Your Catalogue Is Writing Pages Without You
Four filters with six options each is 1,296 combinations, and most platforms will happily give every one of them a URL. On a 2,000-product shop that is how you end up with half a million indexable pages and a crawler that never reaches the forty categories you actually want to rank. E-commerce SEO is mostly not a writing problem. It is a control problem.
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Six problems that only exist when a database makes your pages
A brochure site has as many pages as somebody wrote. A shop has as many as the catalogue and the filters between them can produce, which is a different number by several orders of magnitude — and nobody chose it.
- Facets multiply URLsColour × size × price × brand · combinations, not pages
- Crawl budget runs outSpent on filter noise before it reaches your categories
- Supplier copy is everyone’s copyThe same manufacturer description on forty sites
- Products die, URLs do notDiscontinued lines · 404, redirect or keep?
- Categories earn, products convertDifferent jobs · usually optimised as if identical
- Marketplaces hold page oneAmazon and eBay for the product name you sell
The fourth one causes more quiet damage than any other, because it never shows up as an error. A discontinued product that 404s throws away every link and every ranking it earned. One that redirects to the homepage is treated as a soft 404 and throws them away slightly more politely. The right answer depends on whether a genuine replacement exists, and it has to be decided per product rather than by a rule in the platform settings.
The job is deciding what should not exist
On most sites, SEO adds things. On a shop, the first quarter is usually spent removing them. Internal search results that got indexed. Filter combinations nobody will ever search for. Pagination that duplicates the first page. Session parameters. Sort orders. Print views. None of these were decisions — they are what the platform does when nobody tells it otherwise, and together they can outnumber your real pages ten to one.
This matters more than it sounds, because crawling is a budget. Google allocates a finite amount of attention to a site based on how worthwhile it has found the crawling so far. Spend it on eight hundred thousand filter permutations and the new season’s category page waits weeks to be seen. Retailers frequently interpret that delay as a content problem and commission a blog, which adds pages to a site whose actual complaint is that it already has too many.
The second half of the work is the opposite of removal: the category page. It is the page with commercial intent behind it, it is the one that can rank for the term with volume, and on most shops it is a heading followed by a product grid with no reason to be preferred over anybody else’s. Product pages convert; category pages are what get found. Optimising them as though they were the same page is the most common e-commerce SEO mistake we see, and the cheapest to fix.
Then there is the description problem, which has no clever solution. If your product copy came from the manufacturer, so did everyone else’s, and Google is choosing between forty identical pages on signals other than the text. Original copy is expensive at catalogue scale, which is exactly why it works — and why the honest advice is to write it for the products that earn, not for all nine thousand.
- ✓Crawl budget is finite — Filter noise consumes it before your categories are reached.
- ✓Category pages get found — Product pages convert. They are not the same job and should not share a template.
- ✓Supplier copy is duplicate copy — Forty shops, one description. The tiebreak happens elsewhere.
- ✓Dead products need a decision — Per product, not per platform setting. 404 and homepage redirect both waste value.
- ✓You will not outrank Amazon — For the bare product name. You can own the comparisons, the guides and the categories.
Most shops do not need more pages. They need to stop making them accidentally, and then make forty of the ones they meant to.
What e-commerce SEO actually involves
The disciplines are the same ones on the rest of this site. These are the six places a catalogue changes how they are done.
Facet & Crawl Control
Deciding which filter combinations deserve an indexable URL and blocking the rest properly — which is a different decision per shop, because the ones worth keeping are the ones with real demand behind them.
Category Page Strategy
The pages that carry commercial intent and usually carry no content. Buying guidance, comparison, genuine merchandising logic — enough to be preferred over an identical grid on a competitor.
Product Data & Schema
Price, availability, GTIN, reviews and variants, correct and current. Wrong structured data on a shop is worse than none, because it is visible in the result and it erodes trust before the click.
Technical & Performance
Rendering, pagination, internal search leakage and Core Web Vitals. Shops are heavy, and the pages that matter most commercially are usually the heaviest ones on the site.
Lifecycle & Retired Products
A policy for what happens when a line is discontinued, applied per product rather than by platform default. This is where accumulated link value quietly leaks out of most catalogues.
Seasonal & Demand Planning
Retail demand is a calendar. Category pages for a season need to exist and be indexed weeks before the searches start, not in the week they peak.
Not every shop has the same problem
The catalogue size and how the products differ from each other change which of the six jobs above actually matters. What does not change is that the platform is generating pages either way.
Large catalogue retail
Thousands of SKUs, heavy faceting, and crawl budget as the binding constraint. Almost all of the first quarter is control work rather than content.
Single-product & DTC brands
The opposite problem. Very few pages, so the whole burden falls on one product page and the surrounding content. Here writing genuinely is the work.
Marketplace sellers
Competing with the marketplace that also lists you. The defensible ground is the branded and comparison territory that Amazon cannot own on your behalf.
Fashion & apparel
Where facets explode fastest — size, colour, fit, material, season — and where product lifecycles are shortest, so the retirement policy matters most.
B2B & trade supply
Prices behind a login, technical specifications, and buyers searching part numbers. The specification is the keyword, and most trade sites hide it.
Subscription commerce
The recurring purchase makes retention content valuable in a way it is not for one-off retail. Onboarding queries do real commercial work.
Who we have actually done this for
Anonymised where the client prefers it. No percentages appear against any of them — figures go up only when they are attributable to something a reader could check.
