Catalog content
We give the pages that can rank something to rank with
- Category page copy
- Product descriptions
- Internal linking
- Duplicate consolidation
150+ stores built, and the catalogs inside them.
Forty products or forty thousand, on the platform you are on now or the one you move to. That is the job of an ecommerce SEO agency Chicago brands keep past the first year.
Search for an agency to fix your store's search and you get general SEO agencies. Good ones, mostly. They audit the things every website has: titles, speed, links, mobile.
A store is not every website. It is thousands of pages generated from a database, and it goes missing in ways a site with twelve pages cannot.
So we read 26 stores from their own public feeds, 9,690 products and 1,103 category pages, and checked three of those ways. The typical store had no text on two thirds of the pages it most needs to rank. That is where an ecommerce SEO agency Chicago brands hire ought to be looking.
In short
Ecomm Wizards is an ecommerce SEO agency Chicago brands hire to get product and category pages found. We work on the platform you are on today. We count what is broken on your catalog and show you the number before you decide anything.
The bigger the catalog, the more pages nobody wrote
Chicago sells by the catalog. Parts and fittings, food lines, home goods, trade ranges with twelve sizes of the same thing. Not a shelf of forty products.
At forty products a person can write forty descriptions in a week. At four thousand nobody ever does, so the pages get generated instead, and a generated page says whatever the last one said.
That is the squeeze, and it gets tighter the better you do. Every range you add is more pages with nothing of their own on them. That is why ecommerce seo Chicago brands pay for has to start at the catalog, not the homepage. An ecommerce SEO agency Chicago founders brief meets this on the first call.
Three stores, and what moved afterwards
Capelli Sports
- Vertical
- Sportswear
- What was built
- A move off WordPress with every URL mapped before a page shifted
- Outcome
- 95% of search equity kept, conversion +24%, site speed +38%
Evie Lou
- Vertical
- Fashion
- What was built
- A rebuild around how people actually find and compare the range
- Outcome
- Organic revenue +47%, conversion +82%, AOV +31%
Everlast
- Vertical
- Sports equipment
- What was built
- A large catalog restructured so the ranges are reachable and distinct
- Outcome
- Conversion +152%, total orders +48%, AOV +21%
When your pages say the same thing, Google picks one
This is not a penalty. It is a choice being made for you. Google's own documentation says so plainly. If you do not tell it which version of a page to show, it works out which one it thinks is best and shows that.
On a store that happens constantly. The same description sits on the blue one and the black one and the one in a bigger size. To a search engine those are not three products. They are one page with three addresses.
So two things follow. Google shows whichever it picked, which may not be the one you would have sent people to. And the pages it did not pick spend your crawl allowance without earning anything back. Neither shows up in a report, which is why an ecommerce SEO agency Chicago brands retain can run a year without either of you noticing.
Three checks, run across 9,690 products
Search ecommerce SEO agency Chicago and every page that comes back is a general agency or a directory, and not one of them publishes a measurement. So here is ours. We read 26 stores from their own public feeds and ran three checks that only apply to a store.
| What we checked | Across the 26 stores |
|---|---|
| Category pages we read | 1,103 |
| With no text of their own, typical storeThe range ran from 12% to every page. | 67% |
| Stores with nothing on a single one | 4 of 26 |
| Products we read | 9,690 |
| Reusing another product's description, typical storeOne store had done it to every product it sells. | 23% |
| Stores leaving every sold-out page live | 15 of 23 |
| Stores retiring every oneSo it is a decision, not a technical limit. | 7 of 23 |
| Sold-out pages still live at one store | 648 |
Three different ways to go missing, and only the third is a tidy-up job.
The first is having nothing to rank with. A category page is the one aimed at what people actually type, and on the typical store two thirds of them carry no words at all.
The second is having the same thing to rank with twice. Those pages do not compete with your rivals. They compete with each other.
The third surprised us. Stores do not half tidy up. Fifteen of the 23 leave every sold-out page answering, seven retire all of them, one sits in between. Nobody drifts into that, which means somebody chose, and usually nobody remembers choosing.
Which of the three you have takes about an hour to establish, and any ecommerce SEO agency Chicago brands shortlist can do it.
Three things to check before you brief anyone
- Open your three biggest category pages. If there is nothing above or below the grid but a heading, that is the problem in one look.
- Take the description off one product and search your own site for it. If it comes back more than once, those pages are splitting what should be one page's weight.
- Find something you stopped selling last year and type its address in. If the page still loads, every discontinued line you ever had is still loading too.
Why this never shows up in the report you already get
Nothing here is an error. No crawler flags a category page for being blank, because blank is valid. The page loads, returns a clean status and renders fine.
And the numbers look stable. Traffic does not fall when you add four hundred thin pages. It just never rises, which reads as a flat month rather than a fault.
So it survives audits. A general agency will check what every site has and find little wrong, because little is wrong by those tests. The catalog is the part only an ecommerce SEO agency Chicago brands hire thinks to open.
