Industry · Ecommerce
Search consulting for ecommerce.
Ecommerce search performance is decided by architecture: which category and filter combinations are indexable, how out-of-stock and discontinued products are handled, and whether revenue tracking is accurate enough to prioritise anything.
What makes ecommerce different
- Large catalogues where filter combinations can generate near-unlimited URLs
- Products appear, disappear and go out of stock constantly
- Category pages carry most of the commercial search value
- Replatforming is common and historically expensive
- Revenue data makes prioritisation possible — when the tracking is right
What we see most often
The problems that keep recurring in ecommerce
Not a generic list. These are the specific failure modes this sector produces, in rough order of how often we find them.
- 01
Faceted navigation consuming the crawl
Filter and sort combinations create thousands of crawlable, near-duplicate URLs, so the category pages that actually earn get crawled less often than colour filters.
- 02
Category architecture that does not match demand
The hierarchy follows the internal product taxonomy rather than how customers search, so there is no page for the query that would convert.
- 03
Out-of-stock and discontinued handling by accident
Products 404, redirect to the homepage, or stay live and empty. Each choice has a different effect, and usually nobody decided it deliberately.
- 04
Replatform traffic loss
A migration with a redirect map built from a CMS export instead of value data. It is one of the most expensive avoidable mistakes in ecommerce search.
- 05
Ecommerce tracking that misreports revenue
Duplicate purchase events, refunds not handled, shipping and tax inconsistently included. Then ROAS decisions get made on it.
Scope
What we typically work on
A ecommerce engagement usually draws from these. Which ones, and in what order, comes out of the diagnostic.
- Category and facet architecture with explicit indexation rules
- Crawl budget management and parameter handling
- Product lifecycle rules — out of stock, discontinued, seasonal
- Replatform and redesign protection
- GA4 ecommerce accuracy and revenue reconciliation
- Internal linking towards high-margin categories
- Programmatic category and attribute pages with a quality floor
- International and multi-currency structure where the business justifies it
Fit
Signals you are a good fit
If most of these are true, a diagnostic will pay for itself. If few are, tell us anyway and we will say so.
- A catalogue with hundreds or thousands of SKUs
- Meaningful organic revenue, or paid spend that organic could offset
- Margin differences between categories worth optimising for
- A migration, redesign or platform change planned
- Developer access, or an agency that will implement
Measurement
The metrics that matter here
Deliberately not rankings. These are the numbers that change a decision in this sector.
- Organic revenue and margin by category
- Indexed valuable category and product pages
- Crawl requests on valuable versus filter URLs
- Revenue per landing page
- Migration value retention at day 30
Questions
Ecommerce questions we get asked
Yes. Shopify has structural constraints — collection and filter URLs, duplicate product paths, theme rendering — and useful work means designing within them rather than pretending they are not there.
Some, deliberately. Filters with real search demand and enough products to be useful can be strong landing pages. Everything else should be canonicalised or blocked. The mistake is having no rule at all.
It depends on whether there is a genuine replacement, whether the URL has links and traffic, and whether the product may return. There is a correct answer per case, and the important thing is that the rule is decided rather than left to platform default.
Services and problems most relevant to ecommerce
- ServiceTechnical SEO & Search GrowthMake sure search systems can crawl, render, index and understand the pages that carry your revenue.
- ServiceWebsite Migration ProtectionMove CMS, domain, design or URL structure without losing the organic traffic and revenue you already have.
- ServiceDynamic & Programmatic SEOTurn a large dataset into pages that deserve to exist — with a template, a quality floor and an indexation strategy.
- ProblemA large site with no clear systemLarge sites need rules, thresholds and monitoring — not a longer list of tasks.
- ProblemA website migration is comingMigration losses are avoidable, but only with work that happens before launch — not after.