Decide what you are hiring for
The best hire starts with a decision you make alone: what do you want to be different in 90 days? Without that, every candidate will sell you their favorite service and you will have no way to say no.
Pick one goal. More clicks to your collection pages. A new product line that shows up in search. Recovery after a redesign that dropped traffic. Being named when a shopper asks an AI assistant what to buy. One goal is enough, and it changes who you should talk to. A store recovering from a migration needs a different person than a store with no content.
Then decide how involved you want to be. If you will carry out changes yourself, you can hire for advice. If you want the work done, you need someone who publishes. This is the single most important filter, and our guide to finding a Shopify SEO expert explains the three kinds of help so you know which pool to search in.
Finally, check the basics first. If your store has no organic traffic at all, there may be a simple blocker, such as pages hidden from Google. Ten minutes in Search Console can save you from paying someone to find it. Start with why a store gets no organic traffic.
The five steps in order
Every good hire follows the same order. The steps are short, and most store owners skip at least two of them.
Step one is the brief. One page that you can send to anyone. It covers your goal, your store address, the number of products and collections, what you have already tried, who has access to your Shopify admin and Search Console, and the monthly budget you can honestly commit.
Step two is a shortlist of three. More than three and you will compare noise. Fewer and you will not see a pattern. Send all three the same brief and the same questions, so differences in their answers mean something.
Step three is a paid test. A small, bounded job on your real store, such as rewriting one collection page or auditing five product pages. It costs little, and it shows you how the person communicates, how fast they work, and whether their output reads like something you would put on your site.
Step four is the scope. Deliverables, access, reporting and exit terms in writing, which we cover on the page about what goes in a Shopify SEO contract.
Step five is the first 30 days, which you plan before the person starts, not after.
Writing the brief
A brief does not need to be clever. It needs to be specific. Here is what to put in it.
Your store and your products. The address, what you sell, who buys it, and your two or three best sellers. This lets a candidate look at the site before replying, which separates people who read from people who copy and paste.
Your goal and how you will judge it. Name the number or outcome you care about. Clicks from Google to collection pages is a good one because you can check it yourself in Search Console. Revenue from organic search is better but slower to measure, and noisy.
What has been done. Previous agencies, apps installed, redesigns, domain changes. Candidates need this to avoid repeating work, and it often reveals the real problem. A drop after a redesign points to a different fix than a store that was never optimized.
Access and limits. Who can give them Shopify staff access, Search Console access and analytics access. Whether any pages, such as legal text or brand copy, are off limits. Whether a developer needs to approve theme changes.
Budget as a range. Candidates who know the range can propose something that fits, and you can see who is padding. The page on what Shopify SEO costs will help you set a sensible one.
Keep it to one page. If you cannot, you do not yet know what you want.
Where to find candidates
There are four places worth looking, and each draws a different kind of person.
Shopify's own directory. Shopify lists vetted partners in its Experts marketplace. It is a reasonable starting point, but a listing is a profile and not a guarantee. We cover how to read one on the page about hiring SEO help through the Shopify Experts marketplace.
Freelance marketplaces. Wide choice and low entry price. Quality varies enormously, so the paid test matters more here than anywhere else.
Referrals from other store owners. Often the best source, because the person has already worked with a store like yours. Ask in the communities you belong to, and ask what the person actually delivered, not whether they were nice.
Direct outreach to specialists. Some of the best experts take clients only by introduction. A short, specific message that shows you read their work gets answered.
Whichever source you use, look for evidence that the person has done this on Shopify specifically. The platform has quirks, such as fixed URL prefixes for collections and products and a theme layer written in Liquid, and someone who has only worked on other platforms will spend your budget learning them. For a sense of what the quirks are, read how Shopify URL structure affects SEO.
The shortlist call
With three names, schedule a short call with each. Thirty minutes is enough. Your job on the call is to listen for specifics.
Before the call, ask them to look at your store. After it, you should be able to say what they noticed that you had not. A candidate who points at your thin collection pages, your duplicate titles or your slow theme has done the work. A candidate who talks about their process in general has not.
Ask the same questions of all three. We keep a longer list on the page of 15 questions to ask a Shopify SEO expert, with what a good answer and a bad answer sound like. Pick the five that matter most to you and stick to them.
Notice what they ask you. Experts who are good at this ask about your margins, your best categories, your customers and your past attempts. They want to know where the money is. Ones who do not ask are planning to sell you a package.
