Ecommerce SEO for shops that want more orders
Ecommerce SEO is the work of getting your product and category pages found by people already searching to buy. We do it for UK online shops from £495 a month, rolling monthly, with no lock-in.
What ecommerce SEO is, and who it is for
The short version: getting the things you sell found on Google, without paying for every click.
Ecommerce SEO is the work of getting your product pages and category pages to show up on Google. That way shoppers reach them without you paying for every click. Someone searches for a waterproof dog coat in a medium. Your page is either on the first screen of results, or it may as well not be there.
This page is for you if you run an online shop and already sell something people search for. Perhaps paid ads work, but the cost of each sale keeps creeping up. Perhaps you rank for your own brand name and nothing else. Both are normal, and both can be fixed.
How it differs from ordinary SEO
An ordinary business site has ten or twenty pages. A shop has thousands, most of them made by the platform, and a lot of them near-duplicates. So ecommerce SEO spends more time on structure than on writing. The real decisions are which category pages deserve to exist, which filter combinations Google should see, and what happens to a page once a product is gone for good. None of that is fun to sit through. It still decides the result.
Get those answers wrong and Google spends its time crawling pages that will never earn a sale. Get them right and the shop starts turning up for the phrases people type in the minute before they buy. That is why we treat ecommerce SEO as its own trade rather than a bigger version of the usual one.
Why the first screen decides who gets the order
Most people never look past the first five results. They pick something near the top, or they change the words and pick something near the top of that. So the shop sitting in second place collects orders every day from buyers who never see position eleven.
Ads can buy that position. But the moment you stop paying, the visitors stop the same afternoon. Search works the other way round, because it builds slowly and then holds. We set out that trade-off in our piece on SEO versus paid ads and cost per enquiry. For most shops the honest answer is that you want both, in different amounts as you grow.
The losses you never see
A shop with one strong product line often ranks well for its own name and badly for everything else. Meanwhile the category page that should catch new buyers sits on page three, thin on words and slow on a phone. Nobody notices, because a sale that never happened leaves no trace in the reports.
That is the awkward part of search. You cannot see the person who typed the query, found a competitor and bought there instead. So we start by showing you the phrases people use in your category, how many use them, and where your shop sits today. There is no judgement in it. It is just the picture, and it takes about a week to put together.
Search runs on a calendar
The other reason to start early is timing. Whatever you want to sell at Christmas has to be built and indexed by late summer, because Google will not trust a brand new page in November. The same goes for spring lines, exam season, or whatever your peak happens to be. Shops that plan a season ahead get the easy wins. Shops that ring us in October get next year.
What actually moves an online shop up the results
Four things carry most of the weight, and only one of them is writing.
Four things do most of the work. Roughly in the order they turn out to be the problem:
- Site structure. Which categories exist, how they link to each other, and how many clicks it takes to reach a product from the home page.
- Category pages. These are the pages that rank for the phrases with money behind them. Most shops leave them as a bare grid of products with a heading and nothing else.
- Speed on a phone. Most shopping searches happen on a phone, often on a patchy signal, so a page that takes six seconds loses the visitor before it loads.
- Product data. Price, stock and review details written in a form Google can read and show in the results. Google publishes its own rules for product data, and following them exactly is free.
The plumbing nobody sees
Then there is the plumbing. Duplicate pages spawned by filters. Old product addresses that now lead nowhere. Pagination that Google reads the wrong way round. Images sent at four times the size they display at. None of it is interesting, and all of it costs orders. Our teardown of the Bupa website shows how we read a site before we touch it. We built none of that site, which is rather the point.
Then, and only then, content
Once the first four are sorted, writing starts to pay. Buying guides, comparison pages and size or fit advice all catch people earlier than a product page can. Someone comparing two things today buys one of them next week. Most shops skip this stage because it feels slow. It is slow. It is also the part competitors find hardest to copy.
We look at what happens after the click too, which is the bit most agencies leave alone. A page that ranks and does not sell is a cost rather than a win. So we check the obvious blockers on the way to checkout. Where that turns out to be the bigger prize, we say so and point you at conversion work rather than more traffic.
How we run ecommerce SEO, month by month
There is no secret method here, so here is the actual cycle. Month one is mostly looking. We run a full crawl of the shop and map the phrases your categories should own. Then you get a list of faults, ranked by what each one is costing you. That list is yours whether or not you carry on with us.
From month two the work splits roughly in half. One half is repair, because technical faults hold back everything else. The other half is pages. We rewrite category copy, build the buying guides your competitors already rank for, and tighten internal links so authority reaches the products that matter.
What lands in your inbox
One report a month, a short call if you want it, and the numbers behind both. We report on orders and enquiries from search rather than a list of keywords that went up. Rankings matter, but they are a means, so they sit at the back.
The same person does your account each month. You are not handed to a junior once the contract is signed, mostly because we are too small for that to be possible. It also means nobody has to be brought up to speed in month four.
It all runs rolling monthly. If a month goes badly you can stop at the end of it. We would rather you did that than sit in a contract quietly resenting us. Ninety-two per cent of our clients stay, which only works if staying is the easier choice.
Find the phrases that end in a sale
We pull the terms your category really uses, then sort them by whether the person typing is browsing or buying.
Repair first, then fill the gaps
Technical faults go first, because they hold back everything else. Then the category pages and guides you are missing.
Report what it earned
One report a month in plain English: what we changed, what moved, and what came back in orders.
Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and everything else
We work on the shop you already have. Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Wix or something custom, the ranking rules are the same and only the settings screens change. Nobody here will tell you to move platform so the job suits us better.
