SEO for e-commerce in Portugal: the difference between indexing and intent
An established e-commerce site with a catalogue of a few hundred products and two or three years of activity tends to reach the same point. Organic traffic grows, Google Search Console reports show impressions increasing, average positions improve slightly every quarter. But sales don't keep up. The manager looks at the SEO indicators, looks at the billing report, and realises that the two curves don't meet.
This disconnection has an identifiable cause. Generic SEO optimises for appearing on Google, not for appearing in the right searches. And in e-commerce, “appearing” has no commercial value if it is not aligned with purchasing intent. Those who come to the site from an informational search are not going to buy today, in the overwhelming majority of cases. Those arriving from a transactional search will buy, or at least add to their basket, with significantly higher probability. The distinction between the two types of traffic is what separates SEO that generates sales from SEO that generates statistics.
The four types of intention and why only two produce revenue
Every search made on Google has an underlying intention, identifiable by the words that make it up. The SEO industry classifies these intentions into four categories, with fairly stable proportions in the total volume of searches.
The overall distribution of search intentions stands at 52.65% informational, 32.15% navigational, 14.51% commercial and 0.69% transactional. More than half of searches are for information, not products. Anyone who types in “how to choose a fridge”, “difference between arabica and robusta coffee” or “best way to preserve cheese” isn't buying now. They're learning. This is informational intent. The visitor who arrives at the site via this type of search reads (or not), absorbs (or not), and leaves. The immediate conversion rate is close to zero.
Navigational intent accounts for almost a third of searches and includes those who type in specific brand names (“Worten fridge”, “Continente promotions”). The visitor has already decided where they want to shop. If the business's website appears in these searches, it's because the visitor already knew the brand, and the search only acts as a shortcut to get there. Useful for measuring brand recognition, irrelevant for attracting new customers.
Commercial intent and transactional intent are where e-commerce comes into play. The former appears in searches such as “best coffee capsules 2025”, “built-in vs free-standing fridge”, “delonghi coffee machine review”. The user is comparing before buying. The second appears in searches such as “buy ground arabica coffee online”, “price built-in fridge 60cm”, “compatible nespresso capsules 24h delivery”. The user is ready to materialise. Together, these two intentions represent only around 15% of search volume, but they concentrate the overwhelming majority of the commercial value that SEO can produce.
The mistake that destroys ROI in many e-commerces is to invest resources and content to capture informational traffic, in the expectation that this traffic will eventually convert. This rarely happens. What does happen, more often, is that informational traffic inflates SEO metrics (visits, impressions, keywords positioned) without corresponding business metrics.
What category architecture reveals about strategy
The way an e-commerce site organises its categories is a direct reflection of its SEO maturity. It's not an aesthetic detail. It's commercial infrastructure.
An e-commerce site organised by product type from an internal point of view (“new arrivals”, “best sellers”, “highlights of the month”) optimises for the manager, not the buyer. Google indexes these pages, but nobody searches like this. Nobody types “new Worten fridges” into Google. A visitor who comes to the “news” page comes through internal browsing, never through organic search.
An e-commerce site organised by product categories with user language (“combination fridges”, “American fridges”, “built-in fridges”) optimises for how the shopper thinks. The categories correspond to real searches, with measurable volume, and each category page can compete organically for a family of transactional keywords.
The difference between the two organisations is not measured in clicks. It's measured in revenue. An architecture aligned with purchase intent turns every category page into a commercial entry point. A misaligned architecture accumulates indexed pages with no commercial function.
Deciding which categories to create, how to name them and how to prioritise them in subcategories is SEO work before it is design work. Doing it the other way round (design first, think SEO later) is the most common cause of e-commerces with too many pages and too little organic revenue.
Internal cannibalisation: when your site competes with itself
A technical problem specific to e-commerce is keyword cannibalisation. This happens when two or more pages on the same site try to position themselves for the same search. Faced with two pages that answer the same query, Google doesn't know which one to display. It ends up rotating between the two, or choosing the “wrong” one (the less commercial one), or dropping both positions.
There are three typical causes in e-commerce. Browsing filters that generate indexable URLs (mystore.com/frigorificos, mystore.com/frigorificos?cor=white, mystore.com/frigorificos?marca=samsung&cor=white) create almost identical pages that compete for the same root keyword. Each filter combination can generate a crawlable URL, resulting in hundreds of almost identical pages competing for the same keywords. If these variants are crawlable and indexable, they compete with each other, which confuses search engines about which pages to prioritise. The fix is canonicalisation and consciously deciding which combinations of filters should and should not be indexed.
The second cause is the overlap between blog and catalogue. A blog article on “how to choose a fridge” and a category page on “fridges” end up competing for the same family of keywords. Google may decide that the (informative) article is more relevant than the (transactional) category page, and position it higher in shopping searches. Traffic arrives, but to the wrong page, where there is no direct purchase mechanism. The shopper leaves, searches again, and ends up in another shop.
The third cause is the creation of almost duplicate product pages for what should be variants of the same product. Instead of one “coffee maker X” page with a colour selector (black, white, red), three separate pages with almost identical titles and descriptions. Google sees three pages competing for the same search, splits the authority between them, and none appears in a good position.
