- 01
Start from margin, not from search volume
Which lines carry the profit, which are dead stock, what an order is worth and which competitors keep beating you. We want the commercial picture before we touch the store — a ranking plan built before that conversation is a spreadsheet with a guess attached.
- 02
Crawl the store the way a search engine does
Every URL, every status code, every redirect chain, rendered and unrendered. Most stores we open are spending the bulk of their crawl budget on filter combinations and internal search results nobody will ever visit.
- 03
Take control of faceted navigation first
Decide which filter combinations deserve a real, indexable page because people search that way, and make the rest uncrawlable rather than merely uninteresting. This single decision usually changes what the whole store is capable of ranking for.
- 04
Give category pages a reason to exist
Category pages carry the highest-intent searches in a store. They get an introduction that answers the query, a buying guide underneath the grid, internal links to the sub-categories worth having, and copy written by someone who understands the range.
- 05
Write product pages that can be told apart — and retire the ones that cannot
Genuinely distinct titles, descriptions, metadata and imagery on the products that matter, proper variant handling with canonicals behind it, and an honest decision on the rest. If two products cannot justify two pages, we consolidate. A smaller, stronger set beats a bloated one.
- 06
Mark up price, stock and rating so the result carries them
Product, offer, review, breadcrumb and FAQ structured data, kept in agreement with what is on the page. Same position in the results, far more of the screen — the price, the availability and the stars sit inside the listing itself.
- 07
Make it fast on the phone it is actually opened on
Image weight and formats, lazy loading, script bloat, third-party tags, server response time and layout stability, measured against the published thresholds on real visits. A store that loads slowly ranks lower and, more to the point, gets abandoned more.
- 08
Clean the Merchant Center feed in the same pass
Titles, attributes, identifiers and disapprovals. The same feed powers your free listings and your paid Shopping campaigns, so fixing it once moves both — and it is the cheapest revenue in most stores we open.
- 09
Publish what people read before they spend
Buying guides, comparisons, sizing and compatibility, and the questions your own support inbox answers ten times a week. Authority around the range you actually sell, not filler around a blog.
- 10
Count revenue, not sessions
Purchase value on every order, refunds reconciled where the platform allows it, and organic separated from paid so nobody claims the same sale twice. Tracking is a prerequisite here, not a phase two — a store reported in sessions is a store nobody can make a decision about.