Organic SEO retainer for e-commerce (Local Authority to Market Dominance), scope depends on catalogue size • Current North SEO pricing, see Buy Services
Biotus is a large online store of health and beauty products with around 25,000 URLs - the kind of catalogue where technical problems multiply silently. The store operated alongside sister sites with different URLs that shared, unusually, a single sitemap merged through one FTP set-up, which meant search engines were being given a map of several stores at once. The client commissioned a full technical audit with every possible analysis and a complete set of recommendations, to understand what was holding the store back before deciding on implementation.
The audit was comprehensive: a full, detailed check of the site for technical errors across the catalogue; usability recommendations for the shopping experience; analysis of competitors' websites to see what the leading stores in the category did differently; an analysis of the basket and checkout flow, where conversions were being lost; and a sitemap analysis that was the hardest part - untangling the shared sitemap across sites and designing a solution that gave each store its own correct map.
Content was analysed for uniqueness - with tens of thousands of product texts, categories were prioritized because they carry the commercial rankings - and the HTML code was reviewed for structural and rendering issues. The audit also examined the relationship between Google's algorithms and the site's performance, developing theories about which updates had affected which sections and what to change in response, and analysed meta tags and micro-markup across the templates.
For a catalogue of this size the recommendations were organized by template and by priority, so a fix applied to a template would correct thousands of pages at once.
The store received a complete map of its errors and opportunities - technical, usability, content, sitemap, markup - organized so its team could act on them by priority, and conversions improved as the checkout and usability recommendations were implemented.
The shared-sitemap problem is a good example of an error nobody sees. Each of the sister stores was submitting a sitemap that included the other stores' URLs, so Google received conflicting signals about which site owned which page and which pages to crawl. The audit traced the cause to the merged FTP configuration and specified the fix: a sitemap per store, generated from that store's own catalogue, with the cross-references removed - a change that restored clean crawling for 25,000 URLs and stopped the stores competing with each other in Google's index.
Large catalogues in Vancouver and across Canada accumulate the same silent problems. North SEO's SEO Audit for e-commerce is built for this scale: template-level analysis, sitemap and indexation review, usability and checkout findings, and a prioritized plan that fixes thousands of pages per change.
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