SEO for Ecommerce Stores in Vancouver

Categories Earn the Traffic. Filters Waste It.

Category pages are where a store can answer the broadest searches it can realistically win. Someone searching for a type of product wants a range to choose from, and a well-built category page — clear naming, a short useful introduction, sensible filtering, and enough products — is the best answer. They are also easy to neglect, left as a grid of products with a heading. Product pages matter for specific searches: a model, a brand and product, a product with a particular feature. They need their own descriptions rather than the manufacturer's text that appears on every other store selling the same item, real photos, and accurate structured data so Google can show price, availability and reviews in results. The structural risk is the filters. Every combination of size, colour, price range and sort order can become its own URL, and a store with a modest catalogue can generate a very large number of near-identical pages. Google publishes specific guidance on managing faceted navigation because it is a well-known source of wasted crawling. Managing which of those URLs Google sees — and making the canonical versions clear — protects the pages that should rank. Then there are Google's free product listings. Products submitted through Google Merchant Center can appear in Google's shopping results without paying for ads. For a store that has never set it up, it can be one of the quickest wins available.