Most store owners optimise product pages. Category pages are where the volume is, and they are usually the thinnest pages on the site.
Ecommerce SEO is mostly category page work. Category pages target the terms with real volume, and on most stores they are a grid of products with no text at all. Fixing that, plus the technical problems that faceted navigation creates, produces more than any amount of product page tuning.
Shoppers search for categories far more than for specific products. Your category pages target that volume and are usually a product grid with no content. Adding genuine copy, buying guidance and FAQs to them is the highest-return work available.
Filters generate thousands of near-duplicate URLs and burn crawl budget. Canonicals, parameter handling and selective noindex are what stop a store with two hundred products having forty thousand indexable URLs.
Size, material, delivery time, return policy and real photographs from angles that matter. Unique descriptions rather than the manufacturer's text, which every competitor is also using.
Product schema with price, availability and genuine review ratings where you have them. This is what produces rich results in search, and fabricating the reviews is the fastest route to a manual action.
Deleting discontinued products throws away pages that took months to rank. Keep them, mark them unavailable and offer alternatives, or redirect to the closest match.
Slow product and category pages lose shoppers before the catalogue loads. On Indian mobile connections this is a bigger factor than most store owners measure.
| Problem | What it costs |
|---|---|
| Category pages with no content | The pages with the most volume rank for nothing |
| Manufacturer product descriptions | Identical to every competitor |
| Faceted URLs uncontrolled | Crawl budget wasted on near-duplicates |
| Out-of-stock products deleted | Throws away accumulated ranking |
| No product schema | No rich results in search |
| Fabricated review ratings | Structured data spam, manual action risk |
| Ask them | Good answer | Walk away if |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns the site and accounts? | You do, in your own name | Accounts in the agency's name |
| Can I open three live examples? | URLs you can check yourself | Screenshots and a PDF |
| What is explicitly not included? | A written list with change pricing | Everything is included |
| How will we know it worked? | A metric agreed before work starts | Activity reports |
The exclusions question decides whether the final invoice matches the quote.
Category pages. They target the terms with the most volume, and on most stores they are a product grid with no text at all. Adding real content to them usually outperforms any amount of product page work.
With canonicals, parameter handling and selective noindex, so filter combinations do not generate thousands of near-duplicate indexable URLs. Uncontrolled facets are how a store with two hundred products ends up with forty thousand URLs and wasted crawl budget.
Yes. Manufacturer descriptions are identical across every retailer selling the same item, which gives search engines no reason to prefer your page. Unique descriptions that answer real objections do.
Keep the page, mark it unavailable and suggest alternatives, or redirect to the closest match. Deleting throws away a page that may have taken months to rank, and the URL usually still has links pointing at it.
With genuine reviews and correct Product schema, yes. Fabricating ratings is structured data spam and among the most reliably penalised things you can do, so it needs real reviews first.
Three to six months for category and product pages to move, longer in competitive categories. Technical fixes such as faceted navigation control can show faster because they free crawl budget that was being wasted.
Send us what you are trying to fix and we will tell you what it takes, what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it. If we are not, we will say so.