Magento SEO for big catalogues and busy shops

Pricing begins at £125 a week, close to £18 a day, and it runs 30 day rolling. Very big catalogues can call for extra hours, and you’ll hear that from me before anything starts.

Magento shops tend to be larger than the average Shopify or WooCommerce store, so I always look at the crawl before quoting. A few hundred products on a single store view sits well inside the standard fee. Tens of thousands of products across several stores and languages, with years of extensions layered on, is a different amount of work. Either way you get a clear figure up front.

The fee buys steady weekly work, starting with the settings that cause duplicate pages and moving on to categories, products and new content for the ten searches we pick together. Progress is visible any time in the live reporting portal, with a plain-English report each month. No setup fee, no tie-in. If you want to compare that with what agencies usually charge for ecommerce work, my breakdown of SEO costs in the UK sets out the typical ranges and what sits behind them.

Yes, it has more SEO settings than most platforms. They just need setting up, because the defaults create a lot of duplicate pages.

Canonical tags, URL rewrites, category path rules, robots settings, XML sitemaps and meta fields for every product and category are all built into the admin. Very few platforms give you that much control without extra code. For a shop with a big range and several store views, it’s one of the strongest options going.

The problem is what happens when nobody changes those settings after launch. Layered navigation opens up thousands of filter combinations, products show at more than one address and store views repeat the same content. Google wastes its visits on all that and gets to your important pages less often. Speed is the other common weak spot, because Magento is a heavy platform that needs good hosting and caching. My SEO audit starts by comparing the pages you meant to have with the pages Google has actually found. On Magento that gap tends to be large, and closing it is usually where the early progress comes from.

It’s the filter menu on your category pages. Each filter can create a new page address, which can leave Google crawling thousands of near-identical pages.

A shopper choosing size 10, black and under £50 sees a handy filtered list. Behind the scenes, Magento has made a new URL with those choices tacked on. Now multiply that by every filter option on every category. A catalogue of a few thousand products can produce more filter pages than real ones, and Google has no easy way to tell which matter.

The fix depends on the shop. Filter pages with no search demand get kept out of Google with canonical tags, robots rules or noindex settings. The handful that match real searches, such as a brand within a category, can be turned into landing pages with their own titles and copy. I also check that internal links aren’t pointing Google into endless filter combinations. Tidying this is one of the first SEO fixes I make on a Magento shop, because it frees up Google’s attention for the categories and products that bring in sales.

Magento can put products under category paths, so one product can have several URLs. I set canonicals and URL settings so there’s one main address.

Say a pair of trainers sits in Men, Running and Sale. With category paths switched on, that one product can be reached at three different addresses, plus the plain product URL. Google sees four pages with identical content and has to guess which to rank. Links and signals get split between them, so none performs as well as a single page would.

Magento has settings to stop this. Product URLs can be set to drop the category path, canonical tags can point every version at one main address, and URL suffixes can be made consistent. Changing them on a live shop needs care, because old addresses may already rank or have links, so they get redirected rather than dropped. I check the result in Google Search Console over the following weeks to confirm Google has settled on the right version. If Search Console isn’t set up in your name yet, I’ll sort that first.

Yes. I work on Magento 2 and Adobe Commerce shops. For the code side I work alongside your developer if you have one.

Most of what holds a Magento shop back in search lives in the admin and the content. Configuration, URL rules, canonicals, category copy, product pages and schema. My small in-house team and I handle all of that directly. Where something needs changing in a theme or a custom module, I write up exactly what’s needed and why, so your developer can make the change without guesswork.

If you don’t have a developer, tell me early. Some jobs can be done through settings and extensions without touching code, and for the rest I’ll be honest about what’s involved. Adobe Commerce, the paid version, adds features like content staging and B2B tools, but the SEO basics work the same way as on open source Magento 2. If you’d like to know more about my background and how the team works, the about me page covers it. Between us there’s more than 20 years of SEO experience, and we don’t hand work to anyone outside.

