Traffic is climbing. Rankings are improving. And revenue hasn't moved.

That's the classic e-commerce SEO pattern. And it shows up in one place first. Your organic landing pages. Pull last month's report, sort by sessions, and count how many of the top twenty are product or category pages.

If the answer is almost none, you're paying for a blog. Visitors reading articles about your products who have zero intention of buying. The agency isn't doing bad work. They're doing work aimed at the wrong pages.

It's not about getting more visitors to your store. It's about getting the right visitors to the right pages.

E-commerce SEO is nothing like SEO for a service business. A service company might have 20 pages. An online store can have thousands. Every product. Every category. Every filter combination. Every seasonal item that comes and goes. That level of complexity requires a completely different approach.

Here's what to look for when you're hiring for e-commerce.

They Need Case Studies That Show Revenue

This is where every evaluation starts. And it's where most agencies fail immediately.

Ask for case studies from online stores. Not service businesses. Not local companies. Online stores with real products, real catalogs, and real revenue numbers.

And those case studies should show organic revenue growth. Not just traffic increases. Not just keyword rankings. I've seen agencies show impressive traffic graphs for e-commerce clients that turned out to be entirely blog traffic. People browsing informational articles who had zero intention of buying.

That's not e-commerce SEO. That's content marketing dressed up as SEO.

Ask them to show you revenue by page type. How much came from product pages? How much from category pages? How much from blog posts? That breakdown tells you everything about whether they understand where e-commerce revenue actually comes from.

They Need to Know Your Platform

This is specific to e-commerce and it matters more than you'd think.

Shopify works differently from WooCommerce. WooCommerce works differently from Magento. Each platform has its own quirks, its own limitations, and its own way of handling product URLs, category structures, and page templates.

If your agency doesn't have hands-on experience with your specific platform, their recommendations might sound great but be impossible to implement. Or worse, they'll make changes that break something.

Ask which platforms they've worked on in the last twelve months. Ask them to describe a specific technical problem they solved on your platform. If they call themselves "platform-agnostic" but can't name a single technical change they've made on Shopify or WooCommerce, that's not versatility. That's a gap.

Product and Category Pages Come First

Here's where the strategy conversation gets real. And where you'll instantly see whether the agency understands e-commerce.

Most of your organic revenue will come from two types of pages. Category pages and product pages. Not blog posts. Not informational articles. The pages where people are actually ready to buy.

(If I'm being honest, this is the single biggest mistake I see in e-commerce SEO. Agencies default to "let's build a blog" because that's what they know. But for an online store, the category pages are where the leverage is.)

It's not about publishing more content. It's about making sure the pages that drive revenue are the pages Google ranks.

Ask the agency what percentage of their strategy focuses on product and category pages versus blog content. If their answer is heavily weighted toward blogging, that's a generic SEO answer to an e-commerce problem.

A good agency will start by auditing your top category pages. They'll look at your product page structure. They'll make sure your pages are set up so Google understands what you sell, what it costs, whether it's in stock, and what customers think of it.

The blog matters. But it's not where you start.

Ask What Happens When Products Go Out of Stock

This is a question most store owners never think to ask. But it separates the e-commerce specialists from the generalists every single time.

Your store has products that come and go. Seasonal items. Discontinued products. Things that sell out and may or may not come back. Every time a product page disappears, the search value that page built up disappears with it.

A good e-commerce SEO agency has a plan for this. They know how to redirect old product pages to relevant alternatives so you don't lose the value those pages have built. They know how to handle seasonal products. They know how to keep an out-of-stock page useful by showing similar products instead of just a dead end.

Ask them: "What is your process when a product goes permanently out of stock?" If they say "we delete the page," that tells you they don't understand e-commerce SEO.

Reports Must Show Actual Sales

I've seen e-commerce agencies charge premium fees and send monthly reports that don't include a single revenue number. Just keyword charts and traffic graphs. For an online store, that's unacceptable.

Your agency should be reporting on organic revenue. You should see exactly how much money came from people who found your store through Google. And you should see it broken down by category, by product, and by page type.

(Here's the thing about e-commerce that makes this inexcusable. Unlike a service business where tracking leads to revenue is complicated, an online store can track everything. Every click. Every add to cart. Every purchase. If your agency isn't reporting on sales, they're choosing not to.)

Ask to see a sample report from an existing e-commerce client. Look for revenue data. Look for sales by page type. If it's all traffic charts and keyword tables, they're not measuring what matters.

Cross-Check Revenue Against Your Own Sales Data

Here's something you can do in two minutes that will tell you whether your agency's numbers are real.

Open your Shopify dashboard. Or WooCommerce. Or whatever platform you use. Look at your actual sales numbers for the month. Now compare that to the organic revenue your agency claims in their report.

If your platform shows $50,000 in total sales and your agency claims $70,000 came from organic search alone, something doesn't add up. The numbers should make sense relative to each other.

You have your own sales data. Use it. You don't need SEO expertise to spot a number that doesn't match reality.

Check How Many of Your Products Google Can Actually Find

This is the simplest technical check you'll ever do. And it takes sixty seconds.

Go to Google. Type "site:yoursite.com" in the search bar. Google will show you approximately how many of your pages it knows about.

Now compare that to how many products you actually have. If you have 500 products but Google only shows 200 pages from your site, that means hundreds of your products might not be showing up in search results at all.

(If I'm being honest, I've seen e-commerce sites where half the product catalog was invisible to Google. The agency had been working on blog posts and link building while hundreds of product pages weren't even indexed. A sixty-second check would have caught it on day one.)

Ask your agency how many of your product pages are currently indexed in Google. If they don't know the answer immediately, that's a concern.

Who Does the Work. And Can They Build Things

The person who pitches you during the sales process is rarely the person who does the work on your account. Ask specifically who your strategist will be. Ask about their e-commerce experience. Ask how many other accounts they manage.

And here's something I always check. Ask whether the agency has developers on staff. In e-commerce SEO, a lot of the work requires changes to your website's code and structure. If the agency can only recommend changes but can't implement them, you'll need your own developer available. Know that upfront so you can plan for it.

Sound familiar?

Red Flags

Some things should end the conversation immediately when hiring for e-commerce.

No e-commerce case studies. If all their examples are service businesses or local companies, they haven't done this before. You don't want to be their practice run.

Blog-first strategy. If their plan starts with "we'll write four blog posts a month" without mentioning your product or category pages, they're applying a generic playbook.

And here's one that catches a lot of store owners off guard.

They can't explain what happens to out-of-stock pages. This is the litmus test. If they don't have an answer, they haven't worked with enough online stores to understand the problem.

If I'm being honest, also be cautious of agencies that reach out to you unsolicited, especially right after you launch a new store. Legitimate agencies rarely cold-pitch. And never grant platform access before a contract is signed.

The First 90 Days for an Online Store

Before you sign, ask the agency what the first three months look like for an online store specifically. They should be auditing your site architecture, fixing technical issues with your product catalog, optimizing your top category pages, setting up tracking that shows sales from organic search, and building a content plan that supports your commercial pages.

If their 90-day plan sounds the same as what they'd do for a dentist or a law firm, they're not an e-commerce agency. They're a general agency that's willing to work with an online store. There's a big difference.

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