What Do Store Owners Ask Before Hiring an Ecommerce SEO Agency?

An ecommerce SEO agency is a firm that gets online stores found by buyers in search results and, increasingly, in AI answers. The work has three parts. Fixing technical problems that stop search engines reading the store, rewriting product and collection pages so they match what buyers search for, and earning mentions and links that make the brand worth trusting.

Scale and page type. A service business has ten pages a person wrote. A store has thousands generated from a database, with filters that can create thousands more. The core work is on product and collection pages, which are the hardest page types to optimise and the ones that carry all the revenue.

Any business where the money comes from product pages. If your growth depends on a shopper finding a specific product and buying it, you need someone who has worked inside product catalogues. If your growth depends on someone filling in an enquiry form, a general agency is fine.

A structured check of everything that could be stopping a store from being found, ending with an ordered fix list. A good audit covers technical health, product and collection page quality, competitor position, and now AI answer visibility as well.

Yes, especially at a small catalogue size. The limit is usually time rather than knowledge. Our free checklist covers the work in the order we would do it.

Answer engine optimization is structuring your content so a machine can lift a direct answer out of it. Ordinary SEO aims to win a position in a list of links. AEO aims to be the source the answer is built from, whether that answer appears in a box at the top of Google or inside a chat tool.

Generative engine optimization is making your brand something AI models recognise, describe correctly and name when someone asks what to buy. It applies to stores more than to almost any other business, because product research is one of the most common things people ask AI tools about.

They overlap heavily and many people use them interchangeably. The useful distinction is that AEO is mostly about how a page is written and structured so an answer can be extracted from it. GEO is mostly about how well known and consistently described your brand is across the whole web, which is what shapes what a model says about you.

Three things carry most of the weight. Whether the tool can reach and read your site at all. Whether your pages clearly answer the question being asked. And how often and how consistently your brand is described across other sites the tool has read. The third one is why digital PR now matters more, not less.

The most common reasons, in order, are that AI crawlers are blocked from your site, your product data is missing or unreadable, your pages describe features rather than answering questions, and your brand is barely mentioned anywhere else on the web.

It is a plain text file that tells AI tools which parts of your site matter and how to read them. Support for it is still limited and it is not a shortcut to being recommended. It costs almost nothing to add, so we add it, but anyone selling it as a strategy is overselling.

Yes. We do not take work from service businesses, software companies or local trades. Every method we use is built for product catalogues.

Yes. We work with stores across Canada and the United States. Our office is in Toronto, Ontario, and most of our clients are not local to it.

The person you speak with in the first call is on your account. We do not sell with senior people and deliver with juniors. If that changes, we will tell you before it happens, not after.

Yes, and it is common. We need clear written boundaries about who owns what, because two teams changing the same pages without coordination undoes both sets of work.

Yes, without exception. Every account is created in your name and every piece of content is yours to keep. Nothing stops working if we stop working together.

One person who can approve copy, access to your store and analytics, a route to whoever can change your templates, and about two hours of your time a month.

Across the market, expect roughly 1,500 to 3,000 dollars a month from a freelancer or small shop, 3,000 to 8,000 from an established agency, and 10,000 and up for enterprise work. Our levels are 2,500, 4,500 and 8,000 and up in Canadian dollars, published on our pricing page.

Because the first two months are spent fixing and rebuilding, and search engines take time to re evaluate a changed page. Stopping at month three means paying for the foundation and leaving before anything is built on it.

No, and neither can anyone else. Nobody controls the systems that decide rankings. What we guarantee is the scope of work, the schedule, the reporting, and that you own everything we build.

Technical recovery often shows within six to eight weeks, because you are recovering pages that already existed. Rebuilt collection pages usually take three to four months to settle. Authority and AI mention work takes longest and keeps compounding after the rest has levelled off.

At the six month review we compare everything against the baseline you signed off on. If the numbers are flat and we cannot explain why, we will raise ending the engagement ourselves rather than waiting for you to.

Six months minimum, then month to month with thirty days notice. There is no exit fee and no charge to hand back accounts, because the accounts were always yours.

Shopify and Shopify Plus, WooCommerce, Magento and Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, Wix, Squarespace and custom builds. Most of our work is on Shopify, because most stores of the size we serve are on it.

The differences matter far less than people think. Shopify has some fixed limits on web address structure, Magento gives more control and needs more skill to use, WooCommerce sits in between. Any of them can rank well. Choosing a platform for search reasons alone is almost always the wrong call.

Yes. Above a few thousand products the work changes shape, because you cannot edit pages one at a time. It becomes about templates, rules and product data quality instead.

Before, and during. A migration is the fastest way to lose traffic you have spent years earning. The mapping and monitoring work has to start before the move, not after somebody notices the drop.

Either. Most clients give us access so we can make changes ourselves, which is faster. Some prefer we send briefs and their own developer implements. Both work, and the second is slower.