What an ecommerce SEO package actually is
An ecommerce SEO package is a list of tasks with a monthly price attached. That is all it is. The list might be three lines long or thirty, the price might be low or high, and the names might be bronze, silver and gold. Underneath, you are buying a bundle of activities, and the question that matters is what each activity leaves behind on your store.
Packages exist because they are easy to sell. A tiered menu lets a seller quote you in one email without looking at your site. It also lets you compare three offers side by side, which feels like diligence. The trap is that two packages with identical line items can produce very different results, because "on-page optimization, 20 pages" can mean twenty carefully rewritten collection pages or twenty title tags changed by a script.
So this page does one job. It takes the lines you will see in nearly every package and tells you what each one should produce, what is usually left out, and which questions to ask. If you are not yet sure whether a package is even the right shape of help, how a consultant's work differs from a bundled package is the better place to start, and the pricing page in this series covers what drives the cost of store SEO.
One caution before the lines. A package describes inputs. You care about outputs, meaning pages that exist on your store, rank for something, and bring buyers. Keep asking of every line: after this is done, what can I click on, in my own store, that I could not click on before?
Lines that produce pages and lines that produce paperwork
Every package line falls into one of two groups. Some lines change your live store. Others hand you a file. Both have a place, but a package made mostly of the second kind is a package that charges you monthly to tell you what to do.
A keyword research line produces a spreadsheet. A site audit line produces a report. A competitor analysis produces a slide deck. These are inputs to work, and each is fine once. The problem is when they repeat every month under a new name, because by the third month you have three spreadsheets and the same thin collection pages.
A content line produces published pages. A technical fixes line produces changes to redirects, canonical tags and page speed. An internal linking line produces links on pages you can see. These are outputs. You can open your store afterward and find them.
The diagram above sorts typical lines into those two groups. Use it on a real proposal. Take a pen, mark each line in the package either "document" or "live change", and count. If the live-change lines are a small minority, ask the seller who does that work and when. In some packages, the production work is a line that says "content, as agreed", with no number and no scope. That is where the money goes missing.
Research and audits are inputs and belong at the start. After month one, most of a package should leave visible changes on your store.
The common lines, one at a time
Here are the lines you will meet most often, with what each should produce and what tends to be missing.
Keyword research
Should produce: a list of the searches your buyers use, grouped by page, with a decision about which page on your store should answer each one. Often missing: the mapping to pages. A list of 500 keywords with no assigned page is a wish list.
On-page optimization
Should produce: better titles, descriptions, headings and body text on named product and collection pages. Often missing: any change to the body text. Rewriting a title tag takes minutes. Rewriting the first paragraph of a collection page so it answers the buyer's question takes real effort, and cheap packages skip it.
Technical SEO
Should produce: fixes, not a list of issues. Redirects for removed products, duplicate pages pointed at one version, faster templates. Often missing: access. If the seller cannot edit your theme or your platform settings, "technical SEO" becomes a list of tickets you are expected to action yourself.
Content creation
Should produce: published articles and category text on your own domain. Often missing: a count, a length, and a publishing step. "Two blog posts a month" says nothing about whether they answer questions buyers ask or whether anyone links them to a product.
Link building
Should produce: links from real sites that a human editor chose to publish. Often missing: the list of where the links landed. Ask for URLs, every month.
Reporting
Should produce: a view of clicks and revenue by page, with what changed. Our page on what an ecommerce SEO report should show sets the standard. Often missing: any link between the work done and the result.
What is usually missing from a package
Some work almost never appears as a line but decides whether a store grows. If it is not on the list, ask who does it.
Category and collection page text. On most stores, the collection pages hold the searches with the most buying intent, like "waterproof hiking boots" or "linen duvet covers". Many packages optimize product pages and leave collections as a grid of photos with no words. Our guide to collection page SEO shows why that is backwards.
Product page content that is not copied from the manufacturer. If your product descriptions match what a hundred other stores publish, Google has no reason to pick yours. A package that says "product optimization" but changes only titles leaves this untouched.
Internal linking. Buying guides should link to collections, collections to products, and products back up. This takes planning across the whole site and rarely gets its own line.
Ongoing publishing volume. Search rewards stores that keep adding useful pages on the exact questions buyers ask. A package that caps output at a handful of pieces a month makes slow progress by design.
Visibility in AI answers. Shoppers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude where to buy things. A traditional package rarely measures whether those assistants name your store, and rarely changes pages to help.
