ecommerce seo — at catalogue scale
Ecommerce SEO at catalogue scale.
Catalogues break search in predictable ways: facets that mint a million URLs, canonicals pointing at the wrong variant, feeds and categories that disagree, platform caches serving the wrong thing to the wrong visitor. I led the technical SEO campaign behind Urban Outfitters' ecommerce store — architecture, crawl and indexation — and, this year, found that nearly half of a UK retailer's "traffic" was a bot farm. The fix is structural, and it ships.
in practice since 2007 · uk & us · one operator · no forms, no funnels
who this is for — three situations
01
Traffic looks fine and orders don't.
Mowers Online's August showed roughly 45% of sessions coming from a farm that never bought anything. A forty-minute origin probe told the truth the analytics couldn't. Measurement first, then the edge rules.
02
Facets, filters and variants are eating your crawl budget.
Faceted navigation needs a policy: which combinations are pages, which are parameters, which are noindexed, and what each canonical says. Then the templates have to obey it.
03
You're replatforming and the last migration cost rankings.
A frozen URL inventory, a generated and tested redirect map, and rankings watched through the flip. A UK locksmith group's 238 URLs were verified at cutover, every one.
how the work runs — four stations
01
Map
Crawl the catalogue as Google does and as a shopper does. Inventory categories, facets, variants, feeds and the canonical decisions already in play.
02
Decide
A written architecture: what indexes, what doesn't, what the canonical is, how the feed and the page agree. Reviewed with the people who own the catalogue.
03
Ship
Template, config and platform changes in your stack — Shopify, ShopWired, WooCommerce, Magento, headless. Edge rules where bots or caches are the problem.
04
Watch
Crawl stats, index coverage, server logs and revenue by landing page, read together after every change.
what lands — the receipt
- 01Catalogue crawl and facet inventory
- 02Indexation and canonical architecture, written and agreed
- 03Template and platform fixes shipped
- 04Feed and category reconciliation
- 05Edge and bot rules when traffic isn't traffic
- 06Migration freeze, redirect map and cutover verification when URLs move
- 07Readouts: crawl, coverage, speed, landing-page revenue
signed — one operator, no handoffs
07 items
proof — on the record
case file · Mowers Online
≈45%
of August sessions were the farm — zero orders among them
source — analytics + origin probe
sealed file · UK tile retailer
2.2 s → 47 ms
server response, before and after
source — server timing, verified
sealed file · UK locksmith group
238 / 238
URLs verified at cutover
source — URL manifest + fetch sweep
built · SEOflare
1,647 / 1,752
pages lost to a CDN firewall in thirty seconds — the incident
source — crawl evidence rows
asked straight — answered straight
01Which ecommerce platforms do you work with?
Shopify, ShopWired (I built and ship an SEO app on its store), WooCommerce, Magento and headless storefronts. The architecture work is platform-neutral; the implementation isn't, which is why I do both.
02How do you handle faceted navigation?
With a policy before any code: which facet combinations deserve a page, which are parameters, which are noindexed, and what each canonical points to. Then the templates, the sitemap and the internal links are made to agree with it.
03Can you help if traffic is up but sales are flat?
That pattern is often not human. On one retailer roughly 45% of sessions were a bot farm with zero orders among them. Reading the origin logs settles it in an afternoon; the edge rules follow.
04Do you write product descriptions and category content?
I'll tell you which pages need words and what they need to say, and I'll fix the templates that stop good copy from ranking. The writing itself stays with your team or a writer who knows your products.
05Do you work with stores outside the UK?
Yes. US and European stores are a normal part of the work; everything runs remotely, with the readouts in writing.
start — the brief
A few lines about the site, the problem and the evidence you have.
The reply is a straight read on fit and shape, from the person who does the work. If what you need is small, it says so. If it is not a fit, it points somewhere better.