E-commerce SEO · WooCommerce and Shopify
Your category pages sell. Your product pages get found. Most stores get this backwards.
Online stores in Sri Lanka usually pour effort into individual product descriptions while the category pages — the ones that can actually rank for the searches people make — sit thin, unwritten and buried behind filters.
The category page problem
Think about how people actually search. Almost nobody types a specific product name unless they already know the brand. They type a category and a qualifier: women's running shoes, ayurvedic skincare gift sets, office chairs under thirty thousand. Those are category searches, and the page that should answer them is usually a bare grid of thumbnails with no text on it at all.
A category page with genuine written content — what the range covers, how to choose between options, what the common questions are — can rank for exactly those searches while the product pages underneath capture the narrower branded ones. Getting this hierarchy right is worth more to most stores than any amount of link building.
The second recurring issue is faceted navigation. Filters for size, colour and price generate URL combinations that multiply quickly, and if those are crawlable and indexable the store can end up with tens of thousands of near-identical pages competing with each other. Handling this correctly with canonicals, robots directives and parameter rules is routine work that is almost never done.
What the work covers
Category architecture
Category and subcategory structure mapped to how people actually search, with written content on the pages that need to rank.
Faceted navigation control
Filter and parameter handling so crawl budget goes to pages that can rank instead of thousands of filtered duplicates.
Product page optimisation
Original descriptions rather than manufacturer copy, correct product schema with price, availability and reviews, and image optimisation at scale.
Out-of-stock and discontinued
A policy for products that go away, so accumulated ranking value is redirected rather than dropped into a 404 page.
Store speed
Core Web Vitals on stores carrying heavy themes, sliders and plugin stacks, where speed affects both rankings and cart abandonment.
Shopping and paid alignment
Merchant Center feed quality tied to the same product data, so organic and paid shopping draw on one clean source rather than two.
Selling abroad from Sri Lanka
Stores shipping internationally have a further layer to get right. Currency and shipping information needs to be visible before checkout, because a UK visitor seeing prices in rupees with no delivery estimate leaves. If separate URLs exist for different regions, hreflang has to be correct or Google will pick one and ignore the rest.
This is worth doing properly. Sri Lankan stores selling spices, tea, ayurvedic products, handicrafts and gemstones compete internationally on genuine origin advantage, and that advantage is only useful if the pages are findable.
Questions
Should I optimise category pages or product pages first?
Categories, in almost every case. Category pages answer the searches people actually make, while product pages capture narrower branded demand. Most stores have this the wrong way round and wonder why traffic is flat.
Why do I have thousands of pages in Google I did not create?
Faceted navigation. Filters for size, colour and price generate URL combinations that get crawled and indexed as separate pages. Left unmanaged, these consume crawl budget and compete with the pages you want to rank.
Can I use the manufacturer's product descriptions?
You can, but they appear on every other store selling the same item, so they give you nothing to rank on. Original descriptions on your highest-margin products are usually a better use of effort than rewriting the entire catalogue at once.
What should happen to discontinued products?
Redirect them to the closest equivalent product or the parent category, rather than letting them 404. A product page that ranked for years carries value worth keeping. For seasonal items that return, keep the URL and mark it out of stock instead.
Do you work with Shopify as well as WooCommerce?
Both. Shopify constrains URL structure more than WooCommerce, which changes how category architecture is handled, but the underlying priorities are the same on either platform.
Free store audit
Send the store address and you get a written review covering category structure, crawl waste from filters, product schema and speed — with the findings ordered by revenue impact rather than by severity score.
+94 77 712 3489
kasun@wirecabin.com
Mon–Fri, 08:30–22:00