Ecommerce pricing
How ecommerce SEO is priced
Store SEO is quoted differently from a standard retainer, and for once the return can be modelled rather than promised.
As on the main pricing page, there is no figure here. What is here is the reasoning behind why store quotes differ, which is the part you actually need in order to compare two proposals.
What makes a store quote different
- Catalogue size. Not just product count but generated URLs. Filters, variants, sorts and pagination multiply quickly, and the crawl analysis scales with the total rather than with what you meant to publish.
- Template work, not page work. Changes are made once and affect thousands of pages. That is efficient, and it means the specification and testing have to be far more careful.
- Platform constraints. Shopify limits some fixes entirely. A custom build allows everything and needs more development time. Both change the number, in opposite directions.
- Migration risk. If a replatform is in scope, that becomes the dominant cost and the dominant risk.
The part you can actually model
Ecommerce is the one category where the business case can be built from your own numbers rather than from an agency's optimism. If you know sessions, conversion rate and average order value, then an estimated ranking improvement on a specific category page converts into a revenue range with only a couple of assumptions.
We run that during the audit and show the working. It is also the reason we occasionally advise a store not to invest in search: when the arithmetic does not clear, it is visible before anybody has spent anything.
Conversion first, usually. If a store converts poorly, doubling traffic doubles the cost of the weakness. On several stores the honest advice has been to fix the checkout before paying anyone for SEO.
Common questions
Why does ecommerce SEO cost more than standard SEO?
Scale and risk. A store generates thousands of URLs automatically, the technical decisions affect the whole catalogue at once, and a mistake on a template is a mistake on every product page. The diagnostic work alone is larger before anybody writes anything.
Can you estimate the return before we start?
On ecommerce, better than anywhere else. You know your conversion rate and average order value, so a ranking improvement on a category page can be modelled to a revenue range rather than guessed at. We do that during the audit, and sometimes it is what tells us not to proceed.
Is it cheaper on Shopify?
Slightly, for the platform-specific work, because the problems are known and repeat across every store. The catalogue work is the same regardless of platform.
Want to know what is holding your site back?
Thirty minutes with your site on screen, and a written list of what we would fix first. If search is not the right investment for your business, we will tell you that instead.