Where platforms genuinely differ
Shopify puts most products at two web addresses at once, which needs handling or Google sees the same thing twice. WooCommerce shops tend to be slow, because the theme and the plugins fight each other for the same second. Magento hands you enormous control, plus enough rope to tangle the whole site in filters. These are quirks rather than verdicts, and none of them stops a shop ranking.
If you are on Shopify and want the version of this page written for that platform, read our Shopify SEO page instead. It goes deeper on collections, the duplicate address problem and the app bloat that slows a checkout down. This page is the wider one. Same work, any platform, including the shops that somehow run on two.
What about Amazon and eBay
Marketplaces are a separate game with separate rules. Amazon ranks on sales history and reviews far more than on the words in your listing. So we do not sell Amazon work, and we will say so early rather than take the money. What Google search does for you is bring buyers to a shop you own, on margins nobody else takes a slice of.
Selling into more than one country adds a layer, because Google has to know which version of a page belongs to which market. That sits under international SEO, and it is worth sorting before you spend anything on a second language.
Related: Shopify SEO · International SEO · SEO migration services
What ecommerce SEO costs, in actual pounds
Nobody else on the first page of Google publishes a figure. We do.
Starter ecommerce SEO is £495 a month. It runs rolling monthly and there is no lock-in. So you can leave at the end of any month, with no penalty and no notice period. Nobody from a retention team will ring you to talk you out of it.
That figure buys a real working programme on a small or mid-sized shop. Two tiers sit above it, Growth and Market Leader, and we scope those against the shop in front of us. We publish no number for them, because any number we printed today would be invented.
What moves the price
- The size of the catalogue. Two hundred products is a different job from twenty thousand.
- How hard your category is. Phone cases are brutal. Specialist industrial parts are not.
- How much has to be repaired before anything can grow.
- How much new writing you want, and how quickly you want it.
You can start at the bottom of that range and decide later, once you can see what a month actually buys. For the wider market picture, read our plain guide to what SEO costs in the UK. Our tiers sit on the SEO pricing page. Both exist so you can compare us properly, including with agencies who will not put a figure on a page at all.
One thing the £495 does not cover is ad spend, because there is none. Nor is there a setup fee, a platform charge or a minimum term. If we ever quote you something extra, it will be a named piece of work with a price beside it.
How long it takes, and what we count as working
Three to six months, honestly. Technical repairs can move things sooner, sometimes within a couple of months of the crawl problems clearing. But new writing needs time to be found, read and linked to, and money does not shorten that part by much.
What we count
Orders and enquiries that came from search. Then the revenue behind them, once your analytics tracks it properly, which on plenty of shops it does not on day one. Positions sit underneath as a diagnostic. A page that moved from fortieth to twelfth has earned nothing yet, though it tells us the work is landing.
We cannot promise you a position, and nor can anybody else. Google changes its ranking systems constantly. A guaranteed spot is therefore either a guess or an ad being sold under another name. What we can promise is that you will always know what we did, what it cost and what followed.
What happens if it is not working
Sometimes six months pass and the numbers are flat. When that happens we say so on the call, in those words, and we go through why. Usually it is one of three things: the category is harder than it looked, the shop needs work we do not do, or the traffic arrived and the site did not convert it. Each has a different answer, and one of those answers is that you stop paying us. If you would rather begin with a diagnosis than a retainer, a technical SEO audit is the cheaper first step.
Four things we turn down
We will not buy links, spin product descriptions with a machine and call it content, tie you into twelve months, or take a shop on when paid ads would clearly serve it better this quarter. Saying so costs us a sale and saves you six months.
Related: Technical SEO audit · Conversion rate optimisation · Paid ads
Ecommerce SEO questions, answered straight
The six we get asked most, usually before anybody signs anything.
How much does ecommerce SEO cost?
Ours starts at £495 a month, rolling monthly, with no lock-in. Larger catalogues and harder categories cost more. We scope those per shop rather than print a figure we would have to invent. Most UK agencies quote a monthly retainer and never publish it, which is why comparing quotes is so hard.
How long does ecommerce SEO take to show results?
Three to six months for most shops. Technical repairs can show sooner, sometimes inside a couple of months. New writing takes longer, because it has to be found and trusted first. Anyone promising results in thirty days is selling you something else.
What is the difference between ecommerce SEO and regular SEO?
Scale and structure. A normal site has a few dozen pages you can edit by hand. A shop has thousands, generated by the platform, and many of them near-duplicates. So the work leans towards category structure, filters, stock handling and product data rather than simply writing more pages.
More questions about ecommerce SEO
Which ecommerce platforms do you work with?
Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Wix and custom builds. We work with whatever you already run, and we will not ask you to move platform to suit us. If you are on Shopify, our Shopify SEO page goes deeper on that platform's own quirks.
Is SEO worth it for a small online shop?
Sometimes, and we will say when it is not. It works best when people already search for what you sell and your margins can carry a few patient months. If nobody searches for it yet, paid ads or a marketplace usually beat SEO in the first year.
What do I actually get each month?
Technical fixes, work on your category and product pages, and new content where it is missing. Then one report in plain English showing what changed and what it earned. Plus a call if you want one. No mailing list, and no keyword spreadsheet dumped in your inbox.
Tell us what your shop sells
Send us the web address. We will come back with what we would fix first and roughly what it would cost. If SEO is the wrong spend for you right now, we will say that instead.
Raoul (Alex) Müller
Email: office@digitalmovement.uk
Phone: +44 7865 064463