Question 1

Which e-commerce platform is best for SEO?

Accepted Answer

None of them wins on merit; they fail differently. Magento gives you full control and repays it with layered navigation that can multiply into tens of thousands of crawlable URLs. WooCommerce inherits every WordPress problem, archives and plugin conflicts included. Shopify is tidy but fixes your URL structure for you. Wix and BigCommerce each carry their own defaults you cannot change. Choose the platform your operations need, then audit it for that platform's known failure mode instead of hoping the CMS handles it. We also build online stores on the platform you pick.

Question 2

What is e-commerce SEO?

Accepted Answer

It is SEO where most of your pages are generated rather than written: thousands of product URLs, category pages assembled from filters, and descriptions arriving in a supplier feed. The work is therefore less about writing and more about architecture. Which generated URLs should Google see, which should be consolidated into one, and which should never have been crawlable at all. Content tactics applied to a catalog without settling those questions rarely move anything, because the pages compete with each other before they compete with anyone else.

Question 3

How much does SEO cost for an e-commerce site?

Accepted Answer

Our audit is €199, €399 or €750 depending on catalog size, and the free express review tells you which tier you need before you pay anything. That price covers the diagnosis, not the fix. Implementation is quoted separately against the roadmap, and you are free to hand that roadmap to your own developer instead. We publish the numbers because most of the agencies we compared do not.

Question 4

How do you optimize an e-commerce product page for SEO?

Accepted Answer

Start with what makes the page unique: your own description instead of the supplier text, real specifications, real photographs, and reviews if you have them. Then the machine-readable layer, meaning Product and Offer markup whose price and availability agree with what the page actually shows. Then the part that decides more than either of those: what happens when the item goes out of stock, and whether every size and color creates its own near-identical URL instead of one page with variants. Most lost product traffic sits in that last question.

Question 5

What role does page speed play in e-commerce SEO?

Accepted Answer

Real, but smaller than the tooling implies. Core Web Vitals are used by Google's ranking systems and they affect conversion, so a category page that takes six seconds to load costs you twice. But speed will not rescue a catalog that Google cannot crawl properly, and in our audits it rarely comes out as the top finding. Indexation and faceted navigation usually outrank it. We say so in the report rather than leading with the easiest chart, because speed is the finding clients expect most often and need first least often.

Question 6

We already run ads. Why does the store need organic SEO too?

Accepted Answer

Because paid traffic stops the day the card declines and organic traffic does not. The more useful framing is cost per sale over time. Ads have a floor set by the auction and by your competitors' bids, while organic has a larger upfront cost and a much lower marginal one afterwards. If your ad account is profitable today, organic is what makes it more profitable later. If it is not profitable, fixing the store often changes the ad numbers too, because the same broken pages receive both kinds of traffic.

Question 7

How do I choose an e-commerce SEO agency?

Accepted Answer

Ask for the diagnosis before the retainer. Anyone quoting a monthly fee before looking at your faceted navigation is pricing a guess. Ask what happens to the work if you leave, whether the deliverable is readable by your own developer without a handover call, and whether they will tell you when the honest answer is that your problem is the ads account rather than SEO. Our audit is deliberately sold as a one-off for that reason, and there is no obligation to continue with us afterwards.

Question 8

How is an e-commerce SEO audit different from your general SEO Site Audit, and do I need both?

Accepted Answer

The SEO Site Audit covers technical and on-page health for any site type: corporate, landing pages, service sites, and stores. This audit is scoped specifically to the problems online stores face: faceted navigation, product-level canonicals, catalog indexation depth, Product and Offer structured data, variant handling, and out-of-stock page strategy. If you already had a general technical audit done recently, you probably do not need to repeat that layer. If you have never had either, this e-commerce audit covers the catalog-specific issues more thoroughly than a general audit would.

Question 9

Do you cover paid Google Shopping and Performance Max too?

Accepted Answer

This audit covers organic search only, meaning how your product and category pages rank in Google's unpaid results. If you want an independent review of your Google Ads Shopping campaigns, Merchant Center feed, or Performance Max setup, that is a separate service with its own fixed prices. You can find it on the Google Ads for E-commerce page. Some clients run both audits together; others do organic first, because the same product and category pages receive both the paid and the organic visitors.

Question 10

Does this audit cover visibility in Google AI Overviews or ChatGPT?

Accepted Answer

No. This audit is scoped to classic organic rankings for your category and product pages. Visibility in Google's AI surfaces such as AI Overviews and AI Mode is covered by our AI SEO service, and visibility in assistants like ChatGPT or Perplexity is covered by AI Visibility. The lanes overlap in one useful way: Google's AI features draw on the same index as classic results, so a catalog Google can crawl and read correctly, with valid Product markup, serves both.

