Your category pages are the shop window.

Usually because they carry the supplier’s description, which appears identically on many competing sites, and because product terms have far less search volume than category terms. Ranking the category page is normally the better investment, with unique content on your best-selling products.

Yes, but as genuinely useful buying guidance, placed where a human would read it — typically a short introduction above the grid and more detail below. A keyword-stuffed block hidden at the very bottom is a pattern engines have discounted for years.

Keep the page and mark availability honestly. Deleting it throws away a ranking that took months to earn and will be wanted again when the product returns. Only permanently discontinued products should be redirected, and then to the closest replacement.

Decide deliberately which filter combinations deserve to be indexed — usually a small set with genuine search demand, such as a brand within a category — and canonicalise or block the rest. Left alone, facets generate thousands of near-duplicate URLs and consume the crawling your real pages need.

Yes. Price, availability, brand, and reviews where they exist. It is what makes rich results and Shopping surfaces possible, and it tells engines unambiguously what the page is — which matters more each year as answers get assembled rather than listed.

Shopping brings traffic immediately and costs per click. SEO takes months and then costs nothing per click. Most stores need both, and they share the same foundation: a clean product feed with accurate titles, prices and availability serves both at once.