E-commerce SEO

Why online stores struggle with SEO

An online store is a strange website from Google's point of view. A shop with 400 products can easily generate 40,000 addresses once you add colour filters, size filters, sorting, pagination and tracking parameters. Most of those pages are near-duplicates. If Google wastes its attention on them, your real categories get crawled less often and rank worse.

The second problem is thin content. Category pages are often just a grid of photos with no text, and product pages carry the same manufacturer description that every other retailer copied. Google has no reason to prefer your page over a bigger competitor's.

E-commerce SEO fixes both: it trims what shouldn't be indexed and strengthens what should.

Categories do the heavy lifting

For most stores, category pages bring more organic revenue than individual products. People search broadly first ("merino wool socks", "ceramic dinnerware set") and narrow down later. So I start by mapping searches to categories:

• existing categories get a clear title, a short helpful introduction and links to related categories;
• searches with real demand but no matching category become new categories or curated collections;
• overlapping categories that compete for the same search are merged.

This is also where Canadian specifics show up. Searches for "free shipping Canada", size conventions, and seasonal demand for winter gear all affect how a category should be built.

Product pages: start where the money is

Rewriting every product description is rarely worth it. I look at sales and search data and pick the products that matter: best sellers, high-margin items and products people search for by name. Those get unique copy that answers real questions: materials, sizing, care, delivery times to different provinces, what's in the box.

Every product page also gets structured data for price, availability and reviews, so Google can display those details. Reviews have to be real; under the Competition Act, fake or selectively displayed reviews are a genuine risk, not just a policy issue.

Technical hygiene

Stores need more technical care than service sites. Typical fixes on my list:

1. canonical tags pointing filtered and sorted pages to the main category;
2. a clean XML sitemap with only the pages you want indexed;
3. image compression and lazy loading so category grids load fast on mobile;
4. rules for discontinued products, with redirects to the nearest alternative.

The details are on the technical SEO page. If the store platform makes these fixes impossible, a rebuild on a clean structure is often cheaper over a year than fighting it; see e-commerce websites.

Measuring revenue, not visits

A store owner needs to know how much organic search earns, by category. I make sure GA4 records purchases with their value, so the monthly report shows orders and revenue from organic search next to paid channels. Store owners who also run ads usually want the full chain from click to sale, which is what end-to-end analytics covers. For the bigger picture of channels, margins and pricing, see marketing for online stores.

Selling into Quebec

A store that ships to Quebec has to offer French at least as prominently as English. My SEO work covers the English-language store only: French pages, their keyword research and translated product names are outside it, and would come from your own team or translator. Whoever handles them should know that each language version needs its own addresses and proper hreflang markup, so Google doesn't treat the two versions as duplicates, and that a literal translation is often not what people type.

Seasonality and timing

SEO for seasonal categories has to start months ahead. If you want to rank for winter jackets in November, the category page should be improved in late summer. I plan the content calendar around your peak seasons, including Black Friday and the holiday period, so pages have time to settle before demand arrives.