Your store can carry a better product at a better price and still lose the sale to a marketplace listing that ranks above you. SEO24 runs an e-commerce SEO service from Toronto for Canadian online retailers on Shopify, WooCommerce and custom platforms. We fix how search engines crawl your catalogue, rebuild category pages around the way shoppers search, and report on organic revenue instead of rankings. Start with a free store audit and see what is holding your catalogue back.
Search a product category on google.ca and look at who shows up. Amazon.ca, Walmart, Canadian Tire and Best Buy hold the top organic spots. Above them sits a row of Shopping ads, and more and more often an AI Overview that names a handful of products before anyone scrolls. An independent retailer fights for whatever space is left.
Most stores we audit make that fight harder than it has to be. Collections are organised the way the merchandising team thinks, not the way shoppers type. Product descriptions are the manufacturer's text, identical on forty other sites. Filters spin out thousands of near-duplicate URLs, so Google spends its visit on colour and size combinations and never reaches the pages that earn money. Prices sit in US dollars on a .com, with nothing telling Google the store ships from Mississauga.
None of this appears in a standard SEO report. It appears as flat non-brand revenue and a growing ad bill.
A service business has maybe thirty pages. A store with 2,000 products, six filters and a sort menu can expose hundreds of thousands of URLs, and nearly all of them are worthless to search. So the first job is subtraction: deciding which URLs deserve to be crawled and indexed, and making the rest stop competing with them. That means canonical rules for filtered and sorted views, a position on pagination, and internal search results kept out of the index.
The money sits on category pages. Someone searching for waterproof hiking boots in Canada wants a shelf to browse, so Google ranks collections for that query and leaves single products for the long tail: model numbers, exact variants, part codes. A store that pours effort into product pages while its collections carry a heading and a grid is optimising the wrong template.
Then there is stock. Products sell out, seasons end, lines get discontinued. Each of those URLs may hold links and rankings built up over years, and a silent 404 throws that away. A store needs a written policy: what stays live with a back-in-stock notice, what redirects to its successor, and what is allowed to go.
Last, a store's structured data is a live commercial claim. Price and availability in your Product markup have to match the page and your Merchant Center feed, or Google drops the rich result and may disapprove the listing.
Six components, ordered the way a catalogue is actually fixed: control the crawl first, then the templates that carry the revenue.
We crawl the store the way Googlebot does, map every URL pattern your filters, sorts and search box generate, and set the rules: what gets indexed, what is canonicalised, what is blocked. Server logs and Search Console then show whether Google follows them. This starts with a technical SEO audit of the whole catalogue.
Every collection gets one primary query and a clear place in the hierarchy. Where shoppers search for something you sell but have no page for, such as a material, a use case or a price band, we brief a new collection. Where two pages chase the same query, one gives way.
With thousands of SKUs you fix the template, not the page. Titles, headings, specification tables, image alt text and internal links are rebuilt once and applied across the catalogue. Core Web Vitals are fixed at the same level, so one change speeds up thousands of URLs. Your top sellers get copy written by hand to replace the supplier text.
Product, Offer, review and breadcrumb markup, validated against what is on the page. We reconcile it with your Merchant Center feed so price, stock and shipping to Canadian addresses agree everywhere Google reads them.
Shopify forces its collections and products paths and creates duplicate product URLs inside collections. WooCommerce ships with thin tag and attribute archives switched on. We know where each platform leaks and patch it. WooCommerce changes are made in-house by our WordPress web design team.
Comparison pages and buying guides answer what shoppers ask before they are ready to buy, and each one links into the collection it supports. They are also the pages other sites will link to, which is how a store earns authority that product pages never attract alone.
An online store does not live or die by the map pack. The surfaces that matter here are product surfaces.
Free listings in Google's Shopping tab and product grids are fed by Merchant Center, and a clean feed earns that placement without ad spend. It also makes paid Shopping cheaper to run, which is why we plan the feed alongside your Google Ads management.
Canadian targeting has to be explicit. CAD pricing, shipping and returns stated for Canadian addresses, hreflang if you also run a US storefront, and English and French versions if you sell into Quebec. Stores that skip this hand google.ca to American competitors who cannot match your delivery times or landed cost.
