Hiring an SEO for an online store is one of those decisions where the cost of getting it wrong is not just the money. It is the six months you spent waiting for results that never arrived, and the ground your competitors covered while you waited.
The difficulty is that SEO is hard to evaluate from the outside. Everyone shows graphs that go up. Everyone claims results. And most store owners do not have the technical background to tell a real specialist from someone with a good deck.
So here is a practical way to think about it. These are the questions that separate the people who will grow your store from the people who will keep you busy.
Do they talk about traffic, or revenue?
This is the first and most revealing question, and it filters more candidates than any other.
Traffic is easy to grow. Rank for enough loosely related terms and sessions go up, reports look impressive, and nothing changes in the bank account. A store does not need more visitors. It needs more of the right visitors, landing on pages that sell.
Listen to how a candidate describes past work. Clicks and impressions are legitimate evidence that SEO is working, and any honest specialist will show you movement in those numbers, because they are the earliest signals you get. The question is whether the story stops there. If traffic growth is presented as the outcome rather than the mechanism, be careful. If they can connect it to which pages drive revenue, which categories convert, and what happened to orders, you are talking to someone who understands that SEO is a commercial function and not a reporting exercise.
Tip: Ask directly: “How would you measure whether this worked?” If the answer is only about rankings and traffic, keep looking.
Do they understand the shopper, not just the search engine?
Search engines send visitors. The page has to do the rest.
An SEO who only thinks about crawlers will stuff a category page with text, bury the products, and call it optimised. Rankings might improve briefly. Sales will not, because the page now works for a bot and against a shopper.
The specialists worth hiring think about both at once. They understand that a category page has to help someone browse, compare, and decide, and that the content supporting the ranking has to sit where it helps rather than where it obstructs. They notice when a page is slow on mobile, when the layout pushes products below the fold, or when the navigation makes a product hard to find.
That instinct is not a bonus skill. On an ecommerce site it is central, because every ranking you win lands on a page that has to convert.
Do they know anything about conversion?
Related, but worth separating out.
An SEO who understands conversion rate optimisation asks different questions. Not just “how do we rank this page” but “what happens to the people who arrive on it.” They will notice if a product page lacks reviews, if the shipping information is buried, or if the path from category to cart has friction in it.
You are not hiring a CRO consultant. But an ecommerce SEO who has no view on conversion is optimising half the equation, and the half that does not pay you.
How do they talk about past work?
Many specialists cannot show you client accounts. Confidentiality agreements are normal in this industry, and someone declining to share a client’s data is being professional rather than evasive.
So the useful test is not whether they can produce screenshots. It is how they describe the work.
Someone who has genuinely done it will talk in specifics even without naming anyone. What the problem was. What they changed. Why that particular fix mattered for that particular store. What they measured, and what got in the way. That texture is difficult to fake.
Compare that to a pitch built on round headline numbers with no context. “We grow revenue 4x on average” tells you nothing about whether they can help your store. A better question is what they would look at first on a site like yours, and whether the answer is specific to your situation or a rehearsed list.
Do they understand ecommerce specifically?
A store is not a bigger version of a normal website. It has problems that only appear at scale.
| Ecommerce-specific issue | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Product variants creating duplicate URLs | Splits ranking signals across near-identical pages |
| Faceted navigation and filter URLs | Can flood the index with low-value pages |
| Crawl budget across large catalogues | Important pages get crawled less often |
| Category page optimisation | Where the highest-intent category searches land |
| Product feed and Merchant Center health | Affects visibility beyond organic results |
| Out-of-stock and discontinued products | Mishandled, these leak authority and frustrate shoppers |
If a candidate cannot speak fluently about at least most of these, they may be a competent SEO but not an ecommerce one. Ask them what they would check first on a store with a few hundred products. The answer tells you a lot.
The red flags
Some signals should end the conversation.
Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google’s algorithm, competitor behaviour, or what you change on your own site. A guarantee is either naivety or dishonesty, and neither is what you want.
Link packages. If part of the pitch is a monthly quota of backlinks from a supplier list, that is a risk being sold to you as a service. Bought links violate search engine guidelines and the consequences land on your site, not the seller’s.
Jargon with no translation. Technical language is fine. Technical language that never resolves into plain English is often a hiding place. A good specialist can explain what they are doing and why it matters to your business without needing you to learn their vocabulary.
No questions about your business. Someone who pitches a package before asking about your niche, your core categories, your best sellers, your competitors, and the markets you sell into is selling a template. Those answers shape the entire strategy. A specialist who does not ask for them is not building one.
Tip: A specialist who tells you honestly that something will not work, or that you do not need a particular service yet, is usually worth more than one who agrees with everything.
If you sell in more than one country
Multi-market stores fail in ways single-market stores do not. Market versions compete with each other in search, hreflang gets misconfigured, and the same product ends up cannibalising itself across regions.
This is a genuine specialism. If you sell internationally, ask specifically about hreflang, market structure, and how they prevent your own sites from competing. General ecommerce SEO experience does not automatically cover it.
What good looks like in practice
Put simply, the specialist worth hiring will ask about your business before pitching, talk about revenue rather than sessions, describe past work with real specifics, explain things clearly, tell you what they cannot promise, and understand that a page has to sell as well as rank.
That is a small group. But taking the time to find them is cheaper than the six months you lose to someone who looks the part.
If you are weighing up options for your own store, my ecommerce SEO services page sets out how I work and what an engagement includes. If you would rather start with a clear picture of where your store actually stands, request an SEO audit.
For the wider view of how ecommerce SEO fits together, start with my ecommerce SEO guide.
Frequently asked questions
What should an ecommerce SEO specialist actually do?
The work spans technical health, category and product page optimisation, keyword and intent research, internal linking, structured data, and reporting that connects organic performance to revenue. On larger stores it also covers crawl budget, duplication control, and product feed health.
Is an agency or a freelancer better for ecommerce SEO?
Both work well. Agencies bring capacity, breadth of skills, and cover when someone is away. Independent specialists usually bring direct access and continuity. Delegation within an agency is normal and not a problem in itself. What matters is knowing who will be on your account and that they understand ecommerce specifically.
How much should ecommerce SEO cost?
It varies widely by scope, catalogue size, and market. What matters more than the number is what is included and how it is priced. Be cautious of anyone selling by volume of tasks or backlinks rather than by scope and outcomes.
How long before ecommerce SEO shows results?
Technical fixes can show movement within weeks. Content and authority build over three to six months, with larger gains often between six and twelve. Anyone promising fast, guaranteed results is not being straight with you.
What are the biggest warning signs when hiring an SEO?
Guaranteed rankings, link packages sold by the month, jargon that never resolves into plain English, and a pitch that arrives before any questions about your business.
Aashish Maharjan is an SEO specialist focused on ecommerce and international organic growth across global markets. Learn more about my work or request an SEO audit.