E-commerce SEO services
For direct-to-consumer brands that have outgrown a theme's default setup: stores on Shopify, BigCommerce or Magento with a real catalogue and a paid media bill that keeps rising. We decide which category, filter and product URLs deserve to rank, fix the product data Google reads, and report organic orders and revenue in the same monthly view as your ads. The method stays the same in every market; the shopper's spelling, consumer law, shipping settings and the retainer change, so each market has its own page.
$8,000 a month in the US, US$3,000 in Australia (proxy price)
Choose your market
Every store gets the same order of work: checked tracking, then categories and filters, then product data and free listings, then earned links and seasonal pages. The market changes the words shoppers type, the consumer law behind your reviews and prices, the shipping settings Merchant Center needs and the retainer itself. Each market page carries its own plan and its own planning model in the local currency.
$8,000 a month, growth tier
For US DTC brands with $2M+ annual online revenue or 500+ SKUs on Shopify, BigCommerce or Magento. Category and collection rebuilds, filter rules, merchant listing markup, free listings and a revenue report in dollars.
US$3,000 a month, ex GST (proxy price)
For Australian online retailers with AUD 3M+ online revenue shipping nationally. Pages in Australian spelling, free listings with Australian shipping settings, and a monthly report in AUD.
These pages are not live. We publish no price for them, and any work there is scoped by proposal after a call.
Customer success journey
Choose the description closest to your store today, enter your own organic sessions, conversion rate and order value, and step through the year: what we deliver each month, what you should be able to see, and what stays with you. Shopify's guide (Oct 2025) puts typical SEO results at three to six months, with the first months spent on audits and content, so the model barely moves until month 4 and lets category and product work show after that. The model runs in US dollars; the Australian page runs the same model in AUD. Every assumption is printed under the chart, and none of it is a promise.
Ads pay for most orders. Google Ads and Meta bring in the bulk of orders, organic visits mostly come from people typing the brand, and category pages are a title over a product grid. Sessions are a sample number. Conversion is set at 1.3%, roughly half of the 2.68% global average Dynamic Yield reports (read Oct 2026; completed purchases over visitors, whole site, every channel), because non-branded organic visits on a store like this tend to land on thin pages. Halving it is our assumption. Order value uses the $152 Americas figure from Dynamic Yield.
Large catalogue, filters indexed everywhere. You sell 500+ SKUs and every filter and sort order produces a crawlable URL. Google's faceted navigation guidance (Dec 2025) says this can waste crawling and slow the discovery of new products. Sessions and order value are sample numbers. Conversion is set at 2.0%, our assumption below the 2.68% global average, because many organic visits land on filtered duplicates that do not match the query.
Organic grew once, then stalled. Earlier work lifted organic to a steady level and it has not moved since. Branded demand is fine, but mid-funnel category and product queries go to marketplaces and bigger retailers. Sessions are a sample number. Conversion uses Dynamic Yield's 2.68% global average and order value its $182 global figure. Both are whole-site, all-channel numbers, so replace them with your organic-only figures from GA4.
Mid-migration or recently replatformed. You are leaving Magento for Shopify or BigCommerce, or you moved within the past year and organic never came back. The first job is a redirect map and a check that categories, products and internal links survived the move. Sessions are a sample number; conversion and order value use the Dynamic Yield global figures (2.68% and $182). Expect the first months to be recovery against your pre-migration baseline before any growth.
Every login, export and document lives in your workspace from the first day.
The tracking spec, the crawl export and the fix list.
The keyword map and the filter rules.
The category template, the markup spec and the copy brief.
The deployed filter rules, written up for your developer.
The product copy brief and the stock rules.
The story, the media list and the review.
The guides, the prompt set and the tracking.
The seasonal URL plan and templates.
The report template and the dashboard in GA4 or Looker Studio.
The test log and the new category copy.
The second story and the markup spec.
A documented year of work, in your workspace.
Expected and conservative use the ramps in the assumptions panel. Month 0 is your input with no change.
Non-branded, from your analytics
From monthly organic sessions
From orders, month 0 to the month shown
Each bar splits one month of orders by channel. Month 0 borrows the average share of attributed revenue that ThoughtMetric reported across the e-commerce brands it tracks for May 2026 (published 1 Jun 2026), and treats it as an order split. That is an assumption: ThoughtMetric names neither its sample size nor its attribution model, and the figures are not tied to one country, so swap in the channel split from your own GA4 or attribution tool. After month 0, only the organic band moves, following the planning model below, while every paid and owned channel stays at its month 0 volume. Read the organic share as a model output, not a forecast.