Watch for the moment they talk about results. Honest candidates talk about work and measurement. If anyone guarantees a ranking, a position or a traffic number, take it as a warning and read our red flags page before you continue the conversation.
Run a small paid test
A paid test is the best money you will spend in the whole process. It turns an opinion into evidence.
Choose a task that is small, real and checkable. Good examples include rewriting the copy on one collection page so it answers a buyer's main question in the first paragraph, writing titles and descriptions for your ten best products, or producing a short audit of five pages with a ranked list of fixes. Pay a fair rate for it. Free tests attract people who copy templates.
Judge four things when it comes back. Is it specific to your store, or could it have been written for anyone? Is it accurate, with no invented product details? Does it read like something your brand would say? And how was the communication, did they ask good questions, deliver on time and explain their choices?
Do not judge it by rankings. A single page takes weeks to move, if it moves at all, so the test tells you about working style and quality, not about results. That is fine. Quality and working style are what you are hiring.
If you are testing more than one candidate, give them the same task. Then you can read the outputs side by side, which is far more revealing than reading them one at a time.
If the test goes well, the next step is putting the terms in writing, covered in the contract guide.
Give access safely
An expert needs access, and giving it carelessly is how stores get hurt. Do it in a way that is easy to undo.
In Shopify, add the person as a staff member with only the permissions they need rather than sharing your login. Permissions let you allow work on products, collections and blog posts without exposing orders, customer data or payment settings. If they need to edit theme code, which many SEO tasks do not, ask them to work on a duplicate of the live theme and tell you before anything is published.
In Google Search Console, add them as a user. Do not hand over ownership. In analytics, view access is usually enough at the start.
Keep a short list of who has access to what and remove people when the work ends. This takes a minute and it is the first thing most store owners forget.
Ask before the work begins how they will make changes. Edits to titles, descriptions and page copy are low risk and easy to reverse. Edits to theme files, redirects and the robots.txt file can break things if done wrong, so they deserve a clear plan and a backup. A careful expert will bring this up unprompted. If they do not, raise it yourself, and treat a vague answer as a reason to slow down.
Where apps are involved, ask which ones they plan to install and why. Each one can change how fast your pages load.
Plan the first 30 days
Plan the first month before the person starts. A hire without a plan wastes the energy of the first week, which is when both sides are most motivated.
Days 1 to 5. Access is granted. The expert records a baseline in Google Search Console, noting current clicks, impressions and your top pages. Ask them to send you that snapshot. Everything later is measured against it.
Days 5 to 15. Findings. They should tell you what is blocking you and what is the biggest opportunity, in plain words, tied to specific pages. This is where a proper audit earns its keep, and where our Shopify SEO checklist gives you something to hold them against.
Days 15 to 30. The first work ships. Fixes to the biggest blocker, plus the first batch of improved or new pages on your most valuable collections or products. You should be able to open your store and see the change.
At day 30 hold a short review. Ask three things. What did you ship? What did you learn that changes the plan? What will you ship next month? If the answers are specific, the engagement is healthy. If they are about process, meetings or tools, press for pages.
Also ask them to explain, in one paragraph, what you should expect to see in Search Console in months two and three. Their honesty here tells you a lot. For a realistic reference, read how long Shopify SEO takes.
When it is not working
Some hires do not work out. Knowing the signs early saves months of money.
The first sign is shipping. After 30 to 45 days, you should be able to point at specific pages that changed. If the answer is still a plan, a deck or a promise, raise it directly.
The second is communication. If questions take days to answer, or the answers are vague, the monthly report will be vague too.
The third is explanation. A good expert can tell you why they made a change in a sentence you understand. If they cannot, or hide behind jargon, they may not know.
The fourth is the metric drift. If the report moves from clicks and impressions to numbers that are harder to check, ask why. Sometimes there is a good reason. Often there is not.
Have the conversation early and kindly. Say what you expected, what you have seen, and what you need to see in the next 30 days. Good people respond well to that. If the pattern continues, use the exit terms you wrote into the contract. This is why those terms matter, and why you should never sign anything that locks you in for a year before you have seen a single page ship.
If you want a reference point for what a healthy report looks like, read what a monthly Shopify SEO report should show.
How RunOctopus handles hiring
Hiring takes a brief, a shortlist, a test and a month of watching. Some store owners would rather skip straight to pages being published, and that is what we do.
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.