The short answer
eCommerce SEO is the work of getting an online store found for the searches people make before they buy. It covers category page structure, product data, faceted navigation, site speed and links. AR Digital Solutions runs it in house for Australian stores and reports on organic revenue rather than rankings.
What the work covers
Category page structure.
The pages carrying commercial search volume, built with the right content in the right position.
Product page and feed data.
Titles, descriptions, review markup and product schema feeding both organic results and Shopping.
Faceted navigation control.
Rules for which filter URLs get indexed and which never get crawled.
Technical health.
Crawl budget, pagination, internal linking, Core Web Vitals and duplicate variant content.
Content that earns links.
Buying guides and comparison pages aimed at searches happening before the product search.
Reporting on revenue.
Organic sessions and revenue by category, with the keywords underneath rather than a list of positions.
Category pages are where eCommerce SEO is won
Most stores put their effort into product pages. Understandable, and mostly wrong.
Think about how people search when they're ready to buy but haven't chosen yet. Womens hiking boots. Brass compression fittings. Commercial coffee machines. Plural, unbranded, no model number. Google answers those with pages showing a selection, because a selection is what the search implies, and that's a category page. Product pages win brand and model searches, part numbers and the long tail. Both matter. Only one ranks for the terms with volume behind them.
So category pages are the money pages, and most stores treat them as a grid with a title on top.
What a category page needs.
Not much, but position decides whether it works. Above the grid, an H1 matching the search and 40 to 60 words on what's in the category and who it suits, plus text links to the sub categories. Then products, high up, because products are what the visitor came for.
Everything else belongs below the grid. Buying guidance, sizing or compatibility notes, delivery and returns, four or five FAQs with schema, and links to related categories. A 600 word introduction above the products pushes them off the screen, costs sales, and earns nothing the same words wouldn't earn lower down. Google reads the bottom of the page.
Faceted navigation is how stores create thousands of duplicate pages.
Sort by price. View 48. Colour black. Size 10. Brand and colour together. Every combination is a URL, most near identical, and left alone they consume crawl budget and split rankings across pages competing with each other.
The rules we work to. Pick the facets with real search demand, usually brand plus category and colour plus category, and give those static indexable URLs with their own H1, intro and title tag. Everything else gets noindex, and ideally isn't linked in a crawlable href at all. Never let two facets combine into an indexable URL, because that's how a 900 product store ends up with 40,000 pages nobody searched for. Sort and view parameters canonical to the clean category URL. Paginated pages self canonical rather than pointing at page one, and stay crawlable so products deep in the catalogue still get found.
Out of stock and discontinued products.
Temporarily out of stock: keep the URL, keep it indexable, mark availability correctly in the product schema, show alternatives and offer a back in stock alert. Don't 404 it and don't redirect it. You'll want that page in six weeks and the rankings won't come back for free. Seasonal lines stay on the same URL year to year rather than being deleted and rebuilt.
Permanently discontinued: 301 to the closest replacement where one exists, or to the parent category. Serve a 410 only when nothing relevant exists and no links point at the page. If a discontinued product still pulls traffic, keep it live with the replacement on it. Deleting pages that earn visits is the most common self inflicted wound in eCommerce SEO.
The same rules, different levers
What changes is how much control you get over URLs, parameters and templates.
WooCommerce SEO gives you control of everything, plus the maintenance that comes with it. Shopify SEO is quick to work with inside a URL structure you can't change. Wix SEO has improved and still has limits worth knowing first. Webflow SEO is clean technically, with collection limits that bite on larger catalogues.
How the work runs
We audit the catalogue, not just the site
Category coverage against search demand, index bloat from filters, and which pages already earn revenue.
We fix the structure first
Categories, facets, pagination and internal linking. Cheapest work, biggest movement.
We build the pages that are missing
Categories you should own and don't, plus the guides that earn links.
We report on revenue
Organic revenue by category each month, with what changed and what's next.
Who this suits, and who it doesn't
Stores with enough catalogue to have a structure problem, usually 100 SKUs and up. Retailers competing with marketplaces on the same products. Businesses on eCommerce website design builds who want the structure right before launch.
Less useful if you sell three products. That's a content and paid media job.
Why people pick us for this
Search and build sit in the same office.
When a fix needs a template change, the developer who makes it works here. No ticket to a third party.
Shopify Partner, and we work on the others.
The recommendation isn't shaped by the one platform we sell.
"We tried SEO and traffic went up but sales didn't."
Usually means traffic arrived on blog posts while the category pages stayed where they were. We report revenue by category, so that shows up in month two instead of month nine.