Won on category pages, lost in replatforms
Your category pages are the money pages
Buyers search "linen bedding" far more than any single product name. Category pages match that intent, yet most stores treat them as furniture: a grid, a filter bar, no unique copy, no schema, no internal links beyond pagination. Meanwhile the blog gets weekly attention and earns traffic that rarely buys. Flip the effort.
Faceted navigation eats your crawl budget
Every combination of size, color and sort order can mint a new URL. Left alone, a 2,000-product store can expose hundreds of thousands of crawlable near-duplicates, and Google spends its visit reading noise instead of your new arrivals. Canonicals, parameter rules and selective noindexing are not glamorous. They are rent.
Product schema is table stakes now
Price, availability and review markup drive the rich results and feed the shopping surfaces, including the AI ones. If your platform emits broken or partial Product schema, you are invisible in places you cannot measure.
The replatform trap
Most catastrophic traffic losses we see follow the same story: new platform, new URL structure, redirects written the week of launch, rankings gone by month two. If a replatform is anywhere on your roadmap, SEO Migration Support exists precisely for this, and it is far cheaper than the recovery project.
The stack we would buy, in order
| Step | Task | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Technical SEO Audit, crawl and index reality check | $295 |
| 2 | On-Page Optimization, category pages first | $245 |
| 3 | SEO Migration Support, when the replatform comes | $595 |
What the first 90 days look like
Month one is the Technical SEO Audit, because at catalog scale the technical layer is the money layer: crawl the site, find the duplicate and dead URLs, score the damage, ship the fix list. Month two executes On-Page Optimization on the ten category pages that carry revenue, with rewritten titles and intros that read like a buyer's guide instead of a product dump. Month three cleans faceted-URL rules, confirms Product schema passes Google's merchant checks, and baselines rankings so month four is measured against evidence.
The signals we watch weekly
Indexed pages against known pages, because a growing gap means crawl waste or thin content. Category entrances and their revenue, because that is where ecommerce SEO pays. Impressions on money terms, because they move before clicks and tell you the trajectory early. The team behind Kadima ran this exact playbook on a 71,000-URL catalog: 50,700 dead URLs cleaned, 23,000 canonicals fixed, 4 million clicks in six months and $600K in tracked organic revenue.
Questions store owners ask us
Does the platform matter, Shopify or otherwise?
Less than the forums say. Shopify, Woo and BigCommerce all rank fine when categories are strong and duplicates are controlled. Platform-specific quirks, like Shopify's collection URL patterns, are handled inside the audit rather than sold as separate work.
Is my catalog too small for SEO to matter?
No. Under about a hundred products the game is simply different: fewer, deeper category pages and buying guides instead of crawl management. The audit tells you which game you are in before you spend on content.
Do you write product descriptions?
We write category page copy and buying guides, where rankings are won. Individual product descriptions only matter for your highest-revenue items, and the on-page spec names exactly which ones deserve the effort.
One honest caveat: the timelines above describe when movement typically starts, not a guarantee. Search engines do not sign contracts, and results land quicker or slower than any plan. What we guarantee is the deliverable itself: scoped work, QA gated, revised up to three times until it matches the brief.
Find out what Google actually crawls
The Technical SEO Audit maps your crawl reality, scores every issue, and hands your developers a prioritized fix list.