About the service
E-commerce SEO: why it's a separate discipline
SEO for an online store differs substantially from SEO for a service site or a corporate site. Here the architecture is different, the role of content is different, the technical challenges are different. A store with 10,000 products is hundreds of thousands of possible URLs with filters, thousands of duplicates, mountains of technical nuances that a general-purpose SEO specialist often can’t solve.
Over 8 years of working with e-commerce we’ve developed our own methodology for stores and our own solutions for the major CMSs. This lets us quickly get to grips with a project of any scale and give concrete recommendations that actually work — not ‘general advice from an SEO textbook’.
Why a store is a different task
A typical service site has 5–50 key pages. A store has thousands. Every category, subcategory, every product page, every filter is a separate landing page. If you approach each ‘the old way’ — a copywriter writes a unique 1,500-word text — you’ll never cover even half the catalog. You need different approaches: automated meta-tag generation from templates, making pages unique through structured data, generating filter content through product combinations.
The most common store problems we run into
- Duplicate content from filters and sorting. A store can have hundreds of URLs with identical content — Google doesn’t know which to index, so it indexes none.
- Thin content. Categories with 3–5 products and no description. Google considers them ’empty’ and ignores them.
- Canonicalization without logic. Either canonical is the same everywhere, or it’s missing entirely. Both are a disaster.
- Pagination without rules. Pages /catalog?page=2, /catalog?page=3 get indexed, compete with the main page and drag it down.
- Catalog speed. 8–15 seconds to load. Users leave, Google ranks the site lower.
- No Product schema. Without it Google can’t show the price and reviews in the results — that’s -20…-40% CTR versus competitors.
- A weak blog or none at all. You lose a huge volume of informational traffic that could be turned into buyers.
How we work with filters
Filters are the most powerful and most complex SEO tool in a store. Open them for indexing ‘as is’ and you get millions of useless URLs that eat the whole crawl budget. Close them entirely and you miss a huge chunk of demand for specific products (‘red chiffon dresses’, ‘iPhone 15 Pro 256GB blue’).
Our approach is hybrid. We go through all possible filter combinations and look at the search demand for each. Combinations with real demand we turn into full SEO pages: a separate clean URL, a unique Title and Description, copy, optimized internal linking. The rest we canonical to the ‘parent’ category — they work for users, and for Google they don’t exist.
Product pages
Large stores often face a dilemma: 50,000 products — how do you write a unique description for each? The path for small stores is copywriters writing each description by hand. For large ones — a combination of methods:
- Unique descriptions for the top 1,000 products (the ones generating 80% of sales).
- Template generation with attribute substitution for the bulk.
- Pulling in reviews and Q&A as unique content.
- Product schema with all the details to enrich snippets.
The catalog’s technical side
Catalogs are 80% of the technical problems in our work. Crawling, indexing, URL parameter handling, speed on large pages, server-side rendering, filter handling. Our team has specialists who do exclusively this. We didn’t ‘google a solution’ — we have our own methods for the major CMSs.
Link building for a store
A big mistake is pointing all links at the home page. In stores, categories bring 5–10 times more traffic than the home page. So we build link building tied to specific landing pages: links to key categories, to seasonal collections, to blog guides that support commercial queries.
What you get
After a year of steady work, the typical result: traffic grew 2–4×, the share of SEO in the store’s total revenue grew to 40–70%, and 500–2,000 key queries reached the top 10. The exact numbers depend on the niche, the current state of the site and the budget — we give a realistic forecast after an audit.