Bar length is orders a month from all channels, expected case, drawn to one scale.
Only organic search changes with the model. The other channels are held at their month 0 volume, and the month 0 shares (organic search 10%, google Ads 38%, meta Ads 17%, direct 14%, email and SMS 8%, other channels 13%) are an assumption; your channel report replaces them.
A planning model built from your inputs and public benchmarks, most of them from vendors, agencies and trade bodies. It is not a forecast, a promise or a guarantee of rankings, traffic, orders or revenue.
| Month | Monthly organic sessions, cons. | Monthly organic sessions, exp. | Orders, cons. | Orders, exp. | Orders kept after returns, cons. | Orders kept after returns, exp. | Organic revenue (USD), cons. | Organic revenue (USD), exp. | Cumulative, cons. | Cumulative, exp. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 8,000 | 8,000 | 104 | 104 | 104 | 104 | $16K | $16K | $16K | $16K |
| 1 | 8,000 | 8,000 | 104 | 104 | 104 | 104 | $16K | $16K | $32K | $32K |
| 2 | 8,000 | 8,160 | 104 | 106 | 104 | 106 | $16K | $16K | $47K | $48K |
| 3 | 8,160 | 8,400 | 107 | 111 | 107 | 111 | $16K | $17K | $64K | $65K |
| 4 | 8,400 | 8,800 | 111 | 120 | 111 | 120 | $17K | $18K | $81K | $83K |
| 5 | 8,720 | 9,440 | 118 | 133 | 118 | 133 | $18K | $20K | $99K | $103K |
| 6 | 9,120 | 10,240 | 126 | 148 | 126 | 148 | $19K | $22K | $118K | $126K |
| 7 | 9,600 | 11,200 | 135 | 166 | 135 | 166 | $20K | $25K | $138K | $151K |
| 8 | 10,080 | 12,160 | 144 | 185 | 144 | 185 | $22K | $28K | $160K | $179K |
| 9 | 10,560 | 13,200 | 151 | 206 | 151 | 206 | $23K | $31K | $183K | $210K |
| 10 | 11,040 | 14,240 | 158 | 222 | 158 | 222 | $24K | $34K | $207K | $244K |
| 11 | 11,520 | 15,200 | 165 | 237 | 165 | 237 | $25K | $36K | $232K | $280K |
| 12 | 12,000 | 16,000 | 172 | 250 | 172 | 250 | $26K | $38K | $258K | $318K |
For each month m from 0 to 12: Monthly organic sessions(m) = V0 x VisitRamp(m). Orders(m) = Monthly organic sessions(m) x C0 x ConversionRamp(m). Orders kept after returns(m) = Orders(m minus L) x P. Organic revenue (USD)(m) = Orders kept after returns(m) x Average order value (USD). Cumulative organic revenue (USD) = sum of organic revenue (USD) from month 0 to m. Before month L, orders kept after returns come from the month 0 level of orders.
Each ramp is a multiplier on month 0, one per month. Month 0 is 1.00. Every multiplier is an assumption and is editable below.
| Multiplier | M0 | M1 | M2 | M3 | M4 | M5 | M6 | M7 | M8 | M9 | M10 | M11 | M12 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Visit ramp, expected | |||||||||||||
| Visit ramp, conservative | |||||||||||||
| Conversion ramp, expected | |||||||||||||
| Conversion ramp, conservative |
A planning model built from your inputs and public benchmarks, most of them from vendors, agencies and trade bodies. It is not a forecast, a promise or a guarantee of rankings, traffic, orders or revenue.
