Who it is for
Stores with a catalogue large enough that architecture matters, on WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento or a custom build, and Sri Lankan stores selling overseas. WooCommerce is the most common here and the most variable: performance depends almost entirely on hosting and plugin discipline. Shopify is more consistent but restricts URL structure and robots control, which changes how filters have to be handled.
If you sell a handful of products from one location, local SEO is usually the better fit.
Category pages carry the money
Most store owners invest in product pages and the homepage. But the searches with real volume are category-shaped (“running shoes”, “office chairs”, “baby formula”) and they land on category pages. Product pages capture the long tail of people who already know exactly what they want, which is a much smaller pool.
A category page that ranks needs more than a grid of thumbnails: an intent-matched title and H1, a genuine introduction, sensible sub-category linking, and content that answers what someone comparing options in that category actually needs to decide. Most Sri Lankan stores ship the theme default and never touch it.
Faceted navigation, the biggest technical trap
Filters for size, colour, price and brand generate a URL for every combination. A catalogue of moderate size can produce tens of thousands of crawlable URLs, nearly all of them near-duplicates. Google then spends its crawl budget on filter permutations instead of on your actual products.
Fixing it means deciding deliberately which facet combinations deserve to be indexed (usually a small set with real search demand, like brand plus category) and blocking the rest through canonicals, robots directives and internal linking. It is unglamorous and it is often the single biggest win available on a Sri Lankan ecommerce site.
Product schema and rich results
Product markup with price, availability, currency and review data is what produces the star ratings and price labels in the search results. On a page of competing listings that is a visible CTR advantage for work that takes hours, not months.
For Sri Lankan stores, getting LKR right and keeping availability accurate as stock moves is what stops Google showing a wrong price or status, which loses the sale and, often enough, the rich result.
Out-of-stock and discontinued products
Deleting a product page removes whatever authority and rankings it had accumulated. Leaving it up unchanged sends buyers to a dead end. Neither is right.
Match the action to the situation: keep the page and show the restock date if it is coming back, redirect to the closest equivalent if it is not. With seasonal or imported stock, which in Sri Lanka is most stores, a policy here is worth more than any single optimisation.
What we can show, and what we cannot
No ecommerce client work is published as a case study on this site, so none is claimed here. The six case studies are sites Alston owns, documented with the raw Search Console and Bing exports; they show the method (technical fixes, structured data, results measured from exports) rather than a store’s revenue. The fairest test is your own store: send it over, and the first conversation, a straight read on whether we can help, costs nothing.
How to start
Send the store URL, the platform it runs on and the categories that matter most to revenue. The first read is crawl and indexing, how many URLs the store generates against how many it should, because on most stores that gap is where the early wins are. You get a scope and a fee after that. Send us your store.