Technical SEO Remediation
Canonical strategy for /products/ versus /collections/products/, robots.txt.liquid rules, parameter handling, pagination, sitemap hygiene and crawl-budget recovery.
Chicago, IL
eCommerce SEO & GEO in Chicago, IL
Organic revenue from the pages that sell: collections, part numbers and spec pages, not a blog nobody reads.
Delivered remotely for brands across Chicago and Illinois.
Grow · Chicago
Why Chicago brands come to us for this
- Part-number, cross-reference and superseded-SKU pages made indexable instead of stranded in PDFs
- Specification metafields structured so specs are filterable, comparable and machine-extractable
- Seasonal collection pages published and indexed a full quarter before Chicago demand ramps
- Shopify duplicate-URL and faceted-parameter cleanup before a word of content is written
- GEO work so AI answers cite your product data instead of a marketplace listing of it
Two very different SEO problems live in this city, and they need opposite treatments. A Fulton Market food or beverage brand is fighting for category and occasion terms against Amazon, Instacart listings and national retailers whose domain authority you will never match. A distributor in Elk Grove Village or Bedford Park is fighting for part numbers, cross-references and specification queries where authority barely matters and precise page structure decides everything.
The second problem is the more winnable one and the more neglected. When a maintenance buyer searches a stamped part number, the winner is whoever has that number in a clean title, an indexable page, structured specification metafields and a cross-reference table. Most Chicago catalogs bury all of it in a PDF or an unindexable filter parameter, then wonder why a marketplace outranks the manufacturer for the manufacturer's own SKU.
Underneath both sits Shopify's own default mess: products reachable at two URLs, faceted navigation spawning thousands of thin parameter pages, collection templates that ship with no copy and no internal linking. We fix the platform-level problems first, build the collection architecture from real demand, then work on generative engine optimisation — because for spec-heavy categories, a growing share of the research now happens inside a chat window before anyone opens a search results page.
Local context
Search demand here has a season and a shape
Chicago categories have unusually sharp search seasonality, and content calendars need to respect it. Grill, patio, cooler and outdoor-living demand ramps from March and collapses in October. Snow removal, ice melt, heated gear, humidifiers and cold-weather categories invert exactly. Holiday food gifting compresses into a six-week window where a collection page published in November is already too late — those pages need to be indexed and accruing signals by late summer. On the B2B side, seasonality barely exists but findability is everything: the queries are part numbers, dimensions, material grades and compatibility, and they are served by structured metafields and comparison pages rather than by blog posts. We build a calendar that reflects which of those two shapes your catalog actually has, and usually it is both.
Scope
What eCommerce SEO includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Chicago brand’s realities.
Full service detailCollection & Category Architecture
A collection map built from real search demand, including sub-collections for attributes buyers search on: size, material, use case, price band, occasion.
Product Page Optimisation
Titles, descriptions, image alts, Product and Offer schema with live price and availability, plus review markup that stays valid as inventory changes.
Commercial Content Programme
Buying guides, comparisons and category explainers targeting mid-funnel demand, each linked into the collections they support. No filler blogging.
Generative Engine Optimisation
Entity and schema work, clean extractable answers, llms.txt and citation-worthy content so ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews reference your store.
Digital PR & Link Acquisition
Targeted outreach for editorial links to collection and guide pages from publications your buyers actually read. No directories, no link farms.
Scoped and quoted for your Chicago store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Chicago engagement starts with a fixed statement of work — named deliverables, named dates, one number — written after we have looked at your store, not before. If a smaller first step would serve you better, we will say so.
Get this scopedHow it runs
From kickoff to results
Technical Audit
A full crawl plus log-file analysis to find what Googlebot actually sees and where crawl budget is being spent. Findings ranked by revenue impact.
Demand Mapping
Keyword research mapped to your catalogue and margin, not to search volume alone. High-volume terms you cannot profitably serve get cut.
Fix the Foundation
Technical remediation ships first. There is no point building content on a site that wastes half its crawl budget on filter URLs.
Build & Publish
Collection landing pages and commercial content shipped on a fixed monthly cadence, each with internal links planned before it goes live.
Measure & Iterate
Monthly reporting on non-branded organic revenue, index coverage and AI citations. Branded queries are excluded from every growth number we show you.
Proof
eCommerce SEO results
Anonymised under NDA. Figures pulled from the client’s own analytics.