| In your model | Today (month 0) | Month 12, conservative | Month 12, expected |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly organic sessions per month | 8,000 | 12,000 | 16,000 |
| Orders per month | 104 | 172 | 250 |
| Orders kept after returns per month | 104 | 172 | 250 |
| Organic revenue (USD) per month | $16K | $26K | $38K |
| Cumulative organic revenue (USD), months 0 to 12 | $206K if month 0 holds | $258K | $318K |
| Area | Today | Month 12 |
|---|---|---|
| Organic revenue | A sessions line in a deck, or not tracked at all | Organic orders, revenue and share of revenue each month against month 0 |
| Filters and sort orders | Many more crawlable URLs than products in stock | Filter pages with demand indexed, the rest kept out of Search |
| Pagination | A load more button a crawler cannot press | Paginated URLs linked in order, every product reachable by plain links |
| Categories | A title over a grid | 30 categories with intro, buying help, FAQ and internal links |
| Products and variants | Supplier copy and one URL per colour competing with itself | Fresh copy on the 100 SKUs that earn most, variants grouped under one product |
| Product data | Theme markup with errors, feed items disapproved | Merchant listing markup and an approved feed with free listing clicks tracked |
| Links | Supplier and directory links | Earned links from two digital PR stories pointing at categories |
| Paid search overlap | Ads bidding on queries you already win, unmeasured | An overlap report you can use when you set paid budgets |
| Seasonal pages | A new URL every peak | Permanent seasonal URLs that keep the links they earn |
| Ownership | Knowledge left with whoever ran SEO last | Briefs, templates, rules, tracking spec, dashboards and a year two plan in your workspace |
Playbook
Each card is a page type or a fix tied to one moment in a shopper's search, from a broad category query to a specific product. The search bar under each card shows the kind of query it serves, with your products in the brackets.
Someone searching a category has picked the type of product but not the item. The page they land on should help them narrow: a short intro in plain words, the two or three choices that matter, answers to the questions your support team hears, and links to subcategories and bestsellers. We keep that help above or beside the grid, not instead of it, and we rebuild categories in revenue order.
Every size, colour, price band and sort order can mint a new URL. Google's guidance on faceted navigation (Dec 2025) warns this can cause overcrawling and slow the discovery of new products. We start from the keyword map: a filter combination that people search for gets a clean, indexable page with its own copy, and the rest stays out of Search through robots.txt or noindex.
A product sold in six colours should not compete with itself six times. We set one canonical product with selectable variants, mark it up with ProductGroup and per-variant Product data as Google's variant documentation (Sep 2026) describes, and give a variant its own page only when shoppers search for it by name. Copy for the SKUs that carry the most revenue is written fresh, not lifted from the supplier.
Free listings can place products in Search, the Shopping tab, Images and Lens without ad spend, provided the feed follows Google's policies and carries shipping and return settings. We clear disapprovals, align feed titles and prices with the page, and track free listing clicks apart from Shopping ads. Google states that products are not certain to show.
Google crawls links in a tags and does not press load more buttons. Its pagination guidance (Dec 2025) asks for a unique URL per page, sequential links between pages, and no canonical pointing every page back to page one. We check that every product in a large category can be reached through plain links, then back that up with sitemaps and the feed.
A move from Magento to Shopify, or a new theme, changes URL patterns and can drop ranking pages overnight. We map old category and product URLs to their new homes before launch and check redirects after it. Seasonal pages get permanent addresses, so the links a gift guide earns this year still count next year.
Proof
43x
The founder ran SEO and paid search in-house at Brain Station 23, a software development and IT services company. The same method of tracking first, bottom-of-funnel pages next, then links and conversion work, took inbound pipeline to 43x in eight months. That was SEO and paid search together, for an IT services company, not an e-commerce store.
Source: Brain Station 23 internal data, founder's in-house role; published as a multiple only
NopStation, Brain Station 23's nopCommerce e-commerce brand and the founder's in-house work. Not a client result.
Real keywords from NopStation, the founder's in-house e-commerce work, each with its Google position and the country searched from. The chips list every country where NopStation has a keyword in Google's top 10. CMBD has no e-commerce client case study yet. Positions only.
Ranked in
Source: Ahrefs organic keywords export for nop-station.com and its subdomains, 16 Oct 2026. Positions are Ahrefs positions on that date, shown as keyword, position and country only.
Illustration of the goal
Illustration: a Google search for your keyword, with Your brand in the first result, above Competitor 1, Competitor 2 and Competitor 3.
Illustration of the goal, not a promise and not a client result. Competitor 1 to 3 and positions 2 to 4 are placeholders and appear only in this drawing. CMBD has no e-commerce client case study yet.
