Ecommerce SEO
Most ecommerce sites don't have a content problem. They have an architecture problem.
At Getting Personal (Card Factory PLC), where I was Head of Marketing, one technical fix shipped just before peak trading generated a around 20% uplift in organic traffic through Christmas. Nobody wrote a single new blog post. That's the pattern I've seen across every ecommerce platform - Shopify, Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, bespoke builds: the category pages are thin, faceted navigation is generating thousands of crawlable near-duplicates, pagination is cannibalising the categories it should support. And the proposed answer is always more content.
That's the wrong answer. Fix the architecture first. Rankings follow.
First, I find out what you're actually trying to achieve
The first thing I do isn't a crawl - crawling matters, but it's one piece of information, and leading with it is how you end up solving the wrong problem. I start by understanding what you're trying to achieve and what you believe the problems are. Then I assess the technical, competitor, onsite and offsite ecosystems at a top-line level, and come back with an honest view: whether SEO is even the problem, and if it is, what to do about it.
When the diagnosis does go technical, I want to know what Google is actually indexing versus what the site wants indexed. Those two things are usually very different, and the gap between them is where revenue is being lost.
Faceted navigation is the most common culprit. A retailer with 5,000 products doesn't have 5,000 pages to manage - they have 5,000 products multiplied by every colour, size and filter combination the platform allows. Without a crawl strategy, Googlebot spends its budget on parameter variants and never properly sees the category pages that drive revenue. Deciding what to index, what to canonicalise and what to block is often the single highest-leverage piece of work on an ecommerce site.
Which page owns the search?
Which URL should rank for "women's waterproof jackets"? The category page. Not a product, not a blog post, not a seasonal landing page. When five URLs loosely target the same term, none of them rank in organic search. Building a clear map of which page owns which search - and making the internal linking reinforce it - is the work most audits don't go deep enough on.
Speed is a ranking and a conversion problem at once
Page load on product and category pages costs you twice: in rankings and at checkout. In ecommerce, technical SEO and commercial performance are the same thing.
Migrations are where years of equity disappear in a weekend
A Magento 2 move without complete redirect mapping. A Shopify launch that doesn't preserve URL structure. An SFCC project where staging URL patterns don't match production and nobody notices until after go-live - which is exactly what I caught on the Superdry Germany migration. I've managed replatforms from a bathroom retailer's Magento 2 rebuild (via CTI Digital) to multiple Superdry international markets on SFCC. The things missed pre-launch are the things that cost six months of recovery post-launch.
The portfolio
Beyond the in-house roles, I've worked with Homebase, Wilko and GSC Ltd directly, and with a portfolio of retailers across flooring, blinds, bathrooms, premium paint, pottery and gifts, pet supplements and art via CTI Digital, Blueclaw and Reload Digital. The platform matters less than the architecture decisions made on top of it.
In ecommerce SEO the gap is almost always in the architecture, not the content. If your category pages aren't ranking despite steady investment everywhere else, that's the diagnosis before I've even looked at your site - and the crawl usually proves it inside a week.