UK ecommerce search has one feature that changes the work: the retail aggregators are enormous and they are in almost every result. Amazon, eBay, Argos, John Lewis and the comparison sites hold the head terms and will keep them. A store competing on "running shoes" is not competing with another store.
What is open is everything more specific than that, and there is a lot of it. The category and subcategory searches, the fit and compatibility questions, the brand plus model combinations, and the buying questions the aggregators never answer because answering them is not their business. That is where a UK store wins, and it is a content job more than a technical one.
The other UK specific is returns and delivery. Both are searched constantly before a purchase, both are decided by law and by your own policy rather than by a marketing team, and both belong on a page that can rank rather than in a modal nobody can link to.
How the work is done
Category pages written to be landed on
The highest-value pages in any store and usually an H1 with a grid under it. They need the copy that answers how to choose, which is what the searcher is actually asking, placed where it does not push the products below the fold.
Product pages that are not the supplier feed
If your description is the manufacturer text, so is everybody else’s, and Google picks the store it already trusts. Rewriting the top sellers is a finite job with a measurable return; rewriting all forty thousand is not, and nobody should pretend otherwise.
Faceted navigation brought under control
Colour times size times brand times price is combinatorial, and left open it produces more URLs than you have products. Decided per facet: indexed where people search it, crawlable but not indexed where they do not, blocked where it is noise.
Out of stock and discontinued handled deliberately
A product that sold out should not 404. It should stay, say so, and offer the replacement, which keeps the links and the ranking for when it returns. Discontinued lines redirect to the closest live equivalent rather than to the home page.
Structured data that earns the extra pixels
Product, offer, availability, price, review, and the breadcrumbs. Correct markup is what puts the stars and the price in the result, which moves click-through more than a position does.
Speed on the pages that carry the money
Measured on a category page on a phone, not on the home page on a desktop, because that is where the visitors and the abandonment are.
What is different about search in the UK
Directories hold the first page
For many trade and service terms the top results are aggregators. Two routes past them: the map pack, and pages specific enough that a directory listing cannot answer the question.
Town and postcode, not region
Buyers search by town. A page covering a whole county competes with pages written about each town in it, and loses to all of them.
British English, properly
Spelling, the word for the trade and the way an address is written all signal whether a page was written for this market or translated into it.
Searches in the UK run on google.co.uk, which returns a
different result set to google.com. Work is checked against the one your customers
actually use.
What you get
A category and subcategory structure built around how people search, not how the warehouse is organised
Rewritten copy on the categories and the products that actually sell
A faceted navigation decision per facet, written down and implemented
An out-of-stock and discontinued policy that keeps the links you earned
Product and breadcrumb structured data, validated against what is on the page
Internal linking from the content you already have into the categories that convert
Monthly reporting against orders and revenue from your own analytics
Every number below is from the client’s own Google Search Console, for the period shown. Impressions are how often the site appeared; clicks are people who arrived. What each visit is worth is your sales process, not ours, so these are the visits we can prove rather than a conversion figure we cannot.
+139,355% clicks against the previous period of the same length.
12,285clicks
Backcountry Physical Therapy
Physical therapy · 6 Jul 2023 to 31 May 2024
Impressions
601,822
CTR
2.0%
Avg. position
19.3
+2,059% clicks against the previous period of the same length.
7,630clicks
Your Place Physical Therapy
Physical therapy · 1 Sep 2023 to 31 May 2024
Impressions
284,589
CTR
2.7%
Avg. position
15.66
+1,184% clicks against the previous period of the same length.
6,816clicks
Peak Endurance
Performance and physical therapy · 1 Sep 2023 to 31 May 2024
Impressions
482,378
CTR
1.4%
Avg. position
16.16
+1,174% clicks against the previous period of the same length.
How the engagement works
There is no package to pick from. What the site needs is decided on a call and written
down before any work starts, because a business with one location and a clean site needs
a different month to an agency reselling to twelve clients.
01
A call, before anything is quoted
Thirty minutes on what you sell, where you sell it, and what the site looks like today. No scope is written before that conversation, because the right work depends on all three.
02
A written scope and quote
What will be done, in what order, and what it costs, in writing. Nothing starts until you have agreed to it.
03
Month to month from there
The work runs monthly and the scope changes as the site does. Cancel with 30 days’ notice.
True of every engagement
Search Console and Analytics set up in your name, so the data is yours
No lock-in: month to month, cancel with 30 days’ notice
Categories, almost always. They are what people search before they have chosen, they carry more of the revenue from search than product pages do, and there are far fewer of them, so the work finishes.
What do we do about thousands of product pages?
Not all of them. Rewrite the ones that sell and the ones that get impressions and no clicks. For the long tail, get the structured data and the internal linking right and leave the descriptions alone; the return does not justify the hours.
Is faceted navigation really a problem?
On any store with more than a few hundred products, yes, and it is usually the largest technical issue on the site. Four facets with ten values each is ten thousand URL combinations for one category, and a crawler will find them.
What happens to a product when it sells out?
It stays. A page that 404s throws away every link and every ranking it earned, and if the line comes back you start again. Say it is out of stock, offer the alternative, and keep the URL.
Do you work on our platform?
The work is the same on any platform; what differs is where the settings live and what the platform will not let you change. Shopify has its own page because its constraints are specific enough to be worth writing out.
How do you get past Checkatrade and Yell?
You do not out-rank them on their own terms cheaply. You take the map pack, which they cannot enter, and you write pages specific enough that a directory listing is not a substitute for them.
Do you write in British English?
Yes, and it matters more than it sounds. A page reading "optimize your tire center" tells a UK reader immediately that nobody involved is local to them.
What comes first?
A free written read of the site within two working days, then a call, then a written quote. Nothing starts before you have that in writing.
Book a call with us
A 30-minute call in your working hours. Tell us what you sell and where, and we will tell you what we would do first and what it involves. Prefer email? Send your website through the form and the Passieon Team will reply within two working days.