Ecommerce
Ecommerce SEO, and an honest word about scale
Ecommerce SEO splits into two jobs that need different people. Category architecture at ten thousand products is one. Getting a small catalogue found by the people who want it is the other. I do the second well.
Before you read the rest
If you run a large catalogue with faceted navigation, index bloat and a merchandising team, hire a specialist who does nothing else. If you sell fifty to five hundred products and cannot work out why the category pages get no traffic, that is a problem I can solve and it is usually cheaper than you expect.
Where small catalogues lose
The product page ranks for the brand and model, which you were going to win anyway, and the category page ranks for nothing. That is the single most common shape. The category page is the one with commercial intent behind it, and on most small stores it is a grid of thumbnails with a sentence of text.
Then there is the duplication problem. Variants, sizes and colours each generating their own URL, all near-identical, all competing. Google picks one, usually not the one you wanted, and the rest sit in the index doing nothing.
And there is the thing nobody wants to hear: a lot of ecommerce traffic that looks like SEO is actually brand demand created elsewhere. Before spending on content, it is worth separating the two, because the answer sometimes is that your problem is demand, not search.
What I would do first
Work out which pages are eligible to rank at all, which means indexation, canonicals and internal links. On most small stores a meaningful share of the catalogue is not properly linked from anywhere.
Write the category pages properly. Not a keyword paragraph under the grid: an actual buying guide that answers the comparison the customer is making, placed where they can read it.
Fix the structured data so the results carry price, availability and reviews. This does not move rankings much, and it moves click-through a lot, which is the same thing arriving by a different route.
What this search page looks like right now
I measured "ecommerce seo expert" in Canada on 2026-09-21, running it 3 times rather than once. Google wrote its own answer above the results on every run, which changes the job: the page has to be the kind of source an AI answer draws from, not just a page that ranks under it. The full measurement across eleven searches is here.
| # | Domain | Page title |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | www.upwork.com | Best Freelance Ecommerce SEO Experts for Hire (Sep 2026) |
| 2 | www.seologist.com | Ecommerce SEO Agency Canada |
| 3 | zwebra.ca | eCommerce SEO Services | E-commerce SEO Agency Toronto |
| 4 | seoresellerscanada.ca | eCommerce SEO Services |
| 5 | onelittleweb.com | Top 49+ eCommerce SEO Consultants & Experts in 2026 |
| 6 | www.evoluted.net | Ecommerce SEO Agency | Award-Winning ... |
| 7 | graby.ca | E-commerce SEO Services in Canada - Graby |
| 8 | agencies.semrush.com | Best Ecommerce SEO Companies in Canada 2026 |
Asked alongside it
- How much does an SEO expert cost?
- Is SEO still worth it in 2026?
- What does a SEO expert do?
- What is SEO in ecommerce?
Other industries
- Dental practices - Most dental SEO is sold as content marketing.
- WordPress sites - WordPress is not bad for SEO.
- Shopify stores - Shopify makes a good store easy and a good URL structure impossible.
- Software and SaaS - I build and market software as well as consult on it.
- Law firms - Legal search is expensive, crowded and regulated.
Questions from ecommerce
- Do you work with Shopify?
- Yes, and there is a page about that specifically, because Shopify's URL structure creates its own particular problems.
- Can you guarantee more sales?
- No. I can tell you what share of your revenue currently comes from search, and measure whether that share grows. If it does not, you should stop paying me.
- What does it cost?
- $499 for an audit, retainers from $750 a month, $2,500 for a full programme with paid search. Details here. The price does not change by industry.
Start with a 15 minute call
No deck and no discovery phase. Tell me the site and the problem, and I will tell you whether I can help and what it would cost. If I am the wrong person, I will say so on the call.