A soap company came to us with a good product and a catalog search engines couldn't make sense of. We didn't run a clever campaign. We cleaned house, rebuilt the foundation, and gave the content somewhere solid to land — and the rankings followed.
Most ecommerce SEO problems aren't exotic. They're structural — and they compound. A cleanup engagement like this one works through four areas, in order, because each one limits how much the next can help:
What can search engines actually see? Cleanups start with crawl and index hygiene: pages that should be indexed and aren't, pages that shouldn't be and are, redirect chains, and sitemaps that don't match the live site.
Ecommerce platforms generate near-identical pages by default — variants, filters, tag archives. Consolidating duplicates and cutting or rebuilding thin pages concentrates authority instead of scattering it.
Every product needs a home. A category structure that mirrors how people actually shop gives each page one clear job, one clear URL, and internal links that pass strength where it matters.
Titles, headings, product copy, image alt text, internal anchors. None of it is glamorous. All of it is how a page tells a search engine — and a shopper — what it's for.
There's a temptation in engagements like this to skip to publishing content, because content is visible and technical fixes aren't. We resisted it. Content published onto a broken structure underperforms; the same content on a clean structure works. So the sequence mattered more than any single deliverable:
Crawl and indexation first. Get the sitemap telling the truth, resolve what should and shouldn't be in the index, and flatten redirect chains — so every later fix is actually seen.
Merge duplicate pages, retire what earns nothing, and keep one canonical page per buying intent. Fewer, stronger pages beat many weak ones.
Reorganize categories around how customers shop for soap — by use, by ingredient, by gift occasion — instead of how the catalog happened to grow. Internal links follow the same logic.
Distinct titles and headings for every page that stayed, product copy written for the buyer rather than pasted from a supplier, and alt text that describes the product.
With the foundation clean, publish content that supports the catalog — the questions people ask before they know which product to search for — with each piece linking into the categories it feeds. Not a blog orbiting nothing.
SEO rebuilds don't produce overnight screenshots, and we won't dress this one up with numbers we haven't published. Here is what happened, stated plainly: rankings moved toward page one, and sessions improved over time.
That's the honest shape of a cleanup. Not a spike — a trend. The structural fixes stopped the site from leaking authority, the architecture gave the strongest pages room to climb, and each new content piece landed on a foundation built to receive it. The line bent the right way, and it kept bending.
Why we tell it this way: we publish specific figures when we can stand behind them — like the 12x return we documented for a used-car dealership. Where we don't publish figures, we describe the trajectory and let the work speak. You should hold every agency to the same standard.
Paid traffic stops the day the budget stops. A cleaned-up site keeps working. Every duplicate consolidated makes the surviving page stronger. Every category rebuilt makes the next product launch easier to rank. Every article published lands on a structure designed to route its authority to the pages that sell.
That's why the unglamorous work comes first. Nobody frames a fixed redirect chain — but months later, it's the reason the interesting work pays off.
Tell us about your site and we'll tell you, honestly, whether a cleanup is worth it — and what the first ninety days would look like.