A UK e-commerce retailer
A real engagement carried without a name at the client’s preference. The work is theirs to publish, not ours.
Joe’s Blooms
Web development rather than retail SEO, but a commercial site with a real transactional path. “We’re very thankful to Ghalib and his team.”
Our own measurement work
The crawl and indexation tooling used on this site is published in the open, and much of the technical thinking here comes from running it.
Smaller catalogues
Often better value than large ones. Fewer pages to control, and competitors who have not done the category work either.
Where we are the wrong fit
If the plan is to generate a page for every product-plus-city combination, we are not that agency. That is the pattern Google’s scaled-content policy describes.
Shops on a rebuild
Worth saying plainly: if a replatform is coming, the SEO work belongs in the migration plan rather than before it. We would tell you to wait.
What clients say
Named clients, named companies — published with their permission.
“We’re very thankful to Ghalib and his team for building a fully-functioning website for our business.”
“Highly professional and dedicated to achieving results.”
“We’d been burned by two agencies before Ghalib Ashrafi. First proper technical audit we’d ever had.”
More of them, in full, on our reviews page.
— Our Proprietary Methodology —
The Visibility Framework™, applied to e-commerce
The method is the same one every engagement here runs on. On a shop, step one is a full crawl rather than a sample — because the interesting number is how many URLs exist that nobody meant to create.
Visibility Score™
We crawl the whole catalogue, not a sample, and compare what exists against what is indexed and what earns. On most shops the gap between those three numbers is the entire first quarter of work.
Custom Strategy
A keyword and content roadmap scoped to your niche and budget — which pages to fix, which to build, and which terms are worth the money here.
Execution
Senior strategists implement technical fixes, content and links as one roadmap — no juniors, no outsourcing, no handoffs between departments.
Track & Improve™
Monthly reporting and continuous optimization — we re-test what’s working, cut what isn’t, and adjust as the market moves.
Honest, No-Nonsense Commitment
No one controls Google or AI search — so we'll never guarantee a #1 ranking. What we do guarantee: if your visibility score doesn't improve within 90 days, we keep working at no extra cost until it does.
E-commerce SEO pricing
Scoped by catalogue size, platform and how much of the index is currently accidental — you get the figure after a free audit, not before it. Prices below are USD; UK clients are quoted in GBP and Pakistani clients in PKR.
Starter
Smaller catalogues and DTC brands on one storefront.
- Full crawl & index baseline
- Facet and parameter control
- Monthly reporting
Growth
For retailers where crawl budget is the binding constraint.
- Everything in Starter, deeper execution
- Category page programme
- Product data & schema
- Bi-weekly reporting calls
Enterprise
Large catalogues, multi-market and multi-currency.
- Dedicated senior strategist
- Lifecycle & retirement policy
- Multi-market indexation & hreflang
- Custom reporting dashboard
Retail engagements scope on catalogue size and platform rather than on ambition. A 200-product shop and a 40,000-product shop are different jobs even when the goal is identical.
What you’re actually committing to
Most agencies keep this in a contract you only see after the sales call. We would rather you knew now, because it is the question everyone asks second — right after the price.
- A 3-month initial term, then month to monthLong enough for the 90-day guarantee above to mean something, short enough that you are not trapped if it doesn’t work out. The wider industry standard is 6 to 12 months.
- 30 days’ notice to stopNo exit fee and no buy-out of the months you haven’t used. You leave when you decide to, not when the contract lets you.
- No setup or onboarding feeThe audit is free, and month one costs exactly what month two costs. Nothing is front-loaded.
- You own everythingAnalytics, Search Console, content, accounts and any tooling set up for you — all in your name from day one, and all still yours if we part ways.
- One fixed monthly feeAnything outside the agreed scope is quoted and approved by you before it starts. It never appears on an invoice as a surprise.
- Reporting written to be readWhat changed, what it moved and what is next — in plain English, at the cadence set out in your plan, not a 40-page export nobody opens.
These are the terms as they appear in the agreement itself — nothing here is softened for the website. The full wording lives in our terms and conditions, and you get the agreement to read before anything is signed or invoiced.
What we will not do on a catalogue
E-commerce is the sector where scaled content is easiest to justify to yourself, because the pages really are generated and the platform really will make them. That is precisely why the line has to be explicit.
We will not generate a landing page for every product crossed with every town. It is the textbook example in Google’s doorway-page guidance, it does not work, and the risk is site-wide rather than page-level — a batch of thin pages can damage the category pages that were earning. Where the demand does not justify a URL, the honest output is a section on the category page.
We will not put structured data on a page that does not match what a visitor sees. Prices that are not the price, availability that is not the availability, review markup with no reviews behind it. On a shop this is visible in the search result itself, which makes it a trust problem before it is a policy one.
And we will not recommend rewriting nine thousand product descriptions. It is the advice that sounds thorough and bankrupts the budget before anything ranks. Write the copy for the products that earn, control the rest properly, and revisit.
- No product-by-town pages. The textbook doorway pattern, and the damage is site-wide rather than page-level.
- Schema matches the page. Wrong price or availability markup is visible in the result. It costs trust, not just rankings.
- No rewriting the whole catalogue. Write for the products that earn. Control the rest.
- Removal before addition. Most shops need fewer indexable URLs before they need more content.
- Retirement decided per product. Not by a platform default. That default is where link value leaks.
E-commerce SEO questions, answered
Related SEO pages
Same service, different angle — by market, by discipline and by platform.
Crawler spending its time on filter combinations?
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