What an ecommerce SEO consultant actually does
An ecommerce SEO consultant studies your online store, works out why shoppers are not finding it in Google, and tells you what to change. Some also make the changes. That split between advising and doing is the first thing to understand, because the word "consultant" covers both.
The job has four parts. First is the technical read: can search engines crawl your category and product pages, are duplicate versions of the same product competing, is the site fast enough on a phone. Second is the page-by-page read: do your category pages and product pages say what they sell, in the words a shopper would type. Third is the content gap: which buyer questions have no page on your site at all. Fourth is the measurement plan: which numbers in Google Search Console tell you the work is paying off.
An ecommerce consultant differs from a general SEO consultant in one way that matters. Your site is built from a catalog, which means a single mistake repeats across hundreds or thousands of pages. A bad title template, a filter that spawns endless URLs, a product page that vanishes when stock runs out. A consultant who has seen those patterns on other stores finds them in an hour. One who has only worked on service websites takes weeks, or misses them.
If you are on a specific platform, the platform pages go deeper than this one does. Shopify owners should read how to find a Shopify SEO expert, Wix owners the Wix version, and WooCommerce owners the WooCommerce services guide. This page stays platform-neutral.
The four kinds of help you can buy
Search for help and you will meet four different kinds of provider using nearly the same words. They are not interchangeable, and the most common mistake is comparing their prices as if they were selling the same thing.
A consultant
One person who audits, advises and reviews. You get their judgment, usually by the hour or on a monthly retainer. They tell you what to fix. You, a developer or an employee carries it out. This is the right choice when you have people who can do the work but lack direction.
A freelancer
One person who also does the work, often a defined project: rewrite these 40 category pages, fix the redirects after a migration. It costs less than a team and moves quickly. The limit is that one person is one person. Our page on where a freelancer works for a store and where it breaks covers the edges.
An agency
A group of specialists, usually with one main contact and a monthly report. You get coverage when one person is away and more hands on a big catalog. The usual limit is how many pages get written per dollar, because agencies bill for hours and meetings. What an agency looks like month to month goes through it.
A done-for-you service
A service that writes and publishes pages on your site at a fixed scope, so you are not paying for meetings about the work. It is the newest of the four and varies the most between providers, so judge it by what it actually ships.
Advice versus implementation, the question that decides it
Before you compare names, answer one question honestly: who will do the work once the advice arrives? Most stores that buy consulting and see nothing happen failed on this step, not on the quality of the advice.
Picture a typical audit. It arrives as a document of 60 findings sorted by priority. The owner reads it, feels informed, and then faces a list that needs a developer, a copywriter and several hours a week. Three months later 6 of the 60 items are done. The consultant did the job they were hired for. The store still did not move.
If you have a developer on call and someone who can write product and category copy, advice is enough, and a consultant is the cheapest way to point that capacity in the right direction. If you do not, you are paying for a to-do list. In that case buy the work itself, from a freelancer for a defined project or from a team or service for the ongoing volume.
There is a middle path. Ask a consultant for a short, prioritized plan of the five changes most likely to matter, and nothing more. A tight plan of five items gets done. A plan of sixty does not.
How to choose between them
You do not need to read forty reviews. Three questions settle most of it.
How big is your content gap? Count the category pages that have a single line of filler, the products with a supplier description copied from the maker, and the buyer questions with no article. A store with 50 products and no articles has a large gap, and advice does not close a gap. Pages do.
How much of your own time can you give? A consultant needs a few hours a week of your attention or your team's. An agency needs a monthly call and some approvals. A done-for-you service needs close to nothing after the first conversation. Match the provider to the time you really have, not the time you hope to have.
How will you know it worked? Ask each candidate what they will show you after 90 days, and in which tool. A good answer names Google Search Console and the category and product pages that changed. A poor one promises a ranking by a date.
Once you have a shortlist, run each name through 12 questions to ask before you sign, and read the red flags in a proposal before you open one. An hour spent on those two pages has saved a lot of owners a lot of regret.
What good work looks like on an online store
A vague picture of SEO makes every proposal sound plausible, so it helps to know the shape of good work before you talk to anyone.
Category pages carry real copy that helps a shopper decide, not one line of filler above a grid. Product pages have titles and descriptions written for people, with the details a buyer checks before paying: size, material, compatibility, shipping. Articles target questions your customers ask before they are ready to buy, and link back to the categories and products those questions lead to. Filters and sort options do not create thousands of near-duplicate URLs. Pages that go out of stock keep working. Redirects exist for anything removed.
None of that is exotic. The skill is in doing it across a whole catalog without breaking things, and in choosing the order. Our complete ecommerce SEO guide explains the full do-it-yourself version, and the 2026 checklist gives you a list to hold any provider against.
