SEO for a Webshop: Product Pages, Categories and Duplication

en 2026-09-24 7 min read

SEO for a webshop starts with a one-off SEO foundation at EUR 450-750, which finds out what Google has indexed from your catalogue and fixes the structure behind it. Ongoing work on top of that is SEO growth at EUR 500-800/mo.

The places a shop loses in search are structural: product text copied from the manufacturer, category pages with nothing on them, filters that multiply URLs, and products that vanish without a redirect. Each one is fixable without building a new shop.

Which pages catch which searches

The homepage catches people searching your name. Category pages catch broad searches from people who have not chosen a product yet, such as "oak dining table". Product pages catch people who know the model they want and are deciding where to buy it.

A search for a model number can be answered by every shop that stocks the item, so your product page competes on price, stock and trust. The category page is where a smaller shop has the better chance, because it can help someone choose in a way a large retailer's bare grid does not.

Where shops lose

Filters that multiply your URLs

Colour, size, brand and sort order help shoppers. To a search engine, each combination can be its own URL, so a modest catalogue can produce far more filter URLs than real pages, and Google spends its crawling on near-copies of your categories.

Pick the combinations people search for, such as a brand within a category, and give those fixed addresses, their own titles and a line of text. Keep the rest out of the crawl, with robots.txt rules or by not exposing them as ordinary links. A canonical tag on its own is a hint that Google can ignore. If filter pages are already indexed, the order of those changes matters, and checking it is part of the foundation.

Product text copied from the manufacturer

The supplier's description sits on every shop that sells the product. Google shows one or two of those identical pages for a search and filters out the rest, and nothing on your copy gives it a reason to pick you.

You do not need to rewrite the whole catalogue. Start with the products that sell and the ones people search by name, and add what only you know: how it fits, what it goes with, what customers ask before buying, your own photos.

Variants in the wrong place

A shirt sold in several sizes belongs on one page with a size selector, because nobody searches for size M. A colour that people search for by name can earn its own URL. Whichever you choose, add product structured data so price and availability are clear.

Category pages with nothing on them

A title that says "Shirts" above a grid of photos is what a platform gives you out of the box. Give each category a title that matches how people search, a short introduction that helps someone choose, and links to its subcategories. Write it the way a good shop assistant talks, not as a block of keyword text under the grid. Page two onwards should carry a canonical tag pointing at itself, not at page one, so the products further down stay reachable.

Products that disappear

Deleting a discontinued product throws away the links and search history the page had built. Redirect it with a 301 to a direct replacement or a closely related category. Sending everything to the homepage does not work, because Google treats that much like a missing page. A product that is only out of stock should stay live, marked as unavailable, with alternatives shown.

Duplicates the platform makes for you

On Shopify, a product can be reached at its /products/ address and again under each collection it belongs to. The canonical tag points at the /products/ version, but a theme that builds product links with the collection path sends your own internal links to the copy, and a theme edit fixes it. On WooCommerce, tag archives, internal search results and add-to-cart links can all end up crawled.

What each line costs on a shop

Building the shop is separate. A shop with checkout and payments is step 04 of our five steps: EUR 3.500-7.500 over 6-12 weeks, with a fixed quote after scoping.

Where a foundation lands inside EUR 450-750 depends on the size of the catalogue, how many filters the theme exposes and whether the shop runs in more than one language. A redirect map for a move between platforms belongs to the move itself and is scoped with it.

The order of work

1. Compare the sitemap with the page indexing report in Search Console: which products and categories made it into Google, and which URLs it found that you never listed.
2. Close the leaks: filter and sort parameters, internal search results, platform duplicates and dead products.
3. Fix the categories, and give the filter combinations worth keeping their own pages.
4. Rewrite product text, starting at the top of your sales report.
5. Connect Google Merchant Center, so your products can appear in the free listings on the Shopping tab.

The first two are technical. The last three are the part that waits on you: which products are gone for good, what customers ask before buying, and access to the shop admin and Merchant Center. If you are rebuilding, settle filter handling and URL structure during the design and build, because changing addresses after launch adds a redirect project on top.

When to spend less

• If the catalogue is small and your buyers come from Instagram or a newsletter, set up Search Console and Merchant Center yourself, write proper product titles and skip SEO growth.
• If you sell mainly on Bol.com, Amazon or Etsy, shoppers are searching inside that marketplace. Improve those listings first.
• If you run a standard Shopify theme with few filters, the duplication problems above are small, and a foundation to confirm that may be all you need.

And if the shop has not sold anything yet, do not hire us yet for SEO. Without sales you cannot tell which products deserve new copy or which categories matter.

Questions buyers ask

Should my filter pages be indexed?

Only the ones that match real searches, such as a brand within a category or a material people look for. Sort orders, price ranges and size filters almost never deserve it, so keep those out of the crawl.

Do I need to rewrite every product description?

No. Start with the products that bring in the most revenue and the ones people search for by name, then work down. For a long run of similar items, a good template with the specifics filled in beats copied supplier text.

Will moving from WooCommerce to Shopify hurt my rankings?

It will if the URLs change without redirects, and they will change, because Shopify puts products under /products/ and categories under /collections/. Map every old product and category URL to its new address with a 301 before the switch, then watch the indexing report for errors.

Is Google Shopping part of SEO?

The free part is close to it. Products in Google Merchant Center can appear in free listings on the Shopping tab without paying for ads. It needs a product feed whose prices and stock match the site, which is the same clean product data your pages need anyway.

If you want to know where your shop is losing in Google, send us the shop's address and we will tell you what the foundation would look at.