E-commerce SEO
E-commerce SEO Services That Turn Organic Search Into Your Best Sales Channel
Ad costs keep climbing, and every sale from paid search costs you margin. We optimize your category pages, product pages and store structure so shoppers find you in Google and AI search without you paying for each click.
25 years of SEO · $1.2M in organic sales for one client in a single month · 5-star Google reviews
Is your store paying for traffic it should be getting free?
Look at last month's numbers. How much revenue came from Google Ads and Shopping, and how much did you pay for it? For most stores, paid traffic is the biggest line after inventory. Turn it off and sales drop the next day.
Organic search should be the counterweight. But on most stores, category pages are a grid of products with no text, product pages use the manufacturer's description (the same one on 40 other sites), and filters create thousands of near-duplicate URLs that waste Google's attention.
So the store ranks for its brand name and not much else. Every month that continues, you rent customers you could own. And when ad prices rise again, you have no cushion.
Where do online stores lose organic sales without noticing?
Most stores do not have one big SEO problem. They have a handful of quiet leaks, and each one sends shoppers to a competitor. These are the ones we find most often, and you can check every one yourself.
- Internal search pages in Google: Your site's own search results can end up indexed, creating thousands of junk pages. Search Google for site:yourstore.com plus a word from your search address, such as "search" or "q=". If results appear, block them.
- Variants as separate pages: When every size and color has its own address and the same description, they compete with each other. Decide which variants have real search demand and fold the rest into one main product page.
- Paginated categories with nothing to read: Page 2, 3 and 4 of a category are fine. A category whose first page has no copy at all is not. Google needs words to understand what the category is.
- Products too deep in the site: If a shopper needs five clicks to reach a product from the homepage, Google needs five too. Best sellers should be two or three clicks away.
- Seasonal pages deleted every year: A Black Friday or holiday page that is removed in January and rebuilt in November starts from zero each time. Keep one address, update it and let it keep its history.
- A product feed that disagrees with the site: If the price or stock status in your Google Merchant Center feed does not match the page, listings can be disapproved. Feed and page must tell the same story.
- Thin or missing policy pages: Shipping, returns and contact details matter to shoppers and to Google's view of whether a store can be trusted.
- Manufacturer copy everywhere: If your description is word for word what forty other stores show, Google has no reason to pick yours.
Value tip: Google shows free product listings as well as paid ones. If your products are in Google Merchant Center with accurate data, they can appear in the Shopping tab without ad spend. Many stores set up Merchant Center only for ads and never check whether free listings are switched on. Look in your Merchant Center account today.
What does our e-commerce SEO service include?
Our e-commerce SEO service covers the parts of an online store that drive organic sales: category pages, product pages, site structure, faceted navigation, schema, speed and content. Here's what we deliver.
Category page optimization
Category pages usually rank for the most valuable shopping terms. We add useful buying copy, clear headings and smart internal links, so they win searches like "stainless steel dishwashers."
Product schema
Structured data for price, availability, reviews and shipping, so your listings can show rich details in Google and appear in shopping results.
Buying guides and comparison content
Content that catches shoppers earlier in their search and leads them to your categories.
Product page optimization
Unique descriptions, specs, FAQs and titles shoppers actually search, so your products stand out from every other store selling the same item.
Site speed for stores
We fix heavy images, apps and scripts that slow your templates, so shoppers don't leave before the page loads.
AI shopping visibility
We work to get your products and brand recommended when shoppers ask ChatGPT or Gemini what to buy.
Faceted navigation control
Faceted navigation means the filters for size, color, brand and price. We decide which filter pages deserve to rank and keep the rest out of Google's way, so crawl budget goes to pages that sell.
Out-of-stock and discontinued product handling
Clear rules for what happens to those URLs, so you keep their rankings and links instead of throwing them away.
$540K/mo
monthly revenue, up from $300K
What does e-commerce SEO look like in real numbers?
A household appliance retailer came to us doing about $300K a month. Its products were competitive, but organic search wasn't pulling its weight. Category pages were thin, product pages repeated manufacturer copy, and the site structure buried key categories.
We rebuilt category pages around how shoppers search, rewrote priority product pages, cleaned up the structure and fixed what slowed the store down. Monthly revenue grew from $300K to $540K, and daily clicks more than doubled. Read the e-commerce SEO case study.
A California cannabis e-commerce brand faced a different challenge: a restricted category where paid ads are hard or impossible. SEO had to carry the business. Within 12 months, organic clicks tripled, sales rose 50%, and the brand reached the first page for hundreds of key terms. See the cannabis SEO case study.