Pricing
$8,000a month
US DTC brands with $2M+ annual online revenue or 500+ SKUs on Shopify, BigCommerce or Magento
US$3,000a month, ex GST (proxy price)
Australian online retailers with AUD 3M+ online revenue selling nationally
By proposal
US stores below the growth tier (from $4,500 a month), catalogues above 10,000 SKUs, several storefronts or extra markets
Fit
FAQ
The one where most of your orders ship to. If you sell in both the US and Australia, start with the market that brings in more revenue today. Each market page has its own price, its own model in local currency and the consumer rules that apply there. A store selling into two or more markets is scoped by proposal.
Each market is priced against its own published rates. 1 Digital Agency lists US growth-tier e-commerce SEO at $5,000 to $12,000 a month, while Websites That Sell reports an Australian client average of A$5,157 plus GST. We set each offer under our estimate of its own market's rate. The core scope matches; the US plan carries more category and link work because the market it competes in is larger.
Shopify's guide (Oct 2025) says SEO results typically take three to six months, with the early months spent on audits and content. Our model keeps months 0 to 3 nearly flat while tracking, crawl, mapping and markup work happens, then lets category and product work show. A new store or a store just after a migration starts later, and the model has a switch for that.
The order of work stays fixed; the constraints move. Shopify uses fixed /collections/ and /products/ paths and can expose one product under several collection URLs. Magento's layered navigation and BigCommerce's product filtering can generate large numbers of filter URLs. We write the canonical, filter and template rules for the platform you run and hand them to your developer.
No. Free listings are not ads. Products from Merchant Center can appear without charge across Search, the Shopping tab, Images and Lens when the feed meets Google's policies and carries shipping and return settings. Google says products are not certain to show, so we report free listing clicks separately.
Only from genuine reviews your customers already leave, marked up the way Google documents. In the US the FTC's 2024 rule bans fake reviews, reviews bought for a set sentiment and review suppression; in Australia the ACCC's guidance under the Australian Consumer Law covers the same ground. We never write, buy or filter reviews.
Not for an online store yet. The proof on this page comes from the founder's in-house work at Brain Station 23, shown as multiples and Google positions. Our first store client is a pilot, and with its written consent we publish its 90-day interim metrics as percentages.
No. Google decides its own results. What we commit to is the signed scope, the deliverables per month and an honest report against your month 0 baseline.
Google and regulator pages are cited as published. Benchmarks come from vendors, agencies and trade bodies, so we treat them as directional and say where a figure is secondary.
Guide
Most growing online stores already get organic traffic. The question their finance lead asks is different: how many orders came from it, what they were worth, and whether the share is rising while the Google Ads and Meta bills keep climbing. For many stores the honest answer is that nobody knows, because organic is reported as sessions and rankings while paid media is reported as revenue.
This guide is for DTC brands and online retailers on Shopify, BigCommerce and Magento that sell into the United States or Australia. It covers what e-commerce SEO services include, which stores they fit, how the work changes by market, which pages carry the revenue, how to handle filters, pagination and product data, how to check an agency, what it costs and how long it takes. Where we quote a number we name the source, and most of those sources are vendors, agencies or trade bodies, so read them as directional. For one market in depth, open the United States page or the Australia page.
A store makes money on a small number of page types: the home page, categories and collections, filtered views of those categories, product pages, and the guides that lead into them. Shoppers reach those pages with queries that already carry intent, such as a material, a size, a price band or a use. E-commerce SEO services are the work of making the right page answer each of those queries, keeping the thousands of pages a catalogue generates from getting in each other's way, and proving the result in orders rather than visits.
General SEO tends to measure itself in rankings and sessions, and on a store both can rise while revenue stays flat: a blog post can attract readers who never buy, and a filter page can rank for a phrase nobody shops for. The work on a store looks different in five ways:
The programme is built for stores where organic growth is worth a monthly retainer. That usually means a catalogue large enough to have real category structure and enough revenue that a rise in organic share pays back within the year. Our working line is $2M or more in annual online revenue, or 500+ SKUs, for US stores, and AUD 3M or more in online revenue for Australian retailers.
Shopify brands often reach this stage with a theme that was fine at launch: collections that are a heading over a grid, products that appear under several collection paths, and apps that add their own URLs. The fixes are mostly template and data work, so a developer or Shopify partner who can ship changes inside a sprint matters as much as the SEO plan.