Plan a move. Magento 1 has had no security updates since June 2020. I’ll help you pick the right platform and handle the redirects.

Running an unsupported shop gets riskier every month. Payment providers and hosts are less keen to support it, extensions stop working and fewer developers will take it on. From an SEO point of view, the platform is also stuck with older habits, like slower pages and weaker schema, that newer systems handle better.

Where you move depends on the size of the shop and what you spend running it. Large catalogues with complex pricing usually suit Magento 2. Smaller shops are often better off on Shopify or WooCommerce, where running costs are lower and the SEO can be just as strong. I’ll talk you through the trade-offs honestly, even if the answer is the cheaper option. Whichever you choose, the move gets the same treatment. Every old address mapped and redirected before launch, so the rankings you’ve built up over the years come with you.

Not if it’s planned. Every old address gets redirected to its new one before launch, and I check Search Console closely after.

Magento migrations have more moving parts than most because of the URL habits. Products can live at several addresses, filter pages may already be indexed and old store views add more. I start by pulling a full list of every address Google knows about, from your sitemap, Search Console and a crawl of the shop. Each one gets matched to its new home, or to the closest category if there isn’t a direct match.

Titles, descriptions, category copy and product content come across too, because a redirect to a weaker page still loses ground. After launch I watch for errors and fix anything Google trips over as soon as it shows up. A short wobble while Google recrawls is normal on a big catalogue, but it should settle. My website redesign SEO checklist lists the checks I go through before and after any switch. The same planning applies to a move onto Magento 2, Shopify or WooCommerce, and all of it stays in house.

Usually heavy extensions, missing caching or large images. I check what’s loading and fix the biggest problem first.

Magento does a lot of work for each page, so it leans hard on caching. If full page caching isn’t set up well, or a tool like Varnish isn’t in place, shoppers wait while the server builds every page from scratch. Extensions are the next suspect. Over the years shops gather modules for reviews, search, popups and tracking, and each one can add its own files and database queries.

Images and hosting finish the list. Category pages with dozens of full-size product photos are slow on a phone, and Magento on budget hosting is rarely a happy mix. I test the key templates, find where the time goes and work through the fixes in order of impact, passing anything code-based to your developer with clear notes. My piece on why a slow mobile site costs you customers explains the link between speed and sales. On a big shop even small gains add up across thousands of visits.

Yes. I set them up so each store has its own pages and Google shows the right one to the right people.

Store views are one of Magento’s strengths. You might run a UK store and an Irish one, or English and French versions, all from one admin. Left alone, though, they often show the same products with the same text at different addresses, and Google struggles to know which to show where. Sometimes the wrong country’s prices end up in search results.

The answer is a mix of settings and content. Hreflang tags tell Google which version suits which country or language. Each store gets its own titles and descriptions, written for how people there search rather than translated word for word. Canonicals and sitemaps are set per store, so each one stands on its own. Search habits really do differ between markets, and my guide to choosing the right keywords explains how I work out which terms matter in each. Getting this right also helps AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI pick the correct version when they point people to your shop.

Yes. My office is in Liverpool, and I take on Magento shops from anywhere in the UK.

Magento work is all done online, through the admin, the server and Google’s tools, so the shop’s postcode doesn’t change a thing. You can reach me on WhatsApp, we can jump on a call with your developer when needed, and you can see every change and ranking movement in my SEO reporting portal whenever you like. The plain-English monthly report keeps the wider team in the loop.

A lot of Magento shops are run by bigger teams, and that works fine. I can talk to the owner, the marketing lead and the developer, and keep each one updated on the parts they care about. It’s still 30 day rolling, so you’re never stuck with me if things aren’t moving, and every account stays in your name. My reasons for working without contracts are in no contract SEO. Shops a long way from Merseyside get exactly the same attention as the ones down the road from me.