Google Search Console clearly shows these cases. When two or more pages appear for the same query with a significant percentage of clicks, this is almost always cannibalisation. A regular audit of the last three months of GSC data identifies the cases with the greatest commercial impact.
How to read Google Search Console to distinguish useful traffic from decorative traffic
Most e-commerce managers look at Search Console and see two metrics: impressions and clicks. They look at the overall trend, confirm that it's up, and close the report. This superficial reading reveals almost nothing about SEO health.
The reading that reveals health requires three additional operations.
The first is to filter by type of intent. Instead of looking at all queries, filter out those that contain transactional indicators (“buy”, “price”, “promotion”, “discount”, “delivery”, “online”) or commercial indicators (“best”, “comparison”, “evaluation”, specific brand name). The absolute volume of these queries is more important than the total volume of impressions. If transactional queries account for a very small proportion of traffic, SEO is attracting visitors with no intention of buying.
The second is to cross-reference queries with pages. For each relevant transactional query, identify which page is being shown in the results. When the page is the correct one (transactional category, specific product page), the SEO strategy is aligned with intent. When the page is a blog article or the homepage, there is misalignment that is costing sales.
The third is to monitor the click-through rate (CTR) by position. A query in position 3 with a CTR of 2% has a title or meta-description problem, not a positioning problem. Improving the snippet can double traffic without changing positioning. A query in position 8 with a CTR of 5% has a reverse opportunity: improving positioning leverages a snippet that is already working well.
These three operations, carried out regularly, transform Search Console from a vanity dashboard into a business decision tool.
What changes when product pages are designed for intent
A product page optimised for transactional intent has characteristics that differentiate it from a generic page. The title includes the variable that the buyer types into Google (brand, model, key feature), not just the internal trade name. The meta-description answers the question implicit in the search, it doesn't describe the product in general. The structured data (schema markup) signals price, availability, average rating, which allows Google to present the result with enriched information in the search results. The images have alternative descriptive text. The content of the page answers, in the correct order, the questions a buyer asks: what it is, how much it costs, how it differs from alternatives, how soon it arrives, how to pay for it, what happens if you don't like it.
None of these characteristics are invisible. Google evaluates them, buyers evaluate them, and both evaluations converge in the same direction. Pages that respond to transactional intent appear in higher positions and convert at higher rates. Pages that describe the product without answering the intent appear in lower positions and convert less. The metric of success is not positioning alone, but the positioning-conversion pair.
The concrete step
Before intervening in the SEO of an e-commerce site, it's important to know what the current SEO is doing. An audit focussed on search intent, cross-referencing data from Google Search Console and Google Analytics, identifies where traffic is being captured, where it is being converted, and where it is being lost for no identifiable reason. Ascend Marketing Solutions carries out specific SEO diagnostics for e-commerce with a focus on purchase intent: mapping transactional queries with measurable volume for the catalogue, identifying internal cannibalisation, and proposing intervention priorities ordered by the expected impact on organic revenue in the following quarter.
Article developed by the Ascend Marketing Solutions team, an agency specialising in the development and management of WooCommerce and Shopify shops for the Portuguese and Brazilian markets.
References
- SparkToro. “Search Intent Distribution Data 2025.” Quoted in SearchAtlas. searchatlas.com
- Amraandelma. “Top Search Intent Statistics 2025.” October 2025. amraandelma.com
- Backlinko. “Keyword Cannibalisation: Why Avoid It and How to Fix It.” February 2026. backlinko.com
- SEMrush. “Keyword Cannibalisation: How to Find, Fix, and Prevent It.” 2023. semrush.com
- EcomSEO. “Search Intent for Ecommerce.” January 2025. ecomseo.co
- Incremys. “Search Intent: Understand, Classify and Convert.” 2026. incremys.com
Frequently Asked Questions
The answer almost always lies in the type of traffic, not the volume. Informational traffic grows easily when you publish regular blog content, but converts poorly. Transactional traffic grows more slowly and requires specific optimisation of category and product pages, but converts significantly more.
The first signs appear between three and six months, but they are signs (improvements in positioning, entry of new queries). The consolidated commercial impact usually appears between six and twelve months, and depends on the competitiveness of the sector.
It's not a binary decision. Google Ads have a faster return but each click is paid for as long as the campaign lasts. SEO requires a longer initial investment but produces organic traffic that continues to arrive at no marginal cost per click. In established e-commerces, the typical balanced structure combines the two.
The most direct indicator is in Google Search Console. Open the performance report, filter by an important transactional query, and see how many pages of the site appear in the results. If there are two or more pages, with a percentage of clicks distributed between them, it's cannibalisation.
It's almost always a misalignment between what the search asked for and what the page offers. High positioning means that Google considers the page relevant to the query, but it doesn't mean that the page answers the intention behind the query. The check begins by typing the query into Google, opening the page, and assessing whether it clearly answers four questions: what is it, how much does it cost, how do I compare, how do I buy.
It depends on what the blog is for. A blog that replicates generic content on hundreds of other sites adds nothing. A blog that answers sector-specific pre-purchase questions can act as a capture of commercial intent, and feed remarketing and email marketing.