The Pricing Framework That Helps Online Store Owners Make Smarter SEO Budget Decisions

E-commerce SEO pricing isn't arbitrary. Every quote you receive reflects how much work your store actually requires. Understanding the cost drivers lets you evaluate proposals with a clear head — rather than defaulting to the lowest number.

Catalog Size and Page Volume

A store with 80 products and a clean structure is a fundamentally different project than a store with 4,000 SKUs across 200 category pages. More pages means more keyword research, more on-page optimization, more internal linking decisions, and more technical audit surface area. Agencies price accordingly.

Platform and Technical Complexity

Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce each carry platform-specific SEO issues. Shopify's canonical tag behavior, WooCommerce's plugin conflicts, and BigCommerce's URL structure all require different remediation strategies. If your store has faceted navigation (filtering by size, color, price), crawl budget management and duplicate content handling add meaningful hours to the project.

Competitive Landscape

A Shopify store selling specialty tea competes in a different environment than one selling consumer electronics or apparel. More competitive niches require more aggressive link acquisition, deeper content programs, and longer timelines. Agencies working in high-competition verticals need to price for that sustained effort.

Starting Authority

A brand-new domain with zero backlinks needs a different investment than a five-year-old store with existing rankings. If you're starting from scratch, expect the early months to focus heavily on technical foundation and content structure before you see meaningful traffic movement.

These four variables — catalog size, platform complexity, competition, and starting authority — explain most of the variation you'll see in e-commerce SEO quotes. When comparing proposals, ask how each agency has scoped these dimensions for your specific store.

Most e-commerce SEO is sold in one of three structures. Each has tradeoffs worth understanding before you sign anything.

Monthly Retainer

The most common model. You pay a fixed monthly fee for an ongoing scope of work — technical maintenance, content production, link building, and reporting. Retainers work well for stores that have committed to organic search as a channel and want consistent progress over time.

Typical ranges in our experience:

• Small stores (under 500 SKUs, lower competition): $1,500–$2,500/month
• Mid-size stores (500–5,000 SKUs, moderate competition): $2,500–$5,000/month
• Larger or highly competitive stores: $5,000–$8,000+/month

These ranges vary by market, service mix, and agency overhead. An in-house team in a low-cost city will quote differently than a full-service agency in a major metro.

Project-Based Pricing

A defined scope with a fixed fee — typically used for a one-time technical audit, a site migration, or a content architecture overhaul. Project work ranges widely: a technical audit for a mid-size store might run $1,500–$4,000; a full migration project can reach $8,000–$15,000 depending on complexity. Project pricing doesn't replace ongoing SEO — it handles a specific deliverable.

Hourly Consulting

Some SEO specialists work hourly ($150–$300/hour is common for experienced e-commerce specialists). This works best when you have an internal team that needs expert guidance rather than full execution. It's a poor fit for stores that need consistent production work — hourly engagements rarely maintain the momentum needed for competitive organic growth.

Budget determines scope. Here's what a well-run e-commerce SEO engagement typically covers at different investment levels — and what gets deprioritized when budgets are tighter.

$1,500–$2,500/Month

At this level, you're funding a focused effort on the highest-priority opportunities. A good agency will use this budget for:

• Technical audit and remediation of critical issues (crawlability, indexation, site speed)
• On-page optimization for your top 15–30 category and product pages
• Basic link building (2–4 quality placements per month)
• Monthly reporting on rankings, organic traffic, and revenue from organic

What's typically not included: large-scale content production, PR-driven link campaigns, or broad category page expansion.

$3,000–$5,000/Month

This range opens up meaningful content production alongside technical and link work. Expect:

• Ongoing technical monitoring and fixes as the site evolves
• Optimized category pages across the full catalog, phased over time
• 2–4 long-form content pieces per month targeting commercial and informational queries
• 6–10 link placements per month through a mix of outreach and digital PR
• Conversion-aware SEO — recommendations that consider site structure and user flow, not just rankings

$6,000–$8,000+/Month

At this investment level, you should expect a comprehensive program: full technical ownership, aggressive content expansion, a structured link acquisition program, and close collaboration on commercial decisions like new product launches and category expansions. This tier is appropriate for stores in highly competitive niches or those with large catalogs where organic search represents a primary acquisition channel.

If you're being quoted $8,000/month for a 50-product store in a low-competition niche, ask detailed questions about what justifies the scope. Pricing should always be proportional to the actual work required.

SEO is a capital allocation decision. Before you set a budget, it's worth grounding the conversation in your store's actual economics.

The Basic Math

If your average order value is $85 and your gross margin is 40%, each order contributes $34 to cover overhead and marketing. A campaign that adds 100 incremental organic orders per month is generating $3,400 in gross contribution — before accounting for customer lifetime value. That's the number to benchmark against your monthly SEO fee, not the fee in isolation.

Realistic Timeline Expectations

In our experience working with e-commerce stores, category pages in moderate-competition niches typically start showing meaningful ranking movement between months 3 and 5. Product pages in competitive categories often take longer. Results depend heavily on your starting authority, how aggressively the technical foundation is addressed in early months, and how competitive your target keywords are.

Be cautious of any agency promising first-page rankings within 30–60 days on competitive terms. Those claims don't survive contact with reality in most markets.

What ROI Measurement Requires

To actually measure SEO ROI, you need Google Analytics 4 with e-commerce tracking enabled and Google Search Console connected. Without revenue attribution by channel, you're flying blind on whether organic search is contributing — and you can't hold an agency accountable to results you can't measure.

Before you start any SEO engagement, confirm your analytics are tracking organic transactions accurately. If they're not, fix that first — it typically takes a developer 2–4 hours and it's the foundation everything else sits on.

For a more detailed framework on calculating returns, our e-commerce SEO ROI analysis walks through contribution modeling by store size and channel mix.

These are the questions we hear most often from store owners evaluating SEO investment. Here are straightforward answers.

"Can't I just do SEO myself?"

For a small store in a low-competition niche, yes — self-managed SEO with good tools and a willingness to learn can work. The honest trade-off is time. E-commerce SEO done properly requires consistent technical monitoring, content production, and link acquisition. Most store owners find that as revenue grows, the opportunity cost of DIY SEO outweighs what an agency charges. The break-even point varies, but many store owners find it somewhere around $500,000–$1M in annual revenue.

"I got a quote for $400/month — why are yours so much higher?"

At $400/month, an agency is covering their overhead and not much else. That budget doesn't support meaningful technical work, consistent content production, or quality link acquisition. In our experience, low-cost SEO in e-commerce either produces no movement or produces movement followed by a manual penalty when the link tactics catch up with them. You're not comparing the same product at different prices — you're comparing different products.

"We tried SEO before and it didn't work."

This is worth unpacking. In most cases where SEO "didn't work," the issue is one of three things: the technical foundation was never properly addressed, content was produced without keyword strategy, or the engagement ended before results had time to materialize. Ask specifically what was done and what was measured. The answer usually reveals the gap.

Red Flags in Any E-commerce SEO Proposal

• designed to first-page rankings with no timeline or methodology explanation
• No mention of technical audit in the onboarding scope
• Link building described as "high DA sites" with no explanation of relevance or acquisition method
• Reporting that only covers keyword rankings, not organic revenue or traffic
• Month-to-month contracts with no defined deliverables or scope