Dealing with technical SEO for my kitchenware store – any tips?

[LindaR4]

Hey everyone!

I’ve been running a small online shop selling cooking supplies (mostly high-end knives and cast iron sets) for about a year now. Traffic was okay at first, but lately, I’ve been hit with some weird indexing issues.

Since I have hundreds of product variants and categories, I think my technical SEO is a mess. I’m seeing a lot of "crawled - currently not indexed" errors in my Search Console, and I suspect my site speed is dragging me down because of all the high-res product photos.

Does anyone here have experience with technical SEO specifically for e-commerce? I’m looking for advice on:

• How to handle duplicate content with product filters?
• Best ways to optimize site structure for a lot of categories?
• Should I hire a pro to do a full technical audit, or is it something I can fix with plugins?

I’m not a tech genius, so I’m a bit worried about breaking the site if I DIY it. Would love to hear how you guys handle the "behind the scenes" stuff for your stores!

Thanks in advance!

 

[Sanita3]

Totally feel your pain—tech SEO for shops is a massive headache. You should definitely look into setting up canonical tags for your filters to stop Google from seeing them as duplicates, and maybe try an image compression tool to speed things up before hiring a pro. Honestly, a quick technical SEO audit from a specialist might save you months of guessing, especially since you have so many product variants!

 

[Fertilka5]

I’d honestly suggest checking out ecommerce technical seo by Uaateam https://uaateam.digital/services/seo-management/ to handle the heavy lifting for your shop. Fixing those indexing errors and filter issues on your own can be a nightmare, and they really know how to get things ranking again without breaking the site.

 

[mobeen ayub]

Hey Linda! This is actually a pretty common issue for e-commerce sites with lots of variants, so you're not alone.


For duplicate content from product filters — the usual fix is using canonical tags pointing back to the main category/product page, and adding "noindex, follow" on filtered/faceted URLs that don't need to rank on their own (like sorting by price or color filters). You can also block some of these combinations in robots.txt if they're creating crawl waste, but be careful not to block pages you actually want indexed.


For site structure with lots of categories — aim for a flat structure where important pages are no more than 3 clicks from the homepage. Good internal linking between related categories/products helps a lot too, and makes sure link equity flows to your money pages instead of getting diluted across hundreds of variants.


On the "crawled - currently not indexed" errors — that's often a mix of thin/duplicate content and crawl budget being wasted on low-value pages. Fixing the canonicals and noindex issues above usually helps a good chunk of these clear up over time.


As for site speed — compressing and lazy-loading those product images will probably make the biggest difference, especially if they're high-res.


On hiring a pro vs DIY: a few plugins (like Yoast or Rank Math) can handle basic canonicalization and noindex rules safely without touching code. But a full technical audit (crawling the site, checking indexation patterns, fixing structure) is worth having a professional look at, especially since one wrong noindex or robots.txt rule can accidentally block your whole site from Google. Doesn't have to be expensive — just someone who can audit it properly before you start making changes.