A cancellation path. Look for the term, the notice period, and whether you keep everything that was published. Content on your own domain is yours. Content on the seller's servers or in their tool may not be.
Affordable ecommerce SEO packages: what to cut and what to keep
If your budget is tight, a cheaper package is not automatically a worse deal. It depends on which lines were cut. Some cuts cost you nothing. Others remove the only part that works.
Safe to cut: repeating audits, monthly strategy calls, competitor decks, and any report that is a screenshot of a rank-tracking tool. You can get the audit and a basic report free from Google's own tools, and Search Console is where the real click numbers live.
Never cut: the lines that publish. If a low price comes from "two articles a month and basic on-page work", you are paying for a very slow start. A small package that publishes steadily beats a large one that produces documents.
Be wary of: a very low price with a long contract. When the monthly number is small and the commitment is large, the seller is counting on you not noticing that nothing changed.
A useful test for any budget: ask what the first 30 days will leave live on your store. If the honest answer is "an audit and a plan", the package is slow. If it is "these pages, rewritten and published, and these fixes made", it is moving.
When money is the main constraint, the question is sometimes not which package but which kind of help. The page on doing it yourself, hiring an agency, or using AI content compares those paths without picking a winner.
Five questions to ask about any package before you sign
You do not need a long interview to test a package. Five questions will expose most weak ones. For the full list, use our twelve questions to ask an ecommerce SEO agency. These five are the ones that apply to the package itself.
1. What exactly will be live on my store by the end of month one? Ask for page names or a count, not a description.
2. Who writes the content, and who publishes it? If the answer is "we send it to you for upload", you are doing the last step, and that step is where most plans stall.
3. Which lines repeat each month and which happen once? A one-time audit billed monthly is a common pattern.
4. What do you report, and does it include clicks to my product and collection pages? Rankings alone can rise while sales do not.
5. What happens if it does not work? Some sellers offer no remedy. Others offer a plain exit with no penalty. The answer tells you how confident they are.
Write the answers down. If a seller gets vague on any of the five, you have learned something useful about how the next twelve months will go.
A worked example: reading one package from top to bottom
Here is an invented package, written the way many are, followed by how to read it. It is an illustration, not a real offer.
"Growth package: full technical audit, keyword research for 30 terms, on-page optimization of 20 pages, 2 blog posts a month, 10 links a month, monthly report, quarterly strategy call."
Full technical audit. One time, a document. Fine at the start. Check that it is not billed again each month under a new name.
Keyword research for 30 terms. A document. Thirty terms is a small list for a store with many categories. Ask whether each term is assigned to a page, and which page.
On-page optimization of 20 pages. The first live-change line, and the most ambiguous. Which 20 pages? Is it titles only, or body text too? Is it 20 pages in total or 20 a month? Ask for the page list in writing.
2 blog posts a month. Live pages, but a low count. Ask who picks the topics, how long the posts are, and whether anyone links them to your collections and products. A post that links nowhere helps no one.
10 links a month. Ask for the URLs and the sites. See our page on red flags in ecommerce SEO proposals for why this line deserves suspicion when it comes with no list.
Monthly report and quarterly call. Documents and talk. Useful only if the report shows clicks by page and the call leads to decisions.
Notice the result. Out of seven lines, two or three change your store, and none says when. That is not unusual, and it is why reading a package this way is worth ten minutes before you sign.
The terms around the package matter as much as the lines
The list of lines is only half the offer. The terms around it decide how much risk you carry.
Term length. A month-to-month term lets you leave if nothing visible appears. A long term makes sense only if the price drops in return and an exit right exists for missed commitments.
Setup fees. Some packages charge an upfront fee for the audit and research. That can be fair if the documents are yours to keep and you could take them to another seller.
What counts as a deliverable. If a line says "two articles", does a draft you must edit and upload count, or only a published page? Ask them to define "done" for each line.
Who owns what you paid for. Pages on your domain are yours. Anything else, like research files or reports, should be handed over on request.
How RunOctopus handles this
A package describes tasks. What most store owners want is the pages that those tasks should create.
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.
There is nothing to install, nothing to approve, nothing to upload and nothing to schedule. You do not approve each page, because pages go live on their own. In the first week you get 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.
There is a 90-day promise: 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.
Paste your address into the free site read and Ollie reads the site and shows the plan. No account, no call.