Our record month for one client was $1.2M in organic sales. Joey W., an e-commerce client, is one of the owners who has left us a 5-star Google review. More on our reviews page.
How does our e-commerce SEO process work?
We audit your store, set priorities by revenue in the first two weeks, fix and optimize in months one to three, then grow category by category every month.
1. Free audit (a few days)
Rankings report plus the biggest gaps we see in your categories, products and structure.
2. Strategy (weeks 1–2)
We rank categories by revenue potential and map keywords to every important page.
3. Build and optimize (months 1–3)
Category and product rewrites, faceted navigation rules, schema and speed fixes.
4. Monthly reporting and growth
We report organic revenue, not just traffic, and expand into new categories and content.
How much does e-commerce SEO cost?
Plans start at $950/month, but most stores fit our Growth ($3,600/mo), Expand ($5,500/mo) or Aggressive ($9,700/mo) plans. Price depends on catalog size, how competitive your product categories are, your platform, and how many pages and links you need each month. A 50-product niche store and a 10,000-SKU retailer need very different effort. See the full breakdown on our pricing page.
Who works on your store?
Brian Vastola leads every e-commerce account and has done hands-on SEO for 25 years. He works directly in your platform and with your developer on structure, speed and filters. Our senior team writes category and product copy and builds links. You won't explain your catalog to a new account manager every few months.
When will organic sales grow?
Most stores see early ranking gains in 2 to 3 months and meaningful revenue growth in 6 to 12 months. A realistic path:
- Months 1–3: Technical and structural fixes go live. Rankings start moving on priority categories.
- Months 3–6: Rewritten category and product pages climb. Organic clicks rise. Our Wix and Shopify/WordPress client campaigns, for example, saw impressions grow 6x within 6 months.
- Months 6–12: Organic revenue becomes a dependable channel, and you can test pulling back on ads in the categories where you rank well.
Seasonal stores should start before peak season, not during it.
E-commerce SEO checklist
- Does every main category page have unique text above or below the products?
- Are your top 50 product descriptions written by you, not the manufacturer?
- Do filter URLs (color, size, sort order) have a clear indexing rule?
- Is product schema showing price and availability without errors?
- Do discontinued products redirect to the closest match or category?
- Do your category templates load fast on a phone?
Mistakes to avoid
Don't let every filter combination get indexed. Don't delete out-of-stock product pages that have links and rankings. Don't change URLs during a platform move without a full redirect map. And don't judge SEO on traffic alone. Judge it on organic revenue.
How to judge an e-commerce SEO agency
Ask how they handle faceted navigation and out-of-stock products. Ask whether they report on revenue. An agency that only talks about blog posts and backlinks hasn't run SEO for a real store.
What does e-commerce SEO look like month to month?
Store SEO is a queue, worked in order of revenue. The technical fixes come first. Then the routine below repeats every month.
- Pick the next categories: We look at what sold, what ranks on page two and what has search demand, then choose the next categories and products to work on.
- Rewrite and build: Category copy, product descriptions, titles and FAQs for that batch, plus any buying guide that supports it.
- Link it together: Guides link to categories, categories link to related categories, and best sellers get links from the pages that already have authority.
- Earn links: Outreach for links and mentions from sites your shoppers read.
- Housekeeping: Discontinued products redirected, new products checked for titles and schema, feed errors cleared.
- Report on revenue: Organic sales by category, not just traffic, with next month's batch agreed.
How big each batch is depends on your plan. Growth includes nine new content pages a month, Expand includes fifteen or more, and Aggressive is set to fit your catalog.
Planning a platform move or redesign?
Tell your SEO team before the work starts, not after launch. A migration needs a redirect for every address that changes, a check that titles, copy and schema carried over, and a close watch on Search Console for weeks afterward. Most of the big traffic drops we are asked to diagnose began with a launch where nobody mapped the old addresses to the new ones.
How do AI shopping answers change e-commerce SEO?
Shoppers now ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews questions like "what is the best quiet dishwasher under $800?" The answer names a few products and stores. The stores that get named tend to have the same things in place.
- Specs as text: Dimensions, materials, compatibility and what is in the box, written on the page. AI tools cannot quote a detail that lives only in a photo.
- Complete product data: Structured data for price, availability, brand, product identifiers and reviews, matching what is in your feed.
- Comparison content: Honest "this versus that" and "best for" guides give AI tools the reasoning they need to recommend a product.
- Reviews with detail: Reviews that say who the product suited and why are more useful than star counts alone.
- Coverage beyond your store: Mentions in roundups, forums and articles on other sites are what make an assistant confident in your brand.
