E-commerce SEO

An online store is an SEO problem of scale

Ecommerce SEO is the work of making a catalog findable, and it differs from other SEO mainly because the number of pages makes every small mistake systemic.

A service site has tens of pages and a store has thousands. A weak page title pattern on a service site is one weak title, and on a store it is four thousand.

Wink approaches store optimization at the level of the template and the structure, then at the level of the individual page, because fixing one product page at a time never finishes.

Category pages earn more than product pages

The instinct is to optimize products, and the ranking opportunity usually sits one level above them.

Category pages target the searches with real volume, because most shoppers search for a type of thing before they search for a specific item. A product page competes for a narrow term and often against the manufacturer.

Wink optimizes category pages as destinations in their own right, with content that helps somebody choose rather than a list with a heading on top.

Product pages compete on description, not specification

A product description copied from the supplier appears on every other store selling the same item, which gives a search engine no reason to prefer yours.

Wink writes product content that answers what a shopper actually wants to know before buying, and that difference is what makes the page worth ranking.

The work covers:

• Product page optimization, including titles and descriptions
• Category page optimization and the content that supports it
• SEO titles and meta descriptions built as scalable patterns
• Product schema markup for rich results
• Image optimization across a catalog
• Internal linking between related and complementary products

Filters create more pages than anyone intended

Search filters and sorting options generate URL combinations at a rate that can bury a store's real pages under its own variations.

Wink resolves this through website structure work, canonical tags and crawl control, so that search engines spend their attention on the pages meant to rank.

This is where ecommerce SEO becomes inseparable from technical SEO, because a catalog is where technical faults scale fastest.

Purchase intent is where the value is

Ecommerce keyword research targets the searches that carry buying intent rather than the ones that carry the most traffic.

Somebody searching a product with a qualifier such as a size, a brand, a use or a price range is much closer to a purchase than somebody searching the category alone.

Those qualified searches are also less contested, which is why the research maps them deliberately instead of chasing the largest number on a report.

Out of stock and discontinued products

A catalog changes constantly, and how a store handles a product that no longer exists affects both rankings and revenue.

Removing the page discards whatever ranking it earned, while leaving it live frustrates shoppers. The work sets rules for redirecting, retaining or replacing pages so accumulated authority is not thrown away each season.

Who this is for

• Stores with traffic that does not convert into orders
• Catalogs where category pages were never treated as content
• Shops whose product descriptions came from the supplier
• Stores where filters have generated thousands of crawlable URLs
• Businesses on any platform, since the principles are platform independent

What it connects to

Ecommerce SEO builds on on page SEO applied at scale, it depends on the store being technically sound through ecommerce solutions, and it commonly runs alongside performance marketing so paid and organic cover the same catalog.

Where to start

Send us your store and the twenty products you most want to sell. The audit will usually find that the category pages above them are doing very little.