Services
Ecommerce SEO Consultant & Services
Category and product page SEO fixed at the platform level — faceted navigation, crawl budget, and product schema, not a generic on-page checklist.
Paul Lovell — Technical SEO Consultant
Who this is for
Ecommerce sites where category pages aren't ranking despite good products, crawl budget is being wasted on filter/sort URLs, or a Shopify/platform migration flattened rankings that haven't recovered.
Process
- 1Full site crawl focused on category, subcategory, and product template structure
- 2Faceted navigation and filter/sort URL audit — what's being crawled, what's being indexed, and what should be neither
- 3Product and category schema review against what the platform generates by default
- 4Crawl budget analysis to find what's being wasted on near-duplicate parameter URLs
- 5Platform-specific fix list (Shopify, WooCommerce, custom) your team or theme developer can action directly
How this actually works
Not a checklist — the specific mechanisms most audits skip past.
01
Separate what filter/sort URLs should do from what the platform defaults to
Most ecommerce platforms generate a crawlable, indexable URL for every filter and sort combination by default. Left unchecked, this creates thousands of near-duplicate category pages competing with the canonical version for the same query — the fix is platform-specific parameter handling, not a blanket noindex that also hides pages you want ranked.
02
Check whether product schema matches what's actually purchasable
Price, availability, and variant schema that's out of sync with live inventory doesn't just fail rich-result eligibility — it can trigger manual review flags. This is checked against a live inventory sample, not just template structure, because the gap usually shows up in edge cases: out-of-stock variants, sale pricing, or bundled products.
03
Audit crawl budget against category depth, not just total URL count
A large catalogue isn't automatically a crawl budget problem — the question is whether Googlebot is reaching new/updated products within a reasonable window, or spending its budget re-crawling filter permutations of pages it already knows. Log-file analysis against category depth shows which one is actually happening.
04
Review internal linking from category to product pages for orphaned inventory
Products that are only reachable via search or a sitemap — not via category/subcategory browsing — get crawled less frequently and rank worse, even with clean schema and no technical errors. This is checked by crawling the site the way a user would, not just parsing the XML sitemap.
Deliverables
Frequently asked questions
How is ecommerce SEO different from general SEO?
Ecommerce sites have structural problems general SEO checklists don't cover: faceted navigation generating thousands of near-duplicate URLs, product schema that needs to match live inventory, crawl budget competition between category depth and filter permutations, and platform-specific constraints (Shopify's URL structure, for example, can't be changed the way a custom-built site's can). The fixes are platform and catalogue-structure specific, not generic on-page advice.
Why aren't my category pages ranking even though my products are good?
Common causes: filter/sort URLs diluting relevance signals away from the canonical category page, thin or duplicated category copy across similar collections, crawl budget being spent on parameter permutations instead of new inventory, or internal linking that doesn't reinforce the category as the primary page for its target query.
Do you work with Shopify sites specifically?
Yes — Shopify has platform-specific constraints (URL structure, app-generated schema, theme-level rendering) that need a different fix approach than a custom-built or WooCommerce site. The audit identifies what's fixable within Shopify's constraints versus what needs an app or theme-code change.
How long does an ecommerce SEO audit take to show results?
Faceted navigation and crawl budget fixes typically take 4-8 weeks to show in rankings, since Google needs to recrawl and re-evaluate category pages at scale. Schema and product-data fixes for rich-result eligibility can show within 1-2 weeks of Google's next crawl.