Want the three checks run on your own catalog? Tell us the store and we will send what we find.
Get in touch with usWhat the work is
The order we would do these in
Most stores need the first one and think they need the last. Every row links to the store it was done for, and you can take one without taking the rest. Between them they are where an ecommerce SEO agency Chicago companies retain spends its time.
Technical search
We stop the store spending its crawl on pages that cannot sell
- Crawl and index control
- Canonicals
- Retired product handling
- Structured data
Migration
We move the store without handing back the rankings
Replatforming is where a Chicago ecommerce SEO company earns its money or costs you a year, and the redirect map decides which.
- Platform migration
- Redirect mapping
- Equity protection
- Post-launch recovery
Turning traffic into orders
We would rather fix what the visits do than count more of them
- Landing page work
- A/B testing
- Product page conversion
- Analytics
Not sure which of the four you need? Tell us about the store and we will name the one we would start on.
Get in touch with usWhat holds whichever one you buy
These four do not change with the size of the job. Put the same list to every ecommerce SEO agency Chicago brands talk to before you choose one.
You see the count before you commit
We run the checks on your catalog and send what we find. If there is not enough there to be worth paying for, we say that.
We work on the store you have got
Everything is measured on what you run today. If replacing it is not the answer, we say so and name what is.
You see the number both ways
We measure what we are asked to fix before we touch it, and again afterwards. You get both figures, not a description of them.
Nothing is tied to us
The code, the accounts and the data are in your name. If you leave, there is nothing to ask us for.
Where people push back
“We already pay someone for SEO.”
Then this takes an hour to settle rather than a meeting. Ask them what share of your category pages carry text, and what share of your products reuse a description.
If they have the numbers, they are doing the work and you should keep them. If the question is new, you have found the gap without changing anything.
Those two figures are what separates an ecommerce SEO agency Chicago brands keep from one they quietly replace.
“Nobody reads category page copy.”
Mostly true, and not the point. It is not there to be read end to end, it is there so the page has something to be about.
It also does not need to be long. The stores doing this well in our count were writing a short paragraph, not an essay, and you can do your main ranges in a week.
“Our store is not on Shopify.”
That is fine, and not the first question we would ask. Every platform generates pages from a database, and every one of them generates blank ones just as happily.
If moving would help we will tell you, and if not we will tell you that too.
“We tried SEO and it did nothing.”
That is the usual story, and it is why we count first and send you the number before you pay for anything.
If the count comes back small, there is nothing here worth buying and we will tell you. Four of the 26 stores we read had already done the category work properly.
What we would do in the first two weeks
We run the three checks on your catalog and put the result next to what those pages currently earn you. That tells you two things: how many pages have nothing of their own, and which of them already get seen.
The overlap is the work. A blank category page nobody visits can wait. A blank one that already ranks on page two is worth a morning.
Then we write the first batch with you, not at you, because you know why someone buys the thing and we do not. Any ecommerce SEO agency Chicago brands trust will want that conversation first.
The first conversation is about what is actually missing. It costs you nothing, including when the answer is that we would change very little.
Get in touch with usWhat brands ask before they pick anyone
Most often because they are aimed at a search nobody makes. A product page can only win its own exact name. The page that can win what people type is the category page above it, and that is usually where your problem sits.
They need something to be about. A heading and a grid of photographs gives a search engine almost nothing to read. On the typical store we checked, two thirds had no more than that, so it is worth looking at yours.
Not delete, usually. If it is coming back, keep it and say so. If it is gone for good, send the page to whatever you would want that buyer to see instead, which is rarely your homepage.
Four things, broadly. Gives the pages that can rank something to rank with. Stops the store wasting its crawl. Protects the rankings through a replatform. And turns the visits into orders. An ecommerce SEO agency Chicago brands hire does all four, or says which one you need.
Category work shows up in weeks, because those pages are already there and already rank for something. Rewriting a whole catalog takes months. Most of that time goes on writing, not on code, and you will see movement long before it is done.
Yes. We work on whatever your store runs on now. The first job is finding out whether the platform is the problem or something sitting on top of it, and usually it is not the platform.
Yes, and remotely is how it runs. There is no office in the city to visit. Where you sit does not change how the work is scoped, written or handed over.
No, and you should not try. Start with the ranges that already earn something and the duplicates splitting one page's weight. The long tail can wait.
Usually, and often it is the quickest route. We can hand them a specification and check the result, or take the parts nobody on your team has time for.
That is the whole point of counting first. You get the before figure in writing, then the same count afterwards. If it did not move, you will see that just as clearly.
Next step
Send us your store and we will run the three checks
The same three checks from the table, run on your store.
Put your store address in the form, and you get back:
- How many of your category pages carry no text of their own.
- How many products are reusing a description another product already has.
- Whether the things you stopped selling are still answering, and how many.
You get the findings and nothing else attached to them.
Free, and nobody chases you afterwards.
A developer replies within one working day. Not a salesperson.
