A catalog creates its own problems
On a showcase site, you decide every page. On a store, the software creates pages without asking you. A catalog of 400 products regularly ends up with 20,000 crawlable URLs, and that is where the organic search performance of an e-commerce site is decided.
- Every combination of filters becomes an address: color, size, price, brand, sort by popularity. Multiply them and you get the number.
- Product pages reuse the supplier's description, the same one your ten competitors use: that is duplicate content across the whole catalog, and Google has no reason to pick yours.
- Discontinued products disappear and leave 404 errors behind them, sometimes on the pages that earned the most.
- Category pages capture most of the volume on the keywords that matter, and often end up reduced to a title and a grid of thumbnails.
- The crawl budget goes into filters while new products wait weeks before being indexed.
None of these issues is solved by a plugin or a checkbox. They call for trade-offs, and those trade-offs depend on your catalog. That is why an e-commerce SEO consultant spends more time sorting than optimizing.
The five workstreams of a store
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Category architecture
This is where the search volume is, and it is the most neglected part. A category has to match a way people search, which does not always line up with the catalog's internal logic. A section organized by supplier makes sense to you and is invisible to Google.
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Product pages
They do not all have the same value. A product page that differs from the others only by its reference number will never rank. A handful carry the revenue and deserve real copy; the rest mostly need clean markup, complete structured data and no duplication. Sorting before writing keeps you from paying for pages nobody will ever search for.
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Facets and filters
The most profitable and most technical item. Some combinations match real searches and deserve an indexable page with its own title. All the others must stay available to shoppers while being closed to the crawler. The line is drawn case by case, based on the real volume of each keyword.
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Content that feeds the catalog
Buying guides, comparisons, in-depth articles. Well linked, they capture pre-purchase traffic and send it on to the sales pages. Poorly linked, they compete with those pages and you lose both.
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Products that go away
Out of stock, discontinued, end of season. Each case calls for a different answer: keep the page, redirect to an equivalent, send visitors up to the category. Deciding once and automating the rule beats handling each case as it comes.
What changes from one platform to another
The principles are the same everywhere, the room to maneuver is not: each CMS comes with its own constraints and shortcuts. Here is what I look at first on the three most widespread ones.
- Shopify
- The URL structure is fixed, and the same product stays reachable through several paths depending on the collection the visitor came from. The theme's canonical tags do part of the job, rarely all of it. I mostly work on collections, page templates, metafields and theme speed.
- PrestaShop
- Lots of levers within reach and lots of ways to get it wrong. Product combinations easily generate duplicates, modules add URL parameters, and multistore complicates the markup. On the other hand, you can truly rework everything.
- WooCommerce
- The flexibility of WordPress, with its drawbacks. Taxonomies produce useless archives, variations get duplicated, and stacked plugins weigh heavily on Core Web Vitals. Cleaning up often brings quick results.
- Custom development
- No platform constraints, so no safety rails either. I work in JavaScript, PHP and MySQL, which lets me step in directly rather than write recommendations that someone else will have to translate into code.
What I have already done on catalogs
I practiced e-commerce copywriting at volume before doing audits. I managed product page descriptions in the PIM of Drawer, a design furniture catalog where the hard part is writing hundreds of pages that do not look alike, rather than writing a single one.
I also worked on the editorial content of direct-to-consumer brands such as Panda Tea and Unbottled. On this kind of site, the exercise is to cover the searches that come before a purchase, then organize those articles so they send visitors to the sales pages instead of taking their place.
Everything hinges on how the internal linking is built, and that is exactly where most store blogs sabotage themselves: they capture organic traffic that never reaches the catalog.
How much a store SEO audit costs
Once facets are counted, a store almost always exceeds 50 pages, so the relevant tiers start at the second one.
| Catalog size | Audit only, all taxes included | Audit + fixes, all taxes included |
|---|---|---|
| 50 to 300 URLs small store, limited catalog | from €1,190 | from €1,890 |
| 300 to 1,500 URLs established store, rotating catalog | from €1,990 | on quote |
| Larger, multilingual or multistore | on quote | on quote |
| Monthly support the format suited to a catalog that keeps changing | €990 / month | not applicable |
Prices include all taxes; VAT does not apply (article 293 B of the French General Tax Code).
Content writing, quarterly follow-up and sites under 50 pages follow the general price list.
What I am asked most often
How many product pages really need optimizing?
Far fewer than people think. In most catalogs, a minority of products accounts for most of the searches and sales. Those are the ones that deserve copy written by hand.
For the rest, the goal is different: clean markup, no duplication, well-filled attributes and a good place in the internal linking. Hundreds of product pages can be handled this way without writing hundreds of texts.
Does an online store need a blog?
Yes, as long as it serves the catalog. Pre-purchase searches represent a much larger volume than product searches, and a sales page answers them poorly.
The trap is publishing articles that target the same queries as the categories. You then end up with two pages fighting for the same spot, and Google picking neither of them clearly.
What should you do with sold-out or discontinued products?
Three cases. The product is coming back soon: the page stays online, with the return date and alternatives. It will never come back but an equivalent exists: permanent redirect to that equivalent. It will not come back and nothing replaces it: redirect to the parent category.
What you should avoid is plain deletion. A product page that has built up history and backlinks has value, and removing it amounts to throwing that value away.
Should Google be allowed to index filter pages?
Only the ones that match a real search. “Women's running shoes size 8” is something people search for, so the page deserves to exist with its own title and its own text. “Shoes sorted by price, high to low, page 4” is not.
The rule is built from the search volumes of your industry, then applied at the level of the faceted navigation engine. Leaving everything open is the best way to drown the pages that matter.
Is Shopify a good choice for SEO?
Fine on the essentials, restrictive on the details. The URL structure cannot be changed, filter handling depends a lot on the theme, and some fixes that are routine elsewhere require a workaround here.
That said, no store fails at SEO because of Shopify. It fails because of a poorly organized catalog and copied product pages, and both problems exist on every platform.
Should a store invest in SEO or in Google Ads?
Both, at different times. Google Ads buys traffic immediately and stops dead with the budget. SEO takes months and keeps producing afterwards. For a store that is just starting, Ads is mostly a way to measure: in three weeks you know which keywords bring qualified traffic and at what conversion rate, which saves you from building six months of work on an assumption.
What I do not do is assembly-line link building. On a catalog, money spent on links almost always returns less than the same money spent on architecture and category pages, as long as those have not been reworked.
Are supplier descriptions good enough?
For products nobody searches for by name, they do the job as long as they are complete and well marked up. For your best sellers, they put you in direct competition with every reseller of the same product, with identical text and usually lower domain authority.
The math is simple: rewrite the pages that earn money, structure the others.