How much does ecommerce SEO cost?

Short answer

Anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month for a small shop to five figures for a large catalogue. Size and complexity drive it, not the number of keywords. I start every store with a fixed $500 audit and price the engagement after, because at scale the wrong fix is expensive to deploy and expensive to undo.

Ecommerce SEO quotes vary more than almost any other kind, because “an online store” covers a twenty-product gift shop and a marketplace with two hundred thousand URLs. Both need SEO. They need very different amounts of it.

What the market charges

There is no good public data specifically on ecommerce SEO pricing. The broadest survey is Ahrefs’ poll of 439 SEO providers, published 2023 and updated 2024. The most common monthly retainer was $501 to $1,000, the most common project fee was $2,501 to $5,000, and consultants averaged $171.18 an hour against $98.90 for agencies. In my experience ecommerce work sits at or above those averages, because the sites are larger and the technical work is heavier.

How that plays out by store size, in my experience rather than from any survey:

Small shop, a few hundred products, no filters. Priced like ordinary SEO, often as a one-off project. Much of the work is on-page and a handful of category pages.
Mid-sized store, thousands of products, faceted navigation. A diagnosis followed by a defined implementation project, or a monthly engagement while the fixes roll out. This is where the architecture work starts to pay for itself.
Large catalogue, tens of thousands of products or more. Priced as a project with ongoing advisory, at the top of the ranges above or beyond them. Log file analysis and staged rollouts add real hours, and the stakes of a wrong rule are high.

A quick way to estimate it yourself

Count your page templates, not your products. Then count your filters and roughly how many combinations they can produce. A store with five templates and no filters is a small job however many products it carries. A store with twelve templates and eight filters is a large one even with a modest catalogue.

What actually drives the price

The number of templates and the number of URLs they generate. A store with five templates and ten thousand products is often simpler than one with fifteen templates and three thousand, because every template is a separate set of decisions.

Faceted navigation. Filters are where most large-store problems live. A store whose filters have created hundreds of thousands of indexable combinations needs a facet-by-facet policy and careful implementation.

The platform. Shopify imposes a structure that limits both the problems and the fixes. Custom builds and headless setups give more control and more ways to go wrong, and JavaScript rendering adds diagnosis time.

Who implements. If your developers implement from specifications, you pay for diagnosis and specification. If you need someone to do the work as well, it costs more.

Catalogue churn. Stores where products come and go weekly need indexation rules for out-of-stock and discontinued items, and someone keeping an eye on them.

Why I start with an audit

On a large store, the most expensive mistake is deploying the wrong change across thousands of URLs. A misjudged canonical rule or a blanket noindex on filters can take months to undo. So every ecommerce engagement I take starts with my fixed $500 audit, and the ongoing work is priced after I have seen the catalogue, the templates and the crawl data.

That protects you as much as me. You get a diagnosis and a specification you own, whether or not you hire me to implement it. And the quote for the engagement is based on the actual site rather than a guess from a sales call.

Where the money should go

On most stores I see, the order of return is roughly this: fix indexation and facets so Google is spending its attention on the right pages; strengthen category pages, which should carry the head terms; fix internal linking so authority reaches those categories; then content and links.

The common budget mistake is the reverse: paying for blog posts and link packages while the category pages carry no content and the index is full of filter combinations. Visible work, invisible results.

What to be wary of

Pricing per product. “We’ll optimise 500 product pages for $X” sounds concrete and usually means templated rewrites of descriptions, which is rarely where the gains are.

Pricing per keyword. It rewards picking terms that are easy to rank and rarely searched.

Guaranteed revenue uplifts. Google’s own advice on hiring help is that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking, and nobody can guarantee what your conversion rate does with the traffic either.

And an engagement that never mentions your filters, your variants or your out-of-stock policy. On a store of any size, those are the job.

How to judge whether it is worth it

Look at the revenue your organic search channel currently produces and what a realistic improvement would be worth. If organic is already a large share of revenue, protecting and growing it justifies serious investment. If it is a tiny share because the store is new, start smaller: get the architecture right early, while it is cheap to change.

Tell me the platform, roughly how many products, and what is not ranking. My ecommerce SEO work starts with the $500 audit and I’ll tell you whether the problem is architecture or something else.