Key facts
- Ecommerce platforms generate faceted navigation, filter combinations like size and color that create near-duplicate URLs, and an SEO vendor needs a specific plan for canonicalizing or blocking these from being indexed, or a store can end up with thousands of thin, competing URLs.
- Out-of-stock and discontinued product pages are a recurring ecommerce SEO problem: deleting them outright loses the page's accumulated ranking value, so a vendor should have a written policy (keep the page live with alternatives, or redirect to the closest replacement) rather than deleting on sight.
- Product schema markup (structured data that can show price, availability, and review stars directly in search results) is platform-specific to set up correctly on Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento, and a bidder should be asked which platform their process actually covers.
- Google's Merchant Center feed, used for Shopping ads and free product listings, has its own data requirements separate from on-page SEO, and an RFP should state whether feed management is in scope or being handled elsewhere.
- Seasonal or limited-time collection pages benefit from being kept live year to year at the same URL rather than rebuilt fresh each season, since a returning URL keeps its accumulated ranking signal instead of starting over.
Scope boundaries
State your platform (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, or another) and your current catalog size, since the technical approach to faceted navigation, canonical tags, and schema markup differs meaningfully by platform and by how many SKUs you carry.
State whether collection and category page optimization is in scope alongside individual product pages. Category pages often carry more ranking weight for broad terms than any single product page, and a bidder who only discusses product-level optimization is missing a major part of ecommerce SEO.
State whether Google Merchant Center feed management, the data feed that powers Shopping ads and free listings, is in scope for this vendor or handled separately, since feed issues (missing GTINs, mismatched prices) can suppress a product from showing up at all, independent of on-page SEO work.
What the vendor must be given
Give the vendor admin or a scoped staff account on your ecommerce platform, GA4 and Search Console access, and access to your Google Merchant Center account if feed work is in scope.
Supply your current product data export (titles, descriptions, categories, and any existing schema) so the vendor can audit what exists before proposing changes, rather than working from what they can see on the live site alone, which can hide backend data issues.
Supply your inventory and seasonality patterns if relevant, which products are discontinued, which are seasonal, and which are core year-round sellers, since the SEO treatment for each of these differs (keep live with alternatives, redirect, or leave untouched).
Ownership and exit clauses
State that all changes to product titles, descriptions, category structure, and schema markup are made directly inside your own platform account, not in a separate tool the vendor controls, so the improvements remain in place and editable by you after the engagement ends.
Your GA4, Search Console, and Google Merchant Center accounts should stay yours the whole way through, with the vendor added on as a user, keeping your historical product performance data under your control no matter what happens with the vendor.
Include a requirement that the vendor turn over their canonicalization rules, redirect map for any discontinued products, and category structure documentation on termination, since these decisions affect how your store is crawled and need to be understood by whoever manages the site next.
Milestones and acceptance tests
Set an onboarding milestone: a written technical audit covering faceted navigation and duplicate URL issues, current schema markup status, and any Merchant Center feed errors if that is in scope, delivered before optimization work begins.
The next checkpoint lands 60 to 90 days in, with its own pass-or-fail test: your top-selling category and product pages have updated titles, descriptions, and valid schema markup, faceted navigation URLs are canonicalized or blocked from indexing according to the audit's recommendation, and any Merchant Center feed errors identified in the audit are resolved.
Set a recurring monthly or quarterly milestone comparing indexed page count, organic traffic to product and category pages, and Merchant Center feed health against the prior period, since ecommerce catalogs change constantly and this needs ongoing maintenance, not a one-time fix.
Scoring rubric
Platform-specific technical experience should carry the most weight in your scoring: the written technical audit for your exact platform at 30 percent, price at your catalog size at 25 percent, experience with a comparable catalog size and platform at 20 percent, Merchant Center and schema competence if in scope at 15 percent, and references filling the last 10 percent.
Score the audit on whether it names your platform's specific faceted navigation and canonicalization mechanics by name, rather than generic ecommerce SEO advice that could apply to any platform.
Ask references specifically how the bidder handled a large seasonal or catalog change (a major sale, a product line discontinuation) and whether rankings held up, since this is the situation that most exposes a weak ecommerce SEO process.
Questions every bidder must answer
Require a written answer from every bidder on this: How do you handle faceted navigation and duplicate URLs on my specific platform? What is your policy for out-of-stock and discontinued product pages, delete, redirect, or keep live with alternatives? Is Merchant Center feed management included, and if so, what specific data issues do you check for?
Also ask: How do you set up and validate product schema markup on my platform? How do you prioritize which products and categories to optimize first in a catalog this size? What happens to my schema, canonical rules, and redirect map once this engagement is over?
A bidder who names your platform's specific mechanics, canonical tags, schema fields, feed requirements, rather than speaking generically about SEO, is showing they have actually done ecommerce work at this scale before.
Related questions
Usually not. Variants like size or color are often better handled with canonical tags pointing to one main product page, rather than letting every combination create a separate indexed URL that competes with itself.
Generally yes for collections that represent a real search intent (a genuine category customers search for), but not for every automatically generated filter combination, which is where duplicate content problems usually start.
It depends on the policy. A page left live with clearly marked out-of-stock status and similar alternatives usually keeps more of its ranking value than a page that is deleted outright, which loses everything the page had accumulated.
No. Merchant Center feeds power Google Shopping ads and free listings and have their own data requirements. It is a separate but related task, and this RFP asks you to decide explicitly whether it is included in the SEO vendor's scope.
Yes. SEO for a store like this is billed at $50 a page past the same 10-page monthly floor, and the platform-specific technical audit alongside quarterly indexing and traffic numbers are exactly what the engagement would include.
SearchPod is a vendor for this kind of work and would answer this RFP; the acceptance tests here are the ones we agree to.
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