A useful test of any consultant is whether they can say, for your store, which of those pieces is weakest and why. Someone who has looked at your site will name specific pages. Someone who has not will give you advice that could apply to any store.
When you do not need a consultant yet
Not every store should hire. An honest consultant will tell you so, and a salesperson will not.
If the store is brand new, with a handful of products and no traffic, there is little to improve yet. Launch properly, get your products described well, and set up Google Search Console so you start collecting data. If almost all your sales come from ads or marketplaces and you have no plan to sell through search, treat SEO as a long bet and size the spend to match. If visitors arrive and leave without buying, more traffic will not fix a conversion problem.
If budget is tight, you can do a surprising amount alone with a checklist and an hour a week. Then hire for the gap that remains. The page on what ecommerce SEO returns helps you decide how much the work is worth to your store before you spend on it.
The principle is to hire for a real gap. An outside provider pays for itself when the gap is bigger than your time, and wastes money when it is not.
What the first 90 days should look like
Whoever you hire, the first three months have a recognizable order. If yours does not, ask why.
Weeks one and two. Access and a baseline. The provider records where you stand in Google Search Console before changing anything, so that later results mean something. They find the problems that block everything else, such as duplicate pages or a template that hides text.
Month one. Fixes to what blocks you, plus the first batch of rewritten or new pages on your most valuable categories and products. By the end of the month there should be finished pages you can open, not only a plan.
Month two. A second round of pages, plus the first articles answering what shoppers ask before they buy. Internal links go in so new pages connect to the ones that already have authority.
Month three. A real report showing what was published, what Google is showing, what earns clicks, and what comes next. If Search Console shows little yet, a good provider says so and explains why. For what to expect from that report, see what an ecommerce SEO report should show.
Why AI answers belong in the brief
The brief used to be about Google rankings. That part has not gone away, but it is now only half the job. A growing share of shoppers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Gemini what to buy, and those assistants name only a few stores.
For a store, most of what wins in Google helps here too. Clear pages that say what you sell and answer real questions give an assistant something to quote. Honest reviews and clean product data add to it. It is the same foundation with a few extras, not a separate trick.
Raise it with every consultant you talk to. A good one explains, in plain terms, what on your product and category pages an assistant could quote. Walk away from a blank look, and from anyone who promises your store will be named. To see how assistants choose, read how AI assistants pick businesses.
How RunOctopus handles this
If you read the options above and decided you want the work done rather than explained, here is how we do it.
RunOctopus is a done-for-you service. Its AI, Ollie, researches your business, then writes and publishes pages directly on your own website. A team plans, writes, reviews and publishes alongside Ollie. It works with Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce and Wix. You install nothing, approve nothing, upload nothing and schedule nothing, and pages go live on their own.
The first week brings 8 long-form articles, 6 pages and a custom interactive tool built for your niche. After that it is 175+ pieces of content a month, written, published and linked. You also get reports on where ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini name your business. The promise is more visibility on Google and in AI answers within 90 days, measured against the 90 days before you joined, or every dollar back.
For scale, an agency doing this work charges about $3,209 a month (2026 average, 439 providers) and publishes 4 to 12 pieces. You can see what Ollie would do for your store before you decide anything. Paste your address into the free site read. Ollie reads the site and shows the plan. No account, no call.
Every page in this guide
This guide is the front door to a set of pages, each answering one question a store owner asks while looking for help. They are grouped by the job you are trying to do. Start with the group that matches where you are.
A. Getting help
- Ecommerce SEO expert: the skills that matter for a catalog
- Ecommerce SEO agency: working with one month to month
- Best ecommerce SEO company: what best should mean
- Ecommerce SEO services: the menu and what each store needs
- Ecommerce SEO specialist: roles and when you need one
- Ecommerce SEO freelancer: where it works and where it breaks
- Ecommerce SEO pricing: what drives the price
- Ecommerce SEO packages: reading one line by line
- Agency versus in-house for ecommerce SEO
- 12 questions to ask an ecommerce SEO agency
- Ecommerce SEO red flags in a proposal
- What an ecommerce SEO report should show
B. Tools and the work
- Ecommerce SEO audit: what it inspects
- Ecommerce SEO tools: the categories and the free ones
- The best ecommerce platform for SEO
- Ecommerce SEO software versus a service
- Technical SEO for ecommerce
- How to read an ecommerce SEO case study
- Enterprise ecommerce SEO
- B2B ecommerce SEO
- Out of stock products and SEO
If you want the comparison with the traditional route first, read RunOctopus versus an SEO agency, and for the choice between paying someone and doing it yourself, do it yourself, hire an agency or use AI content.