Premium Skincare (DTC)
8-figure DTC brand, ~140 SKUs, US + CA · Shopify Plus (migrated from Magento 2)
Magento 2 cost $9k a month in hosting, extensions and emergency dev before a single feature shipped. Mobile LCP sat at 5.4 seconds and mobile converted at less than half the desktop rate across 68% of sessions. The named constraint: 11,412 indexed URLs and a top-3 organic position on their hero category, so a migration that lost rankings would cost more than the platform ever saved.
+41%mobile conversion rate1.62% to 2.28% over the first 90 days post-launch
5.4s → 1.8smobile LCP75th-percentile CrUX field data, not lab
+27%organic sessionssix months post-migration vs. pre-migration baseline, branded queries excluded
$108k/yrplatform cost removedhosting, extension licences and the standing emergency dev retainer
Outdoor & Sports Gear
~$7M/yr, 480 SKUs, US + EU via Shopify Markets · Shopify Plus (Shopify Markets, 3 regions)
Paid social carried 81% of revenue and CAC had climbed 44% in eighteen months. Organic sat at 2,100 sessions a month against category competitors doing ten times that, and the EU storefront duplicated the US catalogue with no hreflang at all. The named constraint: three national retailers own the head terms with link profiles this brand could not match in a year, so the plan had to win on query depth instead of authority.
+186%organic sessions2,100 to 6,000/mo, branded queries excluded
+21%conversion rate on organic traffic1.9% to 2.3% after the collection and PDP work landed
$61 → $45blended CACorganic share of revenue went from 8% to 24%
+38%revenue year over yearwith paid media spend down 12%
In their words
Clients on this work
+58% organic revenue YoY
“Honestly I signed for the SEO and the AI-search piece was a footnote in the proposal I skimmed. Then in March our product pages started getting quoted in ChatGPT answers for insulated growler queries, and that traffic showed up in GA4 with real purchase intent attached to it. Organic revenue is up 58% year over year and roughly a fifth of that comes from surfaces that didn't exist when we signed the contract. I still don't fully understand it. I've stopped questioning it.”
Director of MarketingOutdoor gear brand, ~$15M/yr · Seattle, WA
Verified client, 2026FAQ
eCommerce SEO in Chicago — your questions
Almost always because your part numbers are not on an indexable page in a form Google can read. They sit inside a PDF catalog, a JavaScript spec table or a filter parameter. Marketplaces put the number in the title and body of a crawlable page. Fixing that is unglamorous structural work and it is usually the single highest-return SEO project a Chicago manufacturer can run.
A quarter ahead of demand, minimum. For grill, patio and outdoor categories that means publishing in December and January for a March ramp. For holiday food gifting it means late summer. A page published the week the season starts spends the entire season earning the signals it needed before the season started.
It is mostly good technical SEO with a different output target: clean entities, correct schema, extractable answers and content worth citing. It matters more in research-heavy categories, which describes most of Chicago's industrial and considered-purchase sellers. We track citations in AI answers alongside rankings rather than treating it as a separate product.
Slower than paid and considerably more durable, which is the trade you are making. For a Chicago CPG or housewares brand the first movement is usually indexation — getting a catalogue that has been half-crawled for years fully into the index, which shows in impressions within about six weeks. Commercial ranking on the terms that carry margin takes a further three to six months. The honest complication is that many brands here are also competing against their own distributors and marketplace resellers for their own product terms, and untangling that takes longer than the technical work does. We scope it explicitly rather than letting it quietly eat quarter three.
Technical fixes can move impressions inside four to six weeks. New collection pages and content typically need three to six months to rank on commercial terms. Nine months is a fair window to judge the programme on revenue. Anyone quoting thirty days is describing a fluke, not a plan.
Always. Branded queries grow when your paid media grows, so including them inflates SEO numbers for work SEO did not do. Every growth figure we report to you is non-branded, and we show the branded split separately so you can see both.
Generative engine optimisation is making your store citable by AI answer engines. It matters now for research-heavy categories where buyers ask an assistant before they search. The work overlaps heavily with good technical SEO: clean entities, correct schema, extractable answers and content worth citing.
Next step
eCommerce SEO for your Chicago brand.
Thirty minutes with the strategist who would actually run your account. We screen-share your store, read your data live, and tell you the three highest-value things we can see from the outside.
Shopify or Shopify Plus stores doing $150k/mo or moreFounder, CEO or eCommerce lead on the callNo deck and no pitch — we open your store instead
Prefer to write it out? [email protected] gets a real reply the same business day, Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm MT.