Service · Ecommerce SEO
Ecommerce SEO That Grows Revenue, Not Just Rankings
We're a UK SEO agency running long-term retainers for online stores. Category architecture, product page optimisation, and the technical work that stops an ecommerce site competing with itself. Free audit before you commit.
What we do
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Category pages that rank
Most stores put their effort into product pages and leave categories thin. Category pages are where the commercial search volume sits. We build them out with copy, internal links and schema so they can compete for the terms that actually convert.
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Product page optimisation at scale
A store with 4,000 products cannot be optimised page by page. We work in templates and rules, so a change to your product template lifts the whole catalogue at once rather than one SKU at a time.
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Faceted navigation and crawl control
Filters and sort orders generate near-infinite URL combinations that eat crawl budget and split ranking signals. We decide what gets indexed, what gets canonicalised and what gets blocked, then implement it.
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Reporting against revenue
Rankings are a means, not the result. Reporting ties organic sessions to revenue and margin by category, so you can see which parts of the catalogue the retainer is actually moving.
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Out-of-stock and seasonal handling
Discontinued lines and seasonal ranges are where ecommerce sites quietly leak authority. We put a policy in place for what happens to a URL when the product goes, rather than letting it 404 or redirect to the homepage.
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Platform-specific execution
Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce each generate their own duplicate-URL patterns and each needs different fixes. We work in the platform rather than around it.
How an ecommerce SEO retainer with us actually runs
Ecommerce SEO fails in a predictable way: six months of blog posts while the category pages stay thin and the filters keep generating junk URLs. Here is the order we work in.
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Free audit (week 0)
Technical sweep of the store: category and product templates, faceted navigation, canonical handling, internal linking, schema, Core Web Vitals, and the duplicate-URL patterns your platform generates by default. We tell you what is working, what is broken, and whether your traffic supports a retainer or whether paid should come first.
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Foundations (weeks 1 to 4)
Crawl control first, because everything else compounds off it. Faceted URLs resolved, canonicals corrected, schema implemented in the templates rather than bolted on by an app, and the out-of-stock policy agreed and applied.
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Category build-out (months 2 to 4)
The commercial terms live on category pages, so this is where the revenue is. Keyword mapping across the catalogue, copy and internal links added to the categories that can rank, and new categories created where there is demand you do not currently have a page for.
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Compound and report (ongoing)
Content and digital PR to build authority, continuous product template improvements, and monthly reporting tied to revenue by category. Quarterly strategic review to decide where the next quarter's effort goes.
Why ecommerce SEO is a different brief
An ecommerce site is not a brochure site with a checkout attached. A twenty-page services website has twenty things to optimise. A store with 4,000 products has 4,000 product URLs, several hundred category and subcategory URLs, and a faceted navigation capable of generating tens of thousands more. The work is structural, and it does not respond to the page-by-page approach that works fine on a small site.
The most common failure we see is effort in the wrong place. Agencies optimise product pages because that is where the products are, but product searches are usually navigational: someone already knows the brand and model. The commercial, non-branded demand sits at category level. Someone searching for a product type rather than a product name is at the point where they can still be persuaded, and the page that should meet them is a category page that in most stores is a heading, a filter bar, and a grid of thumbnails.
The second failure is crawl waste. Every ecommerce platform generates duplicate URLs by default. Filters, sort orders, pagination, session parameters and products sitting in multiple categories all multiply the URL count without adding anything a customer would search for. Left alone, Google spends its crawl allowance on combinations nobody wants and the pages you care about get visited less often. Deciding what gets indexed is not housekeeping, it is one of the highest-leverage things you can do on a large store.
The third is what happens when products go away. Retailers discontinue lines constantly. A store that lets those URLs 404, or bulk-redirects them to the homepage, throws away the authority those pages accumulated and gives customers a dead end. A policy for end-of-life URLs is unglamorous and it protects a surprising amount of traffic.
Platform matters too, and generic advice does not survive contact with it. Shopify puts products under both /products/ and /collections/, WooCommerce ships permalink and attribute-archive behaviours that need controlling, and BigCommerce handles faceting differently again. We run Shopify SEO, WooCommerce SEO and BigCommerce SEO as separate retainers for that reason. If you want the fundamentals before you talk to anyone, our guide to ecommerce SEO covers the ground in detail.
None of this is quick. Ecommerce SEO compounds: the structural work in the first two months does very little on its own and a great deal once the category build-out lands on top of it. Anyone promising results in week three is selling you rankings for terms nobody searches.
What clients say
Recent case studies
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Case study | SEO compounding into AI Mode visibility
How 18 months of law-firm SEO compounded into being the top-cited legal source in Google's AI Mode
298 answers Google AI Mode citations
The same content library built during 18 months of an SEO retainer is now the single most-cited source in Google's AI Mode answers for the client's target legal queries. It…
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Case study | SEO + Answer Engine Optimisation
How we launched a public services information site and grew organic clicks from zero to over 34,000 a month in three months
34,612 (Month 3) Monthly organic clicks
A new public-services information site launched from a bare domain. Three months in, the site was pulling 34,612 organic clicks a month and had been picked up by Google's AI…
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Case study · Google Ads for ecommerce
How we compounded a deals ecommerce brand's Google Ads revenue 68x in seven years while holding blended ROAS above 13x
£3.7m (Year 7) Annual Google Ads revenue
Seven years of a Google Ads programme for a deals-and-discounts ecommerce brand. Annual attributed revenue grew from £55k in Year 1 to £3.7m in Year 7 (68x). Blended seven-year ROAS…
Frequently asked questions
How is ecommerce SEO different from regular SEO?
The fundamentals are the same. What differs is scale and structure. A store has thousands of URLs, a faceted navigation that generates thousands more, products that live in several categories at once, and a catalogue that changes weekly as lines come and go. That means the work is done in templates and rules rather than page by page, and crawl control matters far more than it does on a small site.
Should we optimise product pages or category pages first?
Category pages, almost always. Product searches tend to be navigational, someone already knows what they want and often who sells it. The non-branded commercial demand sits at category level, and category pages in most stores are close to empty. That is where the gap between what you rank for and what you could rank for is widest.
How long before we see results?
Expect movement on long-tail and category terms from around month three, and meaningful revenue change from month six. Ecommerce SEO compounds rather than switching on. The first two months are structural work that shows very little on its own and makes everything after it work. If you need revenue inside a quarter, paid search is the honest answer and we will tell you so in the audit.
Do you work with our platform?
We run dedicated retainers for Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce, and we work on custom and headless builds too. The platform changes the technical execution rather than the strategy. If you are on one of the three, the platform-specific pages linked above will be a closer fit than this one.
Can you do SEO on a store with thousands of products?
That is the case where it pays best. Large catalogues are where template-level work has the most leverage: one change to a product template can lift several thousand pages at once. Large catalogues are also where crawl waste and duplicate URLs do the most damage, so there is usually more to recover.
What happens to URLs when a product is discontinued?
We agree a policy in the first month. Broadly: redirect to the closest equivalent product where one exists, redirect to the parent category where it does not, and keep the page live with a clear out-of-stock state where the line is coming back. What we avoid is letting them 404 or bulk-redirecting everything to the homepage, both of which throw away accumulated authority.
Do you build links?
Digital PR and link acquisition sit outside the core retainer fee so you are not paying for it in months when it is not the right lever. We will tell you when authority is the constraint rather than on-site work, and quote separately.
What does an ecommerce SEO retainer cost?
It depends on catalogue size and how much structural work the audit turns up, so we quote after the audit rather than before. The audit is free and you get the findings whether or not you go ahead.