Most eCommerce stores with large product catalogues share a common problem that quietly kills growth. It's not their products, pricing, or marketing budget—it's their site structure. Sam Wright, founder of Blink SEO and creator of Macalytics, reveals why taxonomy is the biggest drag on growth for stores doing £3-5 million annually, and exactly how to fix it using Search Console data.

We explore why collection pages represent 35% of all search impressions (more than products and blogs combined), how to determine the right level of granularity for your categorisation, and why most stores aren't deep enough with their subcategories. Sam shares his framework for using Search Console impression data to identify exactly where to create new collection pages, and explains the critical difference between what works for user experience versus what search engines can actually index.

Key Point Timestamps:

06:30 - The Large Catalogue Challenge

11:45 - Why Collection Pages Are Your Biggest SEO Opportunity

16:20 - The Granularity Problem Most Stores Face

22:15 - Using Search Console Data to Guide Taxonomy

27:40 - Real-World Example: Redesigning for Better Structure

35:10 - Future-Proofing for AI Search with Persona Data

42:30 - The AI Shortcut and Critical Warning

Sam defines large catalogue stores as those where the buying journey tips into a different mode—one based around comparison and filtering rather than simple browsing. This typically happens around 250 products, though it varies by category.

"With large catalogue stores, the buying journey is based around comparison and filtering," Sam explains. "A lot of the time these stores have grown up organically over a period of time and no one's taken ownership about how the store's organised."

This organic growth creates a drag on everything—SEO, user experience, conversion rates, even email segmentation. Stores reach £3-5 million in annual revenue, so things are fundamentally working. But growth isn't happening as fast as it should because nobody stepped back to think strategically about organisation and purpose.

Sam shared compelling data from across all the Shopify stores his agency works with: "It's about 35% of all impressions come on collections, which is much more than products and blogs. It's basically the entry point for most people when they're doing actual new product discovery."

More than a third of search visibility comes from collection pages—the pages where new customers first encounter the store. Yet most stores aren't categorised in a way that aligns with how people actually search for their products.

This represents a massive untapped opportunity. If collection pages are already driving 35% of impressions without optimisation, imagine the potential when they're properly structured and aligned with search behaviour.

The real opportunity for most stores lies in going deeper with categorisation. Much deeper.

"Most people are not granular enough with their categorisation," Sam emphasises. "A lot of stores will just have a t-shirts category. They won't subcategorise those t-shirts to the level that matches how people are actually searching."

Sam uses sofas as an example: "So sofas as the parent category, like blue sofas, blue four seat sofas, blue four seat corduroy sofas. That filtering process, that is how people do search."

The challenge on Shopify is that these filters aren't indexable for search engines. Google ads can't effectively target filters either. The solution is breaking out popular subcategories into actual collection pages.

"The real opportunity for a lot of stores is how deep you go in that categorisation because you've got products that other people...