filters generate URLs. Colour, size, brand, price band and sort order combine into thousands of near-identical pages, and a crawler will happily spend your entire crawl budget on them.
We decide deliberately which filtered views deserve to be indexable — usually a small set with genuine search demand, such as a brand within a category — and make the rest unavailable to crawling through consistent canonical, robots and internal linking rules.
Category pages that deserve to rank
A category page with a heading and a product grid competes against pages that also explain the choice. Adding useful, genuinely written guidance about how to choose between the options, placed where it does not push products below the fold, is usually the highest-value content work in a store.
Product pages
Manufacturer descriptions appear identically on every retailer. Where you cannot rewrite everything, prioritise the products that matter commercially and add what the manufacturer does not: compatibility, sizing reality, what is in the box, delivery timing.
Product structured data with accurate price and availability affects how the listing appears. Wrong data is worse than none.
Discontinued and out-of-stock products
Deleting a product URL that has links and rankings throws both away. Depending on the situation, keep the page with alternatives, redirect to the closest replacement, or return the correct status — but decide, rather than letting the platform default do it.
Migrations
Platform migrations are where store visibility is most often lost. Complete URL mapping, redirect testing, and structured data verification are done before launch, not diagnosed afterwards.
FAQ
Which platform is best for SEO?
All the major platforms can rank. Implementation matters far more than the logo.
Should every filter be indexable?
No. Almost none should be. A small, deliberate set with real demand is the usual answer.
Can you fix a drop after a migration?
Often, if the old URL structure can still be reconstructed. Speed matters.