Question 11

Which platforms do you audit?

Accepted Answer

We audit PrestaShop, Shoper, IdoSell, WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, OpenCart, and custom-built catalog systems. The underlying SEO checks are platform-agnostic, but platform context matters: Shoper and IdoSell have specific faceted-navigation behaviors, and WooCommerce pagination defaults create predictable duplicate-content patterns. We note platform-specific recommendations rather than generic advice.

Question 12

How long does the e-commerce SEO audit take?

Accepted Answer

Delivery time depends on the tier and on your catalog: a Start audit of a small catalog is faster than an Expert audit of a large store fresh off a migration. We confirm the delivery date before you pay, during the free express review, so you know the timeline before any money changes hands. If you are auditing ahead of a peak season, tell us: structural fixes need lead time to be recrawled, so earlier is better than later.

Question 13

What exactly does the free express review include?

Accepted Answer

We take a short look at your catalog before you commit to anything: whether your important pages are indexed, whether Product schema is present and valid at a glance, and whether faceted navigation is generating obvious URL bloat. You get up to three main problems, what to do about each one, and a plain go or no-go answer on whether the paid audit is likely to be worth it for your store. It takes up to twenty minutes, there is no obligation, and the written report is the paid audit, not this.

Question 14

How should faceted navigation be handled so it does not waste crawl budget?

Accepted Answer

There is no single rule that fits every store. The right approach depends on whether a filter combination has real search demand, how many unique pages it produces, and whether your platform generates parameter-based or path-based URLs. Common tools include robots.txt rules for parameter patterns nobody searches for, canonical tags pointing filter pages to the base category, noindex where a page must stay crawlable but should not be indexed, and URL consolidation in the CMS. Google notes that noindex alone does not save crawl budget, because the page is still fetched. We audit your specific setup and recommend a filter-by-filter policy rather than a blanket noindex-everything approach, which can remove genuinely valuable pages from Google's index. The filter-by-filter policy comes with the faceted-navigation deep-dive in Professional and Expert.

Question 15

My rankings dropped after a redesign or replatform migration. Can you find why?

Accepted Answer

Yes, this is one of the most common reasons stores come to us. We compare your current URL structure against any crawl data or Search Console history you can share, identify which old URLs are returning 404 instead of redirecting, check whether redirects run through chains instead of pointing straight at the final URL, as Google recommends, and look for canonical or meta-robots changes introduced during the migration. We also check whether the new platform renders product and category pages differently for crawlers versus browsers, which is a frequent issue with JavaScript-heavy storefronts. The migration and redirect review is part of Professional and Expert.

Question 16

How do you handle duplicate product descriptions from the supplier feed?

Accepted Answer

The first step is identifying which pages are actually competing with each other in the index and which are simply thin rather than duplicate. For supplier-text duplication, we prioritize by commercial importance: your best-selling products are the first candidates for unique copy, while long-tail SKUs may be handled through structured variation or consolidation. Every tier gives you a prioritized action list. From Professional it also holds the catalog-wide duplicate map and a canonicalization strategy for the catalog as a whole, not just a list of duplicate URLs.

Question 17

What should happen to out-of-stock and discontinued products?

Accepted Answer

Out-of-stock but returning products should stay live with clear availability signals in the page content and Product schema. Permanently discontinued products with significant inbound links or organic rankings should redirect to the closest live equivalent, not 404. Discontinued products with no traffic or links can return 404 or 410. We review your current handling, check which discontinued pages still carry link equity or ranking signals, and recommend a case-by-case approach that does not waste what you have built up.

Question 18

Do you check Product, Offer, and AggregateRating structured data?

Accepted Answer

Yes, structured data is one of the six areas we audit. We validate your JSON-LD against schema.org and Google's requirements, check that price and availability in the markup match the visible page content (a mismatch can cost the page its rich results or bring a structured data manual action), verify that AggregateRating uses real aggregated review data and not a static placeholder, and confirm that BreadcrumbList reflects your actual category hierarchy. We check the markup both in the raw HTML and in the rendered page, because some platforms inject structured data with JavaScript after the initial HTML is served.

Question 19

How do you audit a very large catalog, say thousands of SKUs?

Accepted Answer

Crawl budget becomes the central concern at scale. We crawl a representative sample of your catalog, look at server log data if you can share it, and cross-reference with the Search Console Page indexing report to identify which segments are being crawled infrequently or not at all. We then audit XML sitemap completeness and freshness, check internal link depth to your deepest SKU pages, and identify structural changes (pagination, internal search indexing, parameter handling) that would give Googlebot a better path through your catalog. The audit report segments findings by catalog layer so you know where to focus first. Large catalogs fit Expert, which adds the sitemap and indexation strategy and the full architecture review.