Magento (Adobe Commerce) and BigCommerce stores tend to carry deeper catalogues and more filter options. Layered navigation and product filtering can produce far more crawlable URLs than products in stock, which is where the first months of work usually go: counting those URLs, deciding which deserve to rank, and closing the rest.
A replatform is the moment a store is most likely to lose organic revenue, because URL patterns change and redirects get missed. If you are moving, the programme starts with a redirect map and pre-launch checks, and the first months are measured against your pre-migration baseline rather than against growth targets.
Marketplace-only sellers with no store of their own are better served by marketplace specialists. Stores that need sales inside a month should spend on Shopping ads and paid social first. And any brand that wants written or incentivised reviews, bought links, or a ranking number in the contract will not get them from us.
The order of work does not change between countries: tracking that agrees with your store, then categories and filters, then product data and free listings, then earned links, guides and seasonal pages. What changes is the shopper's vocabulary, the consumer rules behind reviews and pricing, the shipping and return settings Merchant Center asks for, and the price of the retainer. Each market page covers that in full, so this section is the summary.
The US Census Bureau put retail e-commerce at $340.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026, seasonally adjusted, or 17.1% of total retail sales; the figure is preliminary and is revised with the next release. Competition for category queries is heavy, with marketplaces and national retailers holding many of the results, so US plans lean on long-tail category and filter pages, product data and earned links. Reviews fall under the FTC's final rule on fake reviews and testimonials, announced on 14 August 2024, which lets the agency seek civil penalties. Seasonal planning centres on the late-November peak. The US e-commerce SEO page has the growth-tier plan, the foundational option and the model in dollars.
Australia Post's 2026 eCommerce Report summary (19 March 2026) records A$82.6 billion of online spend in 2025, up 14% on the year, across 9.8 million households, with an average basket of A$96. Shoppers spell colour with a u, search for afterpay and free shipping, and expect delivery times stated for their state. Reviews and pricing claims fall under the Australian Consumer Law, with the ACCC publishing guidance on online reviews. The Australian e-commerce SEO page carries the plan, the proxy price and the model in AUD.
The United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates are on hold. The published rates we found for e-commerce SEO in those markets sit below our price floor, so we have not set a public offer, and any work there is scoped by proposal.
A store's organic revenue usually concentrates on a short list of templates. We plan them in the order shoppers meet them, and we rebuild them in the order of the revenue they carry.
These are the pages a shopper lands on after a query such as linen bedding or trail running shoes. They need a short intro that helps someone choose, the attributes that matter in that category, answers to common questions and links to subcategories and bestsellers, all without pushing the products out of view. Google's documentation on ecommerce site structure stresses internal links that show which pages matter, and a category is usually the page that should receive them.
Some filter combinations are searched for as phrases in their own right: a colour and material, a size and use, a brand inside a category. Those deserve an indexable page with its own title and copy. Most combinations are not searched for at all, and they should stay out of the index.
Product pages win the longest and most specific queries, often with a model number or exact attribute. They need copy that is not shared with every other retailer selling the same item, and they need variants handled so one product does not split its signals across many URLs.
Guides answer the questions a shopper asks before choosing a product, and they earn links more easily than categories. Their job on a store is to pass both readers and links into the category and product pages that sell.
Peak pages for sale events and gifting do better on permanent URLs that are updated each season. A new URL every year throws away the links and history the old one built.
Google's faceted navigation guidance (Dec 2025) explains the problem plainly: filters can generate a very large number of URL combinations, which can lead to overcrawling and slower discovery of new content. The remedies it lists include keeping filter URLs that do not need to be in Search out of crawling, using a consistent parameter order, and returning a 404 status for combinations that produce no results. We apply those after the keyword map, so the decision to open or close a filter is based on what people search for, not on a blanket rule.
Google's URL structure guidance for ecommerce (Dec 2025) adds practical rules that matter on big catalogues: use descriptive words in paths, avoid fragments for content that differs, use key=value parameters without repeating them, keep one form of each URL across internal links, sitemaps and canonicals, and avoid linking to session IDs or tracking parameters. A store that follows those rules has far fewer duplicate URLs to clean up later.
