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 the currency and availability fields matter more than they look. Getting LKR right, and keeping availability accurate as stock moves, is what stops Google from showing a customer a price or a status that is wrong — which loses the sale and, repeated often enough, the rich result too.
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.
The rule is to 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, and keep the parent category healthy either way. On a store with seasonal or imported stock — which in Sri Lanka is most of them — a policy here is worth more than any individual optimisation.
Platforms
We work with WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento and custom builds. WooCommerce is the most common in Sri Lanka and the most variable: performance depends almost entirely on hosting and plugin discipline, and a store on cheap shared hosting will lose to a competitor on decent infrastructure regardless of the content work.
Shopify is more consistent technically but restricts URL structure and robots control, which changes how faceted navigation has to be handled. Neither is better for SEO in the abstract. What matters is knowing which constraints you are working inside.