Is e-commerce SEO actually a separate thing — what really changes on category and product pages?

The search intent between someone looking for information and someone looking for a product is completely different. Someone trying to get a stain out of a curtain is busy dealing with a mess at home, they're not buying a new curtain from you. But someone searching for 'linen drape curtain prices' already has their credit card ready. E-commerce SEO is all about directing your budget toward that second group.

On our shoe store, we published 120 blog posts in the first year. 75% of our traffic came from the blog, but the conversion rate was sitting at 0.2%. Once we restructured the category pages and opened size and model filters to indexation, overall traffic went down, but our order volume doubled within 5 months.

The biggest technical risk on e-commerce sites is the filtering system. When color, size, and price filters generate URLs unchecked, millions of duplicate pages appear across your site. If the agency doesn't rein this in using robots directives, canonical tags, and parameter configurations, you'll burn through your crawl budget and your actual products won't get indexed on Google.

edit: fixed a few typos.

Drill deep into the technical scope of any agency quoting 35,000 TL a month. If their idea of category optimization is slapping a 300-word AI-written text at the bottom of the page and calling it a day, do not give them that money. Real optimization requires getting your hands dirty in the codebase and database structure.

blog traffic looks great when presenting to upper management, you say look at our hundreds of thousands of clicks but cash in the register is zero. btw once we shifted to category and filter optimization the click count dropped but for the first time the phones and orders actually started rolling in.

Instead of signing up for a full retainer with the agency right away ask for a pilot project on your top 5 best-selling core categories. Once you see how the filter structure and search performance change, approve the budget for the rest of the site.

We wasted nearly two years paying content agencies to churn out blog posts. They kept telling us they were 'building brand awareness'. We finally realized that in e-commerce the category page is your main storefront display while the blog is just a flyer stand outside the front door. If your display is a mess and customers can't find what they're looking for handing out flyers doesn't do a thing for the shop.

the price gap comes down to labor. agencies can outsource blog articles to freelance writers for cheap. but e-commerce optimization requires siting down side by side with developers to map out category trees and filter rules and anyway if your budget allows for it definitely switch over to a category-first setup.

Thanks a lot, I'll try it today. Internal linking is the cheapest and most neglected task.

Proven by experience.

Quick summary for newcomers: Speed is a threshold issue; if you're already fast, making it faster changes nothing.

If you have questions, write them; I'll answer as best I can.

I went through the same thing two years ago. Internal linking is the cheapest and most neglected task.

Updating an existing page yields faster results than creating a new one. Proven by experience.

Yes, that's exactly how it is with what is e-commerce SEO. Merge instead of deleting; deleted content doesn't come back.

The biggest time-waster for us was not knowing who had the final say. Good luck with that.

The discussion got scattered, let me summarize. If you get three different answers on a topic, the question was asked wrong.

I'm curious too. Taking notes for two weeks yields better results than a six-month estimate.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

There's a part I don't understand. Taking notes for two weeks yields better results than a six-month estimate.

Just because everyone does it doesn't mean it's right. That's all, sorry if I went on too long.

correct.

There's also a measurement aspect to this. The biggest time-waster for us was not knowing who had the final say.

The harder it is to reverse a decision, the slower you should make it. If I were you I'd go this route.

I have a question, don't want to go off-topic though. Internal linking is the cheapest and most neglected task.

This is my opinion I'm not claiming it's absolute truth.