Question 20

Should category pages or product pages be the priority?

Accepted Answer

Category pages almost always drive more organic traffic volume because they target broader queries with higher search frequency. Product pages capture high-intent, lower-volume queries that often convert better. The right prioritization depends on where your current rankings gap is largest and what your competitors are doing. We map both layers during the audit and give you a prioritized recommendation based on actual traffic and ranking data from your Search Console, not a generic rule.

Question 21

Do you implement the fixes or just report them?

Accepted Answer

The audit is diagnosis and a prioritized roadmap. Implementation is a separate engagement we can quote for, or you can hand the report to your own developer or existing SEO contractor. The report is written with enough technical detail that a competent developer can execute the recommendations without us. On Expert, 30 days of implementation Q&A are included for questions on a specific recommendation.

Question 22

Do you write product descriptions or build links after the audit?

Accepted Answer

No. The audit is diagnosis plus a prioritized roadmap. Content writing and link building are out of scope: for supplier-text duplication you get a prioritization strategy that tells you which products justify unique copy first, not the copy itself. Implementation of technical fixes can be quoted separately, or your own developer can execute directly from the report.

Question 23

Can you audit a multilingual or cross-border EU store, and do you cover GDPR?

Accepted Answer

Yes to both. We review hreflang configuration across your language versions, check canonical direction between locales, and audit whether your non-primary language catalog pages are actually indexed or effectively invisible to Google; the hreflang review is part of Expert. On GDPR: we are EU-registered (CyberLab.Team OÜ, Estonia, VAT EE102131851), operate under GDPR, and sign a Data Processing Agreement on your request. We request read-only access to Search Console and Analytics. You grant access via your email invite and revoke it with one click after delivery.

Question 24

We sell to the Russian-speaking EU diaspora and rely entirely on Google. Is the organic SEO approach any different?

Accepted Answer

Not structurally different, but the business context matters for prioritization. With no Yandex traffic in the picture, every organic position in Google carries more weight. We pay particular attention to hreflang setup if your catalog has Russian-language pages alongside other EU languages, to whether Russian-language product and category pages are indexed and ranking, and to whether Google is crawling the right language version for EU-based users. The hreflang review is part of Expert. The team works in Russian, so we read those pages directly rather than through translation.

Question 25

Can I see a sample report before ordering?

Accepted Answer

Partly. This page shows an excerpt from our published sample, built on an invented store and labeled that way, so you can see the format. We show how the full report is structured at the free express review, before you commit to anything. We do not present fake client data or invented findings as a real audit.

Question 26

Do you guarantee more traffic or higher rankings after the audit?

Accepted Answer

No. We do not guarantee rankings, traffic levels, or revenue outcomes. Organic search results are determined by Google, not by us. What you get is an honest, documented audit of what is currently working against you in organic search and a prioritized action list. How quickly a change shows up depends on when Google recrawls the pages, and structural changes to category architecture take longer. We tell you what we found and what the expected direction of impact is, without attaching numbers we cannot stand behind.

Your situation	What you need
Your category and product pages underperform in Google's unpaid results	This audit (you are here)
You run or plan Google Shopping, Performance Max, or Merchant Center	Google Ads for E-commerce
You want a site-wide technical audit, not scoped to a catalog	SEO Site Audit
Your store runs on Shopify and you want SEO built around the platform	Shopify SEO
You want to know whether Google can show your store in AI Overviews and AI Mode	AI SEO
You already know what is broken and need it fixed	Technical SEO

E-commerce SEO Audit: Why Product and Category Pages Do Not Rank

Recognize yourself?

Marketplaces and competitors rank above your store

The catalog works against itself

A new platform, or a catalog in several languages

What you receive

Findings by catalog layer

Every finding in the same format

A prioritized roadmap

What a finding looks like

What we check

Category & faceted navigation architecture

Product-page on-page factors

E-commerce structured data

Duplicate & thin content

Indexation & catalog hygiene

Technical foundation at catalog scale

What this audit does not include

How the audit goes

Express review

Read-only access

The catalog, layer by layer

The report

Let's look at your catalog

What we need from you to start

After the audit: three paths

Your own developer implements it

Your SEO contractor takes it

Order the work from us

E-commerce SEO audit pricing

Which service fits your store

What each tier adds

Our experience

No lock-in: the audit is yours to use anywhere

What does this look like in practice?

Proof before you order

Frequently asked questions

Scope, price and timing

Is it for my store?

What the audit looks at

After the audit, and e-commerce SEO in general

Not what you need?

Ready for the audit?