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Faceted navigation is your biggest risk
Every filter combination can generate a crawlable URL. Left alone, a 5,000-product shop can present Google with 400,000 near-identical pages and burn its crawl budget on nothing. Decide explicitly which facets are indexable and block the rest.
Structured data that actually helps
Product schema with price, availability and SKU. Breadcrumbs. Organisation. That is the useful set. Marking up your FAQ is nice; marking up your product availability correctly is what changes the click-through rate.
B2B intent is different
Your buyer searches for a part number, a norm or a problem — not 'best affordable widget'. Build landing pages around the norms, applications and compatibility questions your sales team answers on the phone every week.
Speed is a ranking factor and a conversion factor
Google will forgive a slow page that is unique and useful. Your customer will not. Optimise for the buyer and the ranking follows — it is very rarely the other way round.
- Control faceted navigation or lose your crawl budget.
- Product schema with price, stock and SKU.
- Build pages for the questions sales answers by phone.
Frequently asked questions
Because every filter combination generates a crawlable URL unless you decide otherwise, and nobody ever decided. A mid-sized catalogue can hand Google a vast number of near-identical pages this way, and the crawler spends its budget there instead of on your real category and product pages. Pick the few facets worth indexing, block the rest explicitly.
Partly, and not the part that matters most. A plugin can generate sitemaps, tidy meta tags and hand you the switches for canonical and robots handling. What it cannot do is decide which of your facets deserve to be indexed — that is a judgement about your catalogue and your buyers, and it is the decision the whole thing rests on. The plugin holds the switch, not the answer.
A short list: Product with price, availability and SKU; breadcrumbs; organisation. That is the set that does work. Marking up your FAQ is pleasant and low-stakes. Getting availability right in your product markup is what changes whether the result is worth clicking — and getting availability wrong there is worse than omitting it entirely.
Speed is a ranking factor, but that is the weaker reason to do it. Google will forgive a slow page that is genuinely unique and useful. Your buyer, waiting on a filter to respond, will not — they leave and you never hear about it. Optimise for the person, and the ranking tends to follow. It very rarely works in the other direction.
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