E-commerce SEO Overhaul

An Edinburgh-based retailer with a 15,000-product catalogue was losing organic rankings despite strong content. A technical audit revealed a raft of crawl and performance issues compounding over years of incremental development.

The challenge

The site had accumulated duplicate content from faceted navigation, broken canonicals, render-blocking third-party scripts, and no structured data. Google was spending crawl budget on thousands of near-duplicate URLs and ignoring the product pages that mattered.

Approach

Starting with a full crawl audit, we identified the highest-impact issues and prioritised them by traffic opportunity. Faceted navigation was controlled via robots directives and canonical tags. Product structured data (Schema.org Product, Review, BreadcrumbList) was implemented across all category and product templates.

Performance work targeted Largest Contentful Paint — images were lazy-loaded, fonts preloaded, and third-party scripts deferred. A Cloudflare Worker handled long-tail redirect management without touching the origin.

Outcome

• Organic sessions up 34% within 90 days of implementation
• LCP improved from 4.2s to 1.8s
• 11,000 duplicate URLs removed from the crawl index