Grocery Ecommerce · Global Shopify

Search, GEO and Conversion Infrastructure at World Scale.

McGrocer is a UK-based grocery ecommerce business selling worldwide on Shopify. My work as Technical SEO Specialist & Growth Assistant focused on the infrastructure behind that global growth: crawl and indexation control across millions of legacy URLs, GEO acquisition for markets including the US, Europe and GCC, and connecting that traffic to conversion through behavioural CRO.

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John Akande — Los Angeles SEO consultant for service businesses, ecommerce, SaaS and B2B

Technical SEO Specialist & Growth AssistantShopify at Global ScaleInternational GEO ArchitectureCRO & Behavioural Research

+50%

Organic Traffic Growth
(First 90 Days)

+30%

Session Lift
(72 Hours, Core Web Vitals Fixes)

Millions

Legacy URLs
Brought Under Crawl Control

The Business Problem

Global Ecommerce Is a Different SEO Problem.

McGrocer was not targeting one country, one language, or a small catalogue, it was selling groceries worldwide on a large Shopify store. That introduced a constantly changing product catalogue, parameterised and variant URLs, millions of historical URLs returning 404s, international GEO pages, translated content, multiple currencies, Google Merchant Center feeds, and conversion behaviour that varied by market. The risk was straightforward: growth could create technical debt faster than the site could absorb it.

Millions of Legacy URLs

Historical URLs, product variants, and parameters created crawl activity that competed with the pages that actually mattered, making it harder for search engines to efficiently discover and revisit important pages.

No Coherent GEO Architecture

The business needed to provide a relevant experience across the US, Europe, North America, and GCC, not one generic page interpreted the same way everywhere.

Translation Multiplying Duplicate Risk

GTranslate and Shopify Markets meant every new language or market multiplied the number of URLs search engines encountered, each one a potential canonical or duplicate-content conflict if left unmanaged.

The Work

Search, GEO, and Conversion Infrastructure.

01 · Crawl

Legacy URL & Crawl Management

Identified patterns across millions of historical URLs and applied the right control to each, robots.txt rules, 301 redirects, 410 responses where appropriate, canonicalisation, noindex safeguards, parameter handling, and cleaner sitemaps, moving the site toward a deliberate crawl and indexation model instead of unmanaged growth.

02 · GEO

International GEO Architecture

Built purpose-built organic entry points for the US, Europe, North America, and GCC, each considered for search intent, internal linking, canonical signals, currency, language structure, and Shopify Markets configuration, rather than treating every market as an extension of one generic page.

03 · Localisation

Translation & Market Architecture

Worked through GTranslate-driven translated URLs, duplicate translated content, canonical relationships, redirect behaviour, and currency mismatches, so localisation expanded reach without creating an uncontrolled layer of duplicate search signals.

04 · CRO

Behavioural CRO for US & GCC Audiences

Combined Search Console, GA4, and Microsoft Clarity to see discovery, post-visit behaviour, and actual on-page interaction together, then worked on landing-page relevance, messaging, trust signals, and calls to action so international traffic had a clear next step, not just a landing spot.

Product Visibility & What's Next

Merchant Center Scale, and Readiness for Agentic Commerce.

McGrocer's catalogue connected directly to Google Merchant Center, at points involving tens of thousands of products during synchronisation. Part of the work was monitoring how Shopify catalogue changes moved through to Merchant Center and downstream shopping visibility, so large catalogue changes did not silently break product discovery.

The other part was forward-looking: as product discovery increasingly runs through AI and agentic systems rather than only blue-link search, the same principle applies. If products are going to be found, compared, or surfaced by an intelligent system, the underlying product data needs to be structured, clear, and trustworthy, regardless of which system is reading it.

The Outcome

The work moved McGrocer from a collection of ecommerce pages toward a more deliberate global acquisition and conversion system: millions of legacy URLs under controlled crawl and indexation, generic worldwide reach replaced with structured GEO acquisition for the US, Europe, and GCC, and traffic acquisition connected to behavioural CRO instead of treated as the finish line. The underlying question shifted from "how do we get this page to rank" to how the site could be easier to crawl, easier to understand, more relevant to each market, and more effective at turning discovery into revenue.

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Related Engagements

More Ecommerce & Technical SEO Results.

Services Behind the Results

What Built This Outcome.

Ecommerce SEO

Shopify Technical SEO & Crawl Architecture

The crawl and indexation control, GEO architecture, and Merchant Center monitoring behind a Shopify store operating at global scale.

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Website Conversion

CRO & Behavioural Research

The Search Console, GA4, and Clarity-driven CRO work connecting international traffic to a clear path toward purchase.

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Questions About This Engagement

What Global Ecommerce Brands Ask

The issue is not just that old URLs return 404s, it is that unnecessary URLs create crawl activity that competes with the pages that actually matter. At McGrocer this meant identifying patterns across the URL landscape (product variants, tracking parameters, translated paths, legacy structures) and applying the right control for each: robots.txt rules, 301 redirects, 410 responses where appropriate, canonicalisation, noindex safeguards, and cleaner internal linking and sitemaps. Not every URL needs to rank. Every important page needs a clear reason to exist.

A worldwide store cannot rely on one generic page and expect every market to read the same offer the same way. McGrocer built dedicated GEO entry points for markets including the US, Europe, North America and GCC, each considered for search intent, internal linking, canonical signals, currency, language structure, and Shopify Markets configuration. The goal was purpose-built organic entry points for international demand, not just more pages.

Adding a language or market multiplies the number of URLs a search engine encounters, and each one is a potential duplicate-content or canonical conflict if it is not managed deliberately. The work looked at how the translated experience interacted with indexation and discovery, not just whether the content was translated, covering duplicate translated content, canonical relationships, redirect behaviour, and currency mismatches.

Technical SEO gets visitors to the site. CRO answers what happens after they arrive. At McGrocer this meant combining Search Console (discovery), GA4 (post-visit behaviour), and Microsoft Clarity (how people actually interact with a page) rather than optimising pages on assumptions. This mattered especially for GEO traffic: a page can attract international visitors and still fail to convert them if it lacks relevance, trust signals, or a clear next step for that specific market.

A Shopify catalogue with tens of thousands of products syncing to Merchant Center means catalogue changes can affect product visibility at scale, sometimes before anyone notices. The work involved monitoring the pipeline from Shopify catalogue to product data to Merchant Center to shopping discovery, so large-scale changes did not silently break visibility.

It becomes more relevant, not less. If products are going to be discovered, compared, or surfaced by increasingly capable AI systems rather than only traditional search results, the underlying product information needs to be structured, clear, and trustworthy regardless of which system is reading it. Clean metadata and information architecture is the same foundation whether the reader is Googlebot or an AI agent.

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