AI visibility work is included in every MRB plan. See our GEO services for how it works.
What affects the cost and timeline of e-commerce SEO?
Stores vary more than any other kind of client. These five things explain most of the difference in price and in how long results take.
- Catalog size: More categories and products mean more pages that need real copy.
- How unique your products are: Selling your own brand is easier to rank than reselling items that fifty other stores carry.
- Competition: Going up against marketplaces and national chains takes more content and more links.
- Platform and developer access: Some fixes take minutes in one platform and a development sprint in another.
- Seasonality: Pages need to rank before the season starts, so the calendar sets deadlines.
There are no long-term contracts. Choose month-to-month or a 6-month agreement, and cancel either with 30 days' notice. If your store also needs conversion work, such as checkout, site search or product page layout, that is our e-commerce optimization service, which is quoted per project.
More questions to ask any e-commerce SEO agency
- Will you work inside our platform, or only send recommendations?
- How do you choose which categories to start with?
- Who writes product and category copy, and how do they learn our products?
- What is your plan for a product that sells out or is discontinued?
- Can you show organic revenue growth for a store, not just traffic?
What is e-commerce SEO?
E-commerce SEO is optimizing an online store so its category and product pages rank in search engines and bring in buyers. It includes keyword research for products, category and product page copy, site structure, faceted navigation, product schema, site speed and links. The goal is more sales from organic search without paying for each click.
How much does e-commerce SEO cost?
Our plans start at $950/month, but most online stores fit our Growth plan ($3,600/mo), Expand plan ($5,500/mo) or Aggressive plan ($9,700/mo). Price depends on catalog size, competition, platform, and how much content and link building each month requires.
How long does e-commerce SEO take?
Most stores see ranking gains in 2 to 3 months and stronger revenue growth in 6 to 12 months. Our cannabis client tripled organic clicks and grew sales 50% within 12 months, and our Wix and Shopify/WordPress campaigns saw big gains within 6. Results depend on competition and starting point.
Should category pages or product pages come first?
Usually category pages. They target broader, higher-value shopping terms like "women's trail running shoes," and they pass authority to the products under them. We start with your highest-revenue categories, then optimize the top products in each. Hero products with strong search demand of their own are the exception.
What is faceted navigation and why does it matter for SEO?
Faceted navigation is the filter system on category pages, such as size, color, brand and price. Each filter can create a new URL, so a store can produce thousands of near-duplicate pages. Left alone, Google wastes time crawling them. We decide which filter pages deserve to rank and block or consolidate the rest.
Which e-commerce platforms do you work with?
We work with Shopify, WordPress with WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, Joomla, Wix, Squarespace and similar builders, sites built with Elementor and other theme builders, and custom builds. Each has its own limits around URLs, filters and speed. We know where each one needs workarounds. See our platform pages for details on your store's setup.
Can SEO replace my Google Ads?
Not overnight, and often not completely. But strong organic rankings can let you cut ad spend in categories where you already rank well, and keep paid budgets for new products and harder terms. Many stores use both. If you need help on that side, our in-house PPC team runs Google Ads and paid social campaigns, working alongside our SEO team. Your ad spend goes directly to the ad platforms, and our PPC work is quoted per job based on scope.
Do product reviews help SEO?
Yes. Reviews add fresh, unique text to product pages, answer buyer questions, and can show star ratings in search results through review schema. They also build trust that raises conversion. We help you mark them up correctly and encourage more of them.
Should I delete out-of-stock product pages?
Not right away. If the product is coming back, keep the page live, mark it out of stock and point shoppers to similar items. If it is gone for good and the page has links or rankings, redirect it to the closest product or category. Delete a page only when it has no traffic, no links and no close match.
How do I get my products into AI shopping answers?
Make your products easy for a machine to understand and easy for other sites to mention. Write specs and policies as plain text, keep structured data and your product feed accurate, collect detailed reviews and publish honest comparison guides. Mentions on other sites matter too. AI visibility work is included in every one of our plans.
Related services and resources
Every SEO service we offer, in one place
Crawl, speed and indexing fixes
SEO for Shopify stores
Revenue from $300K to $540K a month
Product pages, checkout and site search
Estimate what SEO could return
FREE SEO AUDIT
Find out what your store is missing in organic search
Get a free SEO audit and keyword rankings report for your store. We'll show where your categories rank, which pages leak traffic to competitors, and the fixes that could move revenue first. Or call 919-230-0045 to talk it through.
25 years of SEO · 50,000+ first-page rankings · 5-star Google reviews