A shop is the hardest type of site for search, for one reason: it has too many pages. A company site has twenty; a shop with 800 items and filters easily produces thirty thousand addresses — most of which nobody needs.
Nine places where it breaks, sorted by what they cost.
1. Filters create an endless number of addresses
Every combination of colour, size and price makes a new address. Google crawls thousands of them, spends the time it allocated you, and in that time never reaches the pages that matter.
What to do: filters aren’t indexed, except the ones that genuinely are search topics — and there are few of those. “Trainers size 9” is a topic; “trainers, red, size 9, up to £80, sorted by price ascending” is not.
2. The category is the most valuable page, and it’s empty
This is the biggest missed money in every shop. People don’t search for one item — they search for a category: “women’s winter jackets”, “radiators for a flat”, “pushchair prices”.
A category page with only a heading and a grid of products has nothing to rank. Add:
- two or three paragraphs above or below the products — what you’re choosing between, on what basis, what to watch out for
- answers to three questions customers genuinely ask
- a price range and delivery time
That’s an hour per category and the best-spent time in the whole shop.
3. The product description is copied from the supplier
If fifteen shops sell the same item with the same description, Google picks one and doesn’t show the other fourteen. You are usually among those fourteen.
What to do: you don’t have to rewrite everything. Add one paragraph that is only yours — who it’s for, what it goes with, what people most often ask before buying, your experience with returns. Thirty words nobody else has are worth more than three pages of copied text.
4. The item is gone and the page returns a 404
A product leaves the range, the page is deleted — and that page had been collecting positions and links for years. You throw it all away.
What to do:
- item temporarily unavailable → leave the page, say when it’s arriving, offer an alternative
- item permanently gone → redirect to its successor or to the category, never to the homepage
- a whole category is closing → redirect to the nearest one
5. There are no ratings and reviews
Stars in the search results raise the click rate, noticeably. If you have reviews but they aren’t marked up with structured data, Google doesn’t know they exist.
A bonus that’s rarely mentioned: reviews are the only text on a product page written by somebody else — and they’re full of the words people actually search with.
6. The same item at several addresses
The same product available through two categories, so it has two addresses. Or with a ?utm_ parameter. Or with and without a trailing /. Every variant is a separate page to Google, competing with itself.
What to do: a canonical address on every product page, pointing to the one true one.
7. Price and availability aren’t in the structured data
Price, currency, availability and rating written into Product data let them appear in the search result. Without it you’re just a title and a description, next to a competitor who has a price and stars.
8. The basket and checkout are slow on a phone
Most shops have a good homepage and a slow basket, because speed is measured on the front page. Measure it where the money is lost.
9. There’s no working site search (and no report on what people look for)
A shop’s internal search is the best source of topics there is — those are your customers literally typing what they want. If fifty people a month search for an item you don’t stock, that’s a purchasing decision, not just a website one.
The order worth working in
- The ten most important categories — add text and questions.
- Filters — exclude everything from the index except the ones that are real topics.
- Discontinued items — sort out the redirects.
- Structured data for products and reviews.
- The twenty best-selling items — add a paragraph that’s only yours to each.
- Only then the rest.
In short
- Shops don’t lose because of too few pages but because of too many.
- Categories are the most valuable pages and are most often empty.
- A description copied from the supplier takes you out of the running; thirty words of your own are enough.
- Discontinued items are redirected, not deleted.
- Price, availability and ratings go into structured data — otherwise search doesn’t see them.