How Much Does Ecommerce SEO Cost?
Our price is £350 a month with everything included. The driver almost no pricing page mentions is catalogue size, which changes the work more than competition does.
What It Costs
£350 a month for one shop covering one target area, with everything included. No setup fee, nothing billed separately and no charge for a new page when the shop needs one.
Inside that: technical health and crawl work, site structure, category page content, product page prioritisation, the content that sits beyond the catalogue, internal linking, schema markup, a quarterly technical audit, speed and mobile work, website management, AI optimisation and two social posts a week.
What we will not do on this page. Quote what the market charges.
Any figure we published for what other suppliers charge would be a number we could not source. This cluster's evidence rule bars that. Ranges circulated in this industry are usually somebody's own pricing presented as a market.
What we can say about the shape of the market. That it is unusually wide here.
Ecommerce quotations vary more than in any other sector we work in. Block two explains why: two shops that look identical from outside can need genuinely different amounts of work.
Why our own price does not move with catalogue size. A deliberate decision.
We price on the target area rather than on the number of products, which means a larger catalogue costs you nothing extra and costs us more. That is a trade we accept because it removes an argument nobody enjoys having.
Why Catalogue Size Is The Main Driver
Two shops in the same market, facing the same competitors, selling at similar prices. One has eighty products. The other has eight thousand. They need very different work. Almost no pricing page says so.
What eighty products means. Everything can be looked at.
Every product page can be read. Every category can be written properly. A structural problem is visible because a person can hold the whole shop in their head.
What eight thousand means. Nothing can be looked at individually.
The work stops being execution and becomes judgement about where execution goes. Which four hundred products deserve attention. Which categories carry the demand. What the other seven thousand six hundred pages are doing to the shop's crawl.
The specific things that change at scale. Four.
Faceted navigation stops being a detail and becomes the largest technical issue on the site. Duplication multiplies rather than adding up. Any content decision has to be applied systematically rather than page by page. And diagnosis takes longer, because a fault affecting three hundred pages is harder to spot than one affecting three.
Why competition matters less than people expect. Because it changes how hard the target is rather than how much work exists.
A hard market with eighty products is still eighty products. An easy market with eight thousand is still eight thousand pages that have to be managed.
The Other Drivers
Five things beyond catalogue size move what an engagement involves. A supplier who has not asked about any of them has not looked at the shop.
Platform. Not because some platforms rank better, which our platform guide argues is largely a myth.
What differs is how much control you have. A change that takes an hour on one platform can be impossible on another without development work. That difference lands on the invoice rather than on the results.
How much technical debt exists. What previous suppliers, apps and redesigns left behind.
A shop on its third theme with two abandoned migrations behind it carries months of unwinding before anything new can be built.
Whether the product data is usable. The one that surprises people.
If dimensions, materials, compatibility and specifications exist as structured fields, a great deal becomes possible cheaply. If they exist only inside a paragraph of supplier prose, they have to be extracted before they can be used.
Competition. Real, though secondary to scale per block two.
Whether content has to be written from scratch. A shop with existing buying guides and category copy needs those improved. A shop with none needs them created, which is a different order of work.
Audit Against Ongoing
These are not the same thing bought at different sizes. They answer different questions and they suit different shops.
What an audit is. A diagnosis, delivered once.
What is wrong, how bad each thing is, what order to address it in and what it would take. It produces a document rather than a change.
What an audit will genuinely achieve. Clarity. A plan somebody else can execute.
That suits a shop with in-house capability. It suits one with a developer already retained. Our guide to doing this in-house covers that arrangement properly.
What an audit will not achieve. Anything, on its own.
An audit that nobody acts on is an expensive document. We have seen shops buy three from three suppliers over four years and implement none of them, which is a real pattern rather than a rhetorical one.
What ongoing work is. Diagnosis plus execution plus the fact that a shop changes.
New products arrive with supplier copy. Apps get installed. Stock goes out. A shop optimised once drifts, which is why this is not a project with an end date.
Which suits which. Audit for a shop with hands available. Ongoing for a shop without them.
What Should Be Included
Eight workstreams. The purpose of listing them is so you can put two proposals side by side and see what one of them has quietly left out.
Technical health and crawl. Indexing, duplication, redirects and faceted navigation. The first thing that has to be right.
Site structure. The category tree, product depth and internal linking.
Category pages. Content, not just a heading above a grid.
Product page prioritisation. Deciding which ones can pay and working on those.
Content beyond the catalogue. Buying guides, comparisons and problem led content.
