E-commerce SEO for large catalogues and PrestaShop stores

Filters generate thousands of URLs with almost the same list of products. Google's crawlers have a limited amount of time for your store and spend it on those combinations instead of on the categories that sell. The work here is about REMOVING pages from the index, not adding them.

In e-commerce, a buying query leads to a list of products, not to an article. A category well written for its keyword earns from day one, while a guide post builds visibility but rarely closes the sale. That's why the order of work is the reverse of company-website SEO.

A discontinued product leaves behind a URL that still holds a ranking and traffic for months. Without a redirect rule, seasonal catalogue turnover wipes out the previous quarter's work, and that's a loss no ranking report will ever show you.

E-commerce SEO is the process in which SEO work makes a store's catalogue show up in Google's results for the queries people buy on, and takes them to the right page. Unlike paid campaigns, it builds lasting visibility, and hundreds of categories and product pages give you the long tail of keywords that earns the most in a store. It has three layers, in this order, because each one depends on the last.

What we work on in a store, month after month

• ✓ Category architecture: assigning keywords to specific pages so two of them don't compete for the same term
• ✓ Category descriptions written for the buying query, not for a character count, plus filter copy that makes it into the index
• ✓ Filters and pagination: which combinations deserve their own page, and which need to disappear from the index so the crawler reaches the products
• ✓ Product pages and the product feed: uniqueness across variants, structured data with price and availability, handling discontinued products, and names that work in both organic and shopping results
• ✓ Transactional long tail: queries with a parameter, size, brand or use case that no page answers today
• ✓ Guide content for questions asked before a purchase decision, linking to the categories that earn from those questions
• ✓ Links and brand visibility, run more cautiously than the market average, because in e-commerce it is easier to hurt yourself than to help

Two things in store SEO decide the outcome more than the copy itself, and both come from Google's own documentation, not from our opinion. Product structured data decides whether price and availability show up in results, which is about click-through rate, not ranking alone. The guidelines on faceted navigation describe how filters can generate thousands of URLs that eat Google's crawl budget instead of your categories. That is where we start, because in a store it is usually the single biggest loss. A paid catalogue audit and ongoing work are two separate contracts at JustIdea: we never deduct the audit from the retainer afterwards, and we do not require you to start with it.

• You have a list of fixes and nobody to implement it every month.
• Filters generate thousands of URLs and eat up your crawl budget.
• Categories and product pages have no structured data.
• You want to grow in free search results, not in price comparison sites.

• You want to know what needs doing first: that's a store SEO audit.
• Your catalogue needs to reach price comparison sites and Google Shopping: that's a product feed.
• The store is slow and that's the bottleneck: that's speed optimisation.

What does an online store gain from SEO?

Unlike paid campaigns, organic visibility does not disappear the moment you pause the budget. Four things that catalogue work gives an online store, and one it doesn't: a guarantee of ranking.

You're entrusting your catalogue for quarters at a time, so check the whole agency's ratings

Store SEO is bought in quarters, and for the first few months you are really paying for trust in the contractor. These are three JustIdea profiles with client ratings and a link to the text of each review.

Four things we hear before we start working together

Every one of them is reasonable, and each has an answer you can check before signing anything.

“The competition is too big, we have no chance”

Ranking a store on the most generic terms usually really has no chance. A store earns instead from queries with a parameter: size, brand, use case, application. That's where the big players have generic categories, while you can have a page that answers that exact query.

“We tried SEO and nothing came of it”

The most common cause we see is content work on a store that Google's crawler simply couldn't get through. Copy kept getting written while the search engine spent its crawl budget on filter combinations. That's why we start by sorting out the catalogue, before anyone writes the first description.

“We have thousands of products, who's going to write all that”

From an SEO point of view, nobody has to write thousands of product pages by hand, and that's not the point. We work with templates and patterns: a rule for generating names, a description template with parameters, and manual work only for the categories with the biggest potential. At a large catalogue's scale, that's the only method that scales.

“We'd rather spend that budget on campaigns”

Sometimes that is the right call, and we say so: with a very small catalogue in a saturated category, or with goods sold by a hundred other sellers at the same price. In every other case, both channels work together, because campaigns give SEO a map of the queries that buy, and SEO lowers the average cost per order.

E-commerce SEO: questions before you decide

E-commerce SEO: what else is worth knowing