Common Questions

Most of our Montreal clients see initial ranking movement within 4–8 weeks, though it really depends on how competitive your product categories are and your site's current domain authority. For newer domains or highly competitive keywords, it might take 3–4 months to see meaningful traffic shifts. We focus on sustainable improvements, not quick wins.

It doesn't have to—that's the whole point of our approach. We plan restructures carefully with proper 301 redirects, breadcrumb updates, and internal link adjustments so you don't lose the rankings you've already earned. The goal is to improve crawlability and user navigation without sacrificing what's already working.

Category pages are your main structural pages (like "Men's Shoes" or "Winter Jackets") that you want indexed and ranking. Faceted navigation is the filtering system (size, color, price range) that helps customers narrow results. We optimize both, but we protect faceted pages from diluting your crawl budget by using parameters, rel="nofollow", or JavaScript rendering strategically.

Yes. We analyze how local competitors (and national benchmarks) organize their catalogues, what category-level keywords they're targeting, and which filtering options they expose. This research feeds directly into your strategy—we're not copying them, but understanding what works in your market so we can do it better.

If your categories rank for the terms customers actually use when shopping, yes—but it's about qualified traffic, not just volume. Better indexing means search engines understand your catalogue structure, which helps you rank for product-intent keywords. We measure this through actual click-through rates, conversion paths, and which category pages drive sales, not just impressions.

This is a common crawl budget drain. We use a combination of canonical tags (pointing back to the main category), parameter handling in Google Search Console, rel="nofollow" on filter links, and strategic use of robots.txt to prevent search engines from indexing low-value filtered variations. Each solution depends on your platform and traffic patterns.