Pagination needs the same care. Google's guidance on pagination and incremental loading says it crawls links in a tags and does not click buttons or trigger user-initiated JavaScript, so a category that only reveals more products through a load more button can hide most of its catalogue from crawlers. Each page in a sequence should have its own URL and its own canonical; Google specifically advises against pointing every page back to the first one, and it no longer uses rel next and prev. Sitemaps and a Merchant Center feed help Google find products that sit deep in a category.
Google reads product information from three places: the visible page, the structured data on it, and, for many surfaces, the Merchant Center feed. When those three disagree on price or availability, products can be disapproved or shown with the wrong details. Much of the technical work on a store is making the three agree and keeping them in agreement when prices change.
On the page, we follow Google's product structured data documentation for merchant listings: price, availability, shipping and return details, and review data only where genuine reviews exist. For products sold in several colours or sizes, Google's variant documentation (updated September 2026) describes a ProductGroup with variesBy and hasVariant, a shared productGroupID, a unique ID for each variant, and URLs that preselect each variant with the right image, price and availability. It also advises placing the markup in the initial HTML, because markup added by JavaScript can be read less reliably.
In Merchant Center, free listings let products appear without ad spend across Google Search, the Shopping tab, Images and Lens, and in some countries YouTube. Google's help page lists the requirements: follow its free listing policies, add a return policy, set up shipping (mandatory in countries including the US and Australia) and provide core attributes such as ID, title, link, image, price, description and availability. It also states that products are not certain to show, so we report free listing clicks as their own line rather than folding them into organic.
Shoppers look for proof before they pay, and the proof has to be genuine. In the US, the FTC's final rule bans creating, selling or buying fake reviews and testimonials, including AI-generated ones, paying for reviews tied to a particular sentiment, undisclosed insider reviews and suppressing negative reviews through threats or false claims. In Australia, the ACCC's guidance under the Australian Consumer Law covers the same territory. We set up review requests after delivery, mark up only what customers wrote, and never write, buy or filter reviews.
Trust also shows up in the checkout. Baymard Institute's documented average cart abandonment rate is 70.22%, calculated from 50 studies (page updated 22 September 2025). Among shoppers in Baymard's survey who abandoned for reasons other than just browsing, 40% named extra costs such as shipping, tax and fees, 20% slow delivery, and 19% did not trust the site with card details. Those are checkout problems rather than SEO problems, but organic visitors meet them too, so category and product pages should state shipping costs, delivery times and the returns policy where a shopper looks for them.
Returns belong in the revenue maths. NRF and Happy Returns (15 October 2025) estimated that 19.3% of US online sales would be returned in 2025, from surveys of 2,006 shoppers and 358 e-commerce professionals at large merchants. The planning model on this page has an orders kept after returns input, so you can see organic revenue net of returns rather than gross.
Shoppers now ask AI assistants for product suggestions, and Google shows AI Overviews and AI Mode above or beside its results. Google's own page on AI features (Dec 2025) says there are no additional requirements or special optimisations needed to appear in them: a page must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet, and the usual practices apply, such as allowing crawling, linking pages internally, keeping important content in text and making structured data match the visible page. It also advises keeping Merchant Center information up to date.
That points back to the same fundamentals: clear category copy, accurate product data and buying guides that answer the questions shoppers ask. The share of revenue AI search drives is still small in the data we have seen. ThoughtMetric's May 2026 benchmark attributes 0.4% of e-commerce revenue to AI search across the brands it tracks, without stating sample size or attribution model. From month 7 we track a fixed set of shopper prompts and record whether answers name your products, and we report that against its first reading without promising inclusion.
Many growing brands ship to more than one country, sometimes from one storefront with currency switching and sometimes from separate stores per market. Two agencies working on two markets tend to produce two keyword maps that compete, two tracking setups that never agree and two reports nobody can reconcile. We run one programme with one tracking setup and one keyword map, and we add a market version of a page only when something a shopper needs actually changes.
A page earns a market version when the price, the shipping promise, the spelling or the consumer rules differ in a way the shopper will notice: a returns page written for the Australian Consumer Law is not the same page as one written for US shoppers, and a category that lists prices in dollars cannot serve both markets well. A page that would only swap color for colour can often stay as one page. Where market versions exist, they need correct hreflang links and a feed per country in Merchant Center, and we check both every quarter, because a broken set can show Australian shoppers US prices.
Reporting stays in one view: organic orders, revenue and share of revenue by market, so you can see which market pays back and where the next category batch should go.
