E-commerce SEO audit: catalogues, filters and the pages that sell
Catalogue sites don't have SEO problems. They have SEO problems multiplied by the catalogue.
On an e-commerce site, every technical mistake is repeated by however many products you sell. A theme that writes a bad title writes twelve hundred bad titles; a filter that generates a URL generates a hundred thousand of them.
That scale changes what matters. This is what an audit of a catalogue site looks for, ordered by what tends to be worth the most revenue.
What goes wrong on E-commerce sites
Faceted navigation generating infinite URLs
Colour, size, price and sort combine into more URLs than you have products, each a near-duplicate of a category page. Crawlers spend their budget there instead of on the pages that sell, and the category pages get crawled less as a result.
Category pages treated as an afterthought
Category pages usually rank for the phrases with real commercial intent, and usually contain nothing but a grid. A few hundred words of genuine buying guidance on the top categories is the most reliable e-commerce SEO work there is.
Manufacturer descriptions on every product
The same copy appears on every store selling the item. Google picks one and it is rarely yours. The fix is expensive per product, which is why it should start with the twenty that matter.
Out-of-stock and seasonal products
A product page with no stock and no plan is a dead end for a visitor and a wasted crawl for a search engine — while still holding whatever links and rankings it earned.
Pagination that strands deep products
Canonicalising every page of a category back to page one hides everything past the first grid. On large catalogues this is how thousands of products end up with no crawlable path.
Product images at print resolution
Retail sites are image-heavy by nature, and the mobile experience is where the purchase happens. Image weight is usually the largest single factor in a poor Largest Contentful Paint on a product page.
What an AuditOpti crawl looks for
- How many crawlable URLs the filters generate, and which are indexable
- Duplicate and templated titles and descriptions across the catalogue
- Category pages: content depth, internal links and canonical handling
- Products with no internal links or missing from the sitemap
- Pagination and canonical patterns on category templates
- Mobile Core Web Vitals on a category and a product page, not just the homepage
Check part of it right now, free
These read a live page and tell you what a search engine sees. No signup, no email.
Canonical tag checker
The tag that decides which URL gets the credit — checked properly.
XML sitemap checker
Find your sitemap, prove it parses, and see what it is actually telling Google.
Image alt text checker
Every image on the page, and what a screen reader would say about it.
The issues behind this
Each has a full entry in the issue library: what it is, what it costs a business, and step-by-step fixes for WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and custom builds.
Thin content
The page has too little text to be useful.
Duplicate title tags
Several pages share one identical title.
Orphan page
No other page on the site links to it.
Canonical mismatch
The page points at a different URL as the original.
Oversized images
Images are far larger than they need to be.
Questions
Related
Shopify
Most Shopify SEO problems are the platform's defaults, not your mistakes.
WooCommerce
Every WordPress problem, plus a catalogue that multiplies them.
Online store
Written for the person who packs the orders and also runs the website.
Crawl the catalogue and see where the crawl budget is really going
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