Shoppers now ask ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode what to buy. Those answers lean on structured product data, reviews and third-party mentions, which is the ground our AI search optimisation work covers.
If you also have a showroom or a pickup counter in the GTA, local inventory and your Google Business Profile join the plan.
Revenue. An online store is the one kind of site where SEO can be tied to money without guesswork, so that is how we report it.
The headline number is non-brand organic revenue: sales from people who did not already know your name. Brand searches will come anyway. Non-brand is what SEO earns. Beneath it we track revenue and average order value by landing page, so you can see which collections pay and which only collect visits, plus assisted conversions for the guides that start a purchase and never get the last click. Index coverage and crawl health are tracked too, as early warnings only.
On timing: technical fixes usually show in crawl and indexing data within the first two months. Category rankings and revenue tend to follow between months four and eight, later in crowded categories. Nobody can promise positions, and you should be wary of any agency that does.
See what your store is missing: free SEO auditEvery engagement starts with a free audit, so you see the problems before you spend anything. If we go ahead, the first month is discovery: a full crawl, a review of Search Console and analytics, a look at who holds the rankings you want, and a conversation with whoever runs your site.
From that comes a prioritised roadmap. Each item is ranked by expected impact against effort, and you approve it before work begins. Then we execute in monthly cycles: technical fixes first because everything else depends on them, then page and content work, then authority. Where a change needs your developers, we write the specification and check the result.
Reporting is monthly and in plain language. You get a short written summary of what changed, what it did and what comes next, backed by a live dashboard built on Search Console and Google Analytics 4 data. We recommend a minimum runway so the work has time to pay off, and keep the terms simple.
SEO24 is a Toronto agency, founded in 2023, with an office at 5255 Yonge Street. The team brings more than fifteen years of combined experience across technical SEO, content and WordPress development.
Work is senior-led: the person who plans your strategy does the work and answers your questions.
We build websites as well as optimise them, which matters for stores. When Phoenix Store, a crypto hardware retailer, came to us for a free audit, the findings led to a full redesign and an ongoing SEO programme. The Phoenix Store case study has the detail.
We also work in English, Persian, German and Arabic, which helps if your store sells beyond English-speaking Canada. If SEO is only part of what you need, see the full list of SEO and digital marketing services, or check our SEO pricing before you get in touch.
Case study · E-commerceFrom a free audit to a store built for search.Read the Phoenix Store story
Straight answers to what store owners ask before they hire an e-commerce SEO agency.
It depends mostly on catalogue size, platform and how competitive your category is. A 200-product Shopify store needs a different scope from a 20,000-SKU catalogue with faceted navigation. We scope every store after the free audit and quote a fixed monthly fee, never a share of revenue. Our pricing page shows current starting points.
Technical fixes are usually visible in Search Console within four to eight weeks, as Google recrawls the store. Category rankings and non-brand revenue generally follow from month four onwards, and competitive categories take longer. Stores with existing authority and a crawl problem tend to move fastest, because the fix releases value that was already there.
Either can rank well. Shopify is faster to run and harder to break, but it fixes your URL structure and limits control over some templates. WooCommerce gives full control and asks for more maintenance in return. Structure, content and technical hygiene decide results far more than the platform, so we rarely recommend migrating for SEO reasons alone.
Scale and templates. A store has thousands of URLs generated from a few templates, plus filters, variants and stock changes that a brochure site never deals with. The work is mostly about controlling what gets indexed, strengthening category pages and keeping product data consistent across the page, the markup and the Merchant Center feed.
No. We are based in Toronto and many clients are in the GTA, but an online store’s market is wherever it ships. We work with retailers across Canada and with stores selling into the US and overseas, including multilingual catalogues. Meetings happen by video call, or in person at our Yonge Street office.
Often, over time. As collections start ranking for non-brand queries you can test pulling back bids on those same terms and watch total revenue. We never suggest switching ads off on a hunch. SEO and paid data are read side by side, so the decision rests on your own numbers.
Send us your store URL and we will audit it for free: crawl and indexing problems, category gaps against the competitors who outrank you, and the first fixes we would make. Once we receive your request, a senior strategist reviews the site and sends you a written analysis. There is no obligation and no sales sequence afterwards. If the findings are useful, we can talk about next steps.
Prefer to talk first? Call (437) 297-7071 or send us a message.