The pages that win search traffic for a small online store are usually the category pages, not the products. Someone typing “linen tea towels” or “organic coffee beans 1kg” wants a range to choose from. Google knows that, so it tends to show category and collection pages for those searches.
Yet when we audit small stores, the category pages are often a heading and a grid of products with nothing else. Meanwhile the owner has spent hours tweaking individual product titles. The effort is in the wrong place.
This guide covers the order we’d work in: categories first, then products, then the technical problems that filters and stock changes create.
Category pages are your main landing pages
Treat each important category like a service page on a normal business site. It needs a reason to exist beyond being a list.
Plan categories around how people search
Your categories should match the words customers use, not your supplier’s catalogue codes. If people search “kids rash vests” and your category is called “Junior UPF Tops”, you’re making Google and customers work harder than they need to.
Before you build or rename categories, do some basic keyword research (Google’s autocomplete and the “People also search for” box are free and surprisingly good). Then group products the way customers think: by type, by use, sometimes by material. Avoid having two categories that target the same search. “Women’s sandals” and “Sandals for women” competing against each other helps nobody.
Put real content on them
A short introduction above the grid, 50 to 150 words, that says what’s in the range and who it’s for. More detail below the grid if it’s useful: a sizing note, how to choose between options, care instructions, a link to a buying guide.
Write it for the customer. “Our ceramic planters are wheel thrown in Mullumbimby and glazed inside so they hold water without a saucer” is useful. “Shop our amazing range of quality planters at great prices” is filler that every store has.
Get the basics right
- A clear H1 that matches the search (“Ceramic planters”, not “Collection”).
- A unique title tag and meta description for each category. Shopify and WooCommerce both let you set these, though WooCommerce needs an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math to do it properly.
- Internal links to the category from your menu, homepage and related products.
- Pagination that works. If a category has 80 products across four pages, the later pages should still be crawlable and should link to each other.
Product pages: stop using the manufacturer’s description
If you resell products, the supplier sends everyone the same description. Dozens of stores then publish identical text. Google has no reason to rank your copy of it above the others, so it often picks one version and ignores the rest.
You don’t need to write 500 words for every product. Prioritise:
- Your 20 best sellers, and anything with good margin.
- Products people search for by name or model number.
- Products where you know something the supplier’s blurb doesn’t say.
For each, write in your own words: what it is, who it suits, what it’s like in use, what it’s not good for, and the specifics people check (dimensions, materials, compatibility, what’s in the box). Add your own photos where you can. A photo of the product on your actual bench, next to something for scale, says more than another studio shot on a white background.
For the long tail of products you can’t rewrite, at least add a line or two of your own above or below the supplier text, and make sure the title and specifications are complete. We go into layout and copy in more detail in product pages that sell.
Variations, not duplicates
If a shirt comes in five colours, that’s usually one product with five variations, not five products. Five near identical pages split your reviews, your links and Google’s attention. The exception is when a variant is searched for in its own right and genuinely differs (a laptop model with a different spec, for example).
Filters: the technical trap
Filters (by size, colour, brand, price) are great for customers and a common source of SEO mess. Every combination of filters can create a new URL:
/planters/?colour=white
/planters/?colour=white&size=large
/planters/?size=large&colour=white
/planters/?colour=white&size=large&orderby=price
Multiply that across every category and a store with 200 products can produce tens of thousands of URLs. Google wastes time crawling them, and the near duplicates dilute your real category pages.
What we do on small stores:
- Decide which filtered pages deserve to rank. Occasionally one does: “white ceramic planters” might be a real search worth targeting. For those, it’s usually better to create a proper subcategory with its own clean URL and written content, rather than relying on a filter URL.
- Keep the rest out of the index. Filter and sort URLs should carry a canonical tag pointing to the main category page, or a noindex tag. Your SEO plugin or theme normally handles this, but check.
- Stop crawling of endless combinations where the volume is high. A robots.txt rule blocking sort parameters and multi filter combinations is common. Shopify’s default robots.txt already blocks a number of these, and you can view yours at yourstore.com.au/robots.txt. WooCommerce stores need it set up deliberately.
- Don’t link to filter URLs in your main navigation unless you want them indexed.
Get this wrong in the other direction (blocking your real categories) and you can wipe out your traffic, so if you aren’t comfortable editing robots.txt, have someone do it who is.
Out of stock products
What you do depends on whether the product is coming back.
| Situation | What to do |
|---|---|
| Temporarily out of stock | Keep the page live. Mark it out of stock, show an expected date if you know one, offer a “notify me” option and link to similar products. |
| Discontinued, with a close replacement | 301 redirect the old URL to the replacement product. |
| Discontinued, no replacement, page has links or traffic | 301 redirect to the most relevant category. |
| Discontinued, no traffic, no links | Let it return a 404 or 410. That’s fine. |
The mistake we see most is deleting product pages in bulk during a stocktake. Any of them that had rankings, links or bookmarks are now dead ends. Check Search Console for traffic before you delete anything, and keep a spreadsheet of what’s redirected where.
Also avoid hiding out of stock products from your category pages and search entirely if they’ll be back in a fortnight. Customers who land on them from Google still want to see what you sell.
Product schema
Product structured data tells Google the price, availability, brand, reviews and shipping details in a format it can read without guessing. It’s what makes prices and stock status appear in search results and makes your products eligible for Google’s shopping features.
Google’s product structured data documentation splits this into two kinds. Merchant listings are for pages where people can buy from you, and they can include shipping and returns information. Product snippets are for review style pages where you can’t buy directly. A store wants merchant listings.
The good news: Shopify themes and WooCommerce (especially with Yoast SEO, Rank Math or a similar plugin) output product schema automatically. What goes wrong is the data feeding it:
- Prices in the schema that don’t match the price on the page (common when sale prices or GST settings change).
- Availability stuck on “in stock” because inventory isn’t tracked.
- Missing brand or GTIN/barcode values when you have them.
- Two plugins both adding product schema, so Google sees two different versions.
Test a few product pages in Google’s Rich Results Test after any theme or plugin change. Google says using a Merchant Center feed alongside structured data gives you the best eligibility, and for most stores the free listings are worth setting up.
Where to start this week
If you only do three things:
- Write a proper introduction for your five most important category pages.
- Rewrite the descriptions for your ten best selling products in your own words.
- Check that filter and sort URLs aren’t being indexed (search Google for
site:yourstore.com.auand look for URLs full of question marks).
If you’re still setting up the store, WooCommerce setup for a first Australian online store covers the groundwork. Once it’s running, track sales from organic search rather than rankings alone, which is what a good SEO report should show.
We build stores on both WooCommerce and Shopify as part of our e-commerce and Shopify builds, with categories and redirects planned before launch. If an existing store needs its SEO sorted out, that’s a job for our SEO team.