Schema markup. Described accurately rather than aspirationally, per the rule across this cluster.
Measurement. Separating brand from non-brand, which our measurement guide explains matters more than every other number.
Ongoing maintenance. Because the shop keeps changing.
What a missing item usually means. That the supplier cannot do it.
A proposal covering content thoroughly with nothing on technical work is describing what that supplier produces rather than what your shop needs.
What Gets Dropped At The Cheap End
At a low fee something has to give. That is arithmetic rather than dishonesty. Knowing which things go first tells you what you are actually buying.
Technical work goes first. Because it is invisible and expensive.
It needs someone senior, it takes time. A client cannot see it. Nobody notices its absence for months, which makes it the safest thing to omit.
Then anything requiring judgement at scale. Deciding which four hundred of eight thousand products deserve work.
That takes an experienced person several days. Producing ten blog posts takes less and looks like more.
Then content that needs subject knowledge. A buying guide that helps somebody choose requires understanding the products.
Generic copy about the category requires none, reads acceptably to a client and helps nobody.
What survives at the cheap end. Whatever is quick, visible and produces something to show.
Reports. Blog posts. Meta descriptions updated. A monthly summary that documents activity rather than progress.
The test for any proposal. Ask what happens in month one.
An answer built around content production on a shop nobody has crawled yet tells you which of these you are buying.
What Sits Outside The Fee
Five costs that are not part of anybody's monthly fee, ours included. A shop that has budgeted only for the fee will meet these later.
Platform subscription. Your ongoing cost of running the shop, paid to the platform regardless of who does your marketing.
Apps and extensions. Anything added to the shop for a function it lacks.
Worth reviewing periodically for a reason our page speed guide covers: each one leaves code behind. Several together compound.
Photography. Product images beyond what a supplier provides.
Frequently the difference between a product page that converts and one that does not. Never included in an SEO fee.
Product data work. Per block three. Getting specifications into usable fields where they currently sit inside prose.
This can be substantial on an inherited catalogue and it is worth scoping before it surprises you.
Development time. The one that causes most friction.
Where a fix needs a developer, somebody has to pay for that developer. Establishing before you start whether your supplier implements or only recommends is the single most useful question in this area, which our guide to choosing an agency deals with.
How To Compare Two Quotes
Two proposals at different prices are rarely the same service costed differently. Six questions make an unlike comparison usable.
Who does the technical work. The question that sorts suppliers fastest.
An agency that recommends but cannot implement is half a service on a shop, because the recommendations sit unactioned while you look for somebody to execute them.
What access is needed. A supplier who does not want platform access is not planning to change anything on the platform.
What happens in the first month. Per block six. Diagnosis first. Or content production straight away.
How they report. Specifically whether brand and non-brand are separated, since a report combining them can show growth from work that achieved nothing.
What happens at the end of the term. Who owns the content, whether documentation is handed over, what remains yours.
Whether they asked how many products you have. The simplest signal of the six.
Per block two, catalogue size is the main driver of the work. A supplier who has quoted without asking has priced a website rather than a shop. The number is a guess whatever it says.
When It Is Not Worth Buying
Three situations where a shop should not buy this from us or from anybody. Saying so costs us work and it is more useful than the alternative.
Thin margins. If what remains after cost of goods, fulfilment and returns is small, there may be nothing left to fund acquisition at all.
The arithmetic is worked through in our guide on whether this is worth it, using margin rather than revenue because revenue flatters every shop.
A very small catalogue. A shop with a handful of products has very little to work with.
There are few category terms to target and little structural work available. A capable owner can frequently handle it. Paying somebody monthly to maintain a shop that could be maintained in an afternoon is poor value.
Demand that genuinely lives on a marketplace. The hardest one to hear.
If your product is commodity stock searched for by exact name. Your buyers habitually start on a marketplace, then building your own demand is slow and expensive against simply being where they already are. Our guide on the marketplaces treats that fairly.
One that is not on this list. A shop that is too small to matter.
Size is not the disqualifier. Margin, catalogue and where demand already lives are.
Eighty products
or eight thousand.
Same market, same competitors, entirely different work. We price on the target area rather than the catalogue, so a larger shop costs you nothing extra. Ask any supplier who quoted without asking how many products you have.
What is included every month:
£350 per month, one target area. No setup fee, nothing billed separately.
Twenty-two guides.
One subject.
This guide covers cost. The rest of the series covers the sequence, structure, category and product pages, technical health, measurement and everything a store owner has to decide.
