Niche — E-commerce
E-commerce sites built for organic growth
Category architecture, faceted navigation decisions, PDP schema, and the content that earns links — without turning your store into a generic blog.
Where e-commerce SEO goes wrong
Most e-commerce SEO advice is about product pages and blog content. The real leverage is in category architecture — how products are organised, how categories are named, what facets are indexed, and how the site architecture distributes authority.
Get the category architecture right and ranking individual product pages becomes much easier. Get it wrong and you're fighting crawl budget issues, duplicate content problems, and thin page penalties indefinitely.
The e-commerce authority framework
Category page architecture
Category pages are the most valuable pages on an e-commerce site — they capture high-volume, high-intent queries. Building them as genuine authority pages with curated content, buying guides, and rich schema is the difference between a category that ranks and one that doesn't.
Faceted navigation: index vs. block
Faceted navigation creates thousands of URL combinations. Most should be blocked from indexing. The ones worth indexing — filtered category pages with real search demand — should be treated as individual landing pages with unique content. Getting this wrong is the source of most e-commerce duplicate content issues.
Product schema that earns rich results
Product, Review, AggregateRating, Offer, and BreadcrumbList schema — correctly implemented — earn rich results in the SERP. Price drops, review stars, availability. These directly impact click-through rates on competitive queries.
Content that earns links without being a blog
The most linkable e-commerce content is original research, data, or tools — not generic buying guides. Original market data, sizing guides based on real customer data, comparison tools. The kind of content that journalists and bloggers naturally link to.
Frequently asked questions
Should I noindex out-of-stock product pages?
It depends on whether you plan to restock. Permanently discontinued products should 301 redirect to the closest equivalent or category page. Temporarily out-of-stock products should stay indexed — they may rank for the product name and capture demand when you restock. Update the schema to reflect availability status.
How do I handle duplicate content from product variants?
Canonical tags are the standard solution — point variant URLs (size/colour pages) to the master product URL. But if a variant represents a meaningfully different product with its own search demand, consider making it an independent page with unique content. Don't canonical away pages that could rank independently.
Is Shopify good for SEO?
Shopify is fine for SEO with the right configuration. The main limitations are URL structure (you can't remove /collections/ or /products/), some crawl budget issues with duplicate URLs (?variant= parameters), and limited control over JavaScript rendering. These are workable constraints, not dealbreakers.
Ready to turn your store into an authority?
I audit e-commerce sites and build content architecture that earns organic growth. Let's talk about your store.