eCommerce SEO strategy
On a large catalogue, organic growth rarely comes from doing more SEO. It comes from doing the right SEO in the right order. Strategy is mostly the discipline of prioritisation.
Where organic growth actually comes from
The biggest lever on most eCommerce sites is category architecture: whether the pages that exist match how people actually search, at the granularity they search at. Most large catalogues are simultaneously missing pages for real demand and carrying thousands of pages no one asked for.
After that comes the unglamorous machinery: internal linking that concentrates rather than scatters authority, faceted navigation that creates value instead of crawl waste, and product content that answers the commercial question rather than the brand one.
The metric I hold everything against is incremental non-brand revenue. Brand traffic was coming anyway. The strategy only earns its keep on the demand you were not already capturing.
How I build a roadmap
Start with search demand mapped against the catalogue, market by market. Size each gap in revenue terms, not traffic terms, because a thousand visits to a high-margin category and a thousand visits to a clearance page are not the same thousand visits. Then sequence honestly: quick wins first to fund patience, structural work behind them, and dependencies made explicit so nothing waits on a surprise.
A strategy document that does not survive contact with the dev backlog is a wish list. The roadmaps that work are the ones written with the constraints of the organisation in mind: what the team can actually ship, in what order, and what each step is expected to earn.
Where the experience comes from
This is the work I do in-house at lululemon, where organic strategy across five APAC sites has driven millions in incremental non-brand revenue, and the work I did agency-side for adidas, Chemist Warehouse, Nando's and Lyka.