Most agencies can show a rising traffic chart. These questions help separate the ones that can move a store's revenue.
Ask to see a sample monthly report. It should show organic orders, revenue, conversion rate, order value and share of revenue against a month 0 baseline, by category, with rankings as supporting detail.
An agency that has worked on large catalogues will ask how many URLs your filters create before it proposes content. If the first plan is a blog calendar, the crawl problem is likely to remain.
Shopify's fixed collection and product paths, Magento's layered navigation and BigCommerce's filtering each need different rules. Ask how they would handle duplicate product paths and variant URLs on your platform.
The answer should be genuine reviews only and earned links only. Any offer of review packages or link placements promised in advance is a legal and ranking risk to your store.
Month 1 should be tracking checks, a crawl and a fix list ranked by revenue. Content production before measurement makes the later reports hard to trust.
Ask whether a case study is a client result, the agency's own site or a founder's previous employer. Our proof is the founder's in-house work at Brain Station 23, and we label it that way.
In the US, 1 Digital Agency's pricing guide (25 July 2026) sets out three tiers: foundational work at $2,500 to $5,000 a month for smaller catalogues and low-competition niches, growth-focused work at $5,000 to $12,000 a month for most growing Shopify, BigCommerce or Magento stores competing nationally, and enterprise work at $12,000 to $25,000 or more for large brands and stores with 10,000+ products. It is one agency's tier table, not a market survey. Our midpoint estimate of the growth tier is $8,500, and our US growth-tier retainer is $8,000 a month. Smaller US stores that fit the foundational tier are scoped by proposal from $4,500 a month.
In Australia, Websites That Sell (updated 15 April 2026) reports that its e-commerce clients selling Australia-wide spent an average of A$5,157 plus GST a month in 2026, with national campaigns ranging from A$3,960 to A$11,000 plus GST. At AUD 1 = US$0.65 the average is about US$3,350. Because it is one agency's client average, we treat it as a labelled proxy, and our Australian retainer is US$3,000 a month, ex GST.
Every retainer has a three-month minimum, because months 1 to 3 are foundation work, and scope is agreed in writing with deliverables for each month. Fees exclude ad spend, platform and app fees, and development work. Catalogues over 10,000 SKUs, several storefronts or extra markets are scoped by proposal. The market cards above show each offer next to its market page.
Shopify's guide (29 October 2025) says SEO results typically take three to six months, with the early months focused on audits and content, and lists site age and history, competition, content quality, backlinks and technical SEO as the factors that stretch or shorten that. A store adds two complications: a migration resets part of the clock, and a peak season can hide or exaggerate a trend for a month or two, so we compare each month with the same month in the prior year where data exists.
The 12-month path on this page shows the order of work. Months 0 to 1 check tracking against store orders and crawl the catalogue. Months 2 to 3 produce the keyword map, the filter rules and the product markup, and switch on free listings. Months 4 to 6 fix filters and pagination, rebuild the first categories, rewrite top product pages and earn the first links. Months 7 to 9 add buying guides, prepare seasonal pages and put organic revenue into the monthly report. Months 10 to 12 widen the category work, test category layouts and end with a year one review against month 0.
The planning model uses sample session numbers with conversion rates and order values from Dynamic Yield's benchmarks: 2.68% global conversion and a $182 global order value, with 2.59% and $152 for the Americas. Those are whole-site, all-channel figures, so replace them with your own organic numbers from GA4 before you rely on the chart.
Report the numbers your finance and e-commerce leads already use, and write the definition next to each one.
Start with the market page for the country most of your orders ship to. The services below often sit alongside an e-commerce programme.
E-commerce SEO pays when it is measured in orders and revenue, built on the category, filter and product pages shoppers actually land on, and kept honest on reviews and claims in each market. The method is the same in the US and Australia; the vocabulary, the consumer rules, the shipping settings and the price are not.
To see where your store stands, pick your market above or book a strategy call. In 30 minutes we look at organic's share of your revenue, how your filters are indexed and whether your feed is clean, and you leave with a month 0 baseline idea and a written scope if it fits.
In a 30-minute call we look at organic's share of your revenue in each market you ship to, how your filters and categories are indexed, and whether your Merchant Center feed is clean. You leave with a month 0 baseline idea and a written scope if it fits.