E-commerce SEO

The filter problem nobody sees until the crawl

A shop with 400 products can easily expose 40,000 URLs to search engines. Every combination of colour, size, price range and sort order creates a new address, and each one shows almost the same products as the category it came from. Search engines spend their crawl effort on those variations and index a scattered set of them, while the category page you actually want to rank gets less attention.

Each platform has its own version of this. Shopify serves every product under several collection paths. WooCommerce creates tag and attribute archives by default. Magento layered navigation can generate URLs without limit. The fix is a set of rules: which filtered pages deserve to be indexed because people search for them, such as "black leather boots", and which should be kept out. We write those rules for your platform and, in the larger packages, implement them.

Why category pages matter more than product pages

Most shops pour effort into product pages, and those pages matter for conversion. For search, though, category pages usually carry the demand. People search for "women's running shoes" far more often than for a specific model number, and a category page is what answers that search. Yet many category pages are a heading and a grid with no text at all.

We work category pages first: a title built around the search phrase, a short introduction that helps the buyer choose, and links to closely related categories. Product pages follow, starting with your best sellers. Copying the manufacturer's description onto those is common and costly, because the same text sits on every other retailer selling that product.

Out-of-stock and discontinued products need a decision, not a default. Deleting pages that have links and traffic throws that value away. Leaving dead products live frustrates buyers. The plan sets one rule for temporary gaps and another for permanent ones, so whoever manages the catalogue does not have to decide each time.