SEO for ecommerce.
Built for stores.

The problems that only appear at catalogue scale

Ecommerce SEO is not general SEO applied to products. A handful of structural problems appear once you have a catalogue and filters, and they are severe enough that they decide outcomes on their own.

Faceted navigation, the largest one

Filters for size, colour, price and brand combine into URLs. Combinations multiply, so a few hundred products can generate hundreds of thousands of crawlable URLs, nearly all of them near-duplicates of each other.

The consequences are real. Crawl budget is spent on filter permutations instead of your actual products. Near-identical pages compete with one another. And the whole thing looks, correctly, like automatically generated low-value content.

There is no single fix, only a decision per facet. Facets with genuine search demand, such as a brand or a category people search by name, deserve indexable pages with their own content. Everything else should be canonicalised to the parent, or blocked from crawling, or handled without generating a crawlable URL at all. The mistake is treating every facet the same way in either direction.

Thin and duplicated product pages

Manufacturer descriptions appear verbatim on every retailer selling the item, so the identical text sits on dozens of sites and none of it distinguishes yours. Variants make it worse, with twenty near-identical URLs for one product in different sizes.

What differentiates a product page is what only you have: your photography, your reviews, your specifics on sizing and fit, your answers to the questions people actually ask before buying.

Out-of-stock and discontinued products

A recurring own goal. Deleting the page throws away every link and every ranking it earned. If the item is returning, keep the page and say so. If it is genuinely gone, redirect to the closest equivalent, not to the homepage, which produces soft 404s at scale.

Category pages carry the commercial weight

Most high-intent category terms are won by category pages, not product pages, and most category pages are a grid with a heading and nothing else. They are frequently the largest unexploited opportunity in an ecommerce site.

How UtilitySEO handles this

The audit crawls the whole site rather than a sample, which is the only way faceted URL explosion and template-level duplication become visible, and returns findings ranked by impact so structural problems come before cosmetic ones.