Ecommerce search work is priced as a package because buyers ask for a monthly figure before anyone has looked at the catalogue, and agencies would rather answer than lose the call. The problem is that catalogue size, platform and the way the store generates URLs change the size of the job by an order of magnitude, and no package name carries that information. Two stores paying the same monthly fee can be receiving completely different work: one having its faceted navigation and indexing problems solved, the other receiving four blog posts and a dashboard. This page explains what sits inside an ecommerce package, which variables actually move the number, and how to compare two proposals that look identical on paper.
What an ecommerce package should contain
Strip the tiering away and a credible ecommerce engagement is built from five ingredients. Technical and indexing work comes first and dominates on large catalogues: which URLs should be crawlable, what happens to filtered and sorted variants, how out-of-stock and discontinued products are handled, and whether the store's own URL generation is creating thousands of near-duplicate pages. Google's documentation on consolidating duplicate URLs and its ecommerce guidance both exist because stores generate this problem by default rather than by mistake. Second is category page work, which is where most commercial search demand actually lands, and which most stores treat as a grid with no content at all. Third is product data, including structured data so that price and availability can appear in results. Fourth is content aimed at the questions buyers ask before choosing. Fifth is reporting. Ask what share of the fee goes to the first three, because those are the ones that compound across a whole catalogue rather than one page at a time.
What actually moves the price
Four variables explain most of the spread between ecommerce quotes. Catalogue size is the first and the most obvious, though the relationship is not linear: a well-structured store with many products can be easier to work on than a small store with a chaotic URL structure. Platform is the second, and it matters more than buyers expect, because platforms differ in how much control they give over URLs, templates, pagination and internal linking, and a limitation that cannot be configured away becomes engineering work. Competitive position is the third: selling a commodity product against national retailers and marketplaces is a different job from selling something specialist with few direct competitors. The fourth is the state of the current store, meaning whether the work begins with a clean base or with an accumulated set of migrations, redirects and abandoned URL patterns. A proposal that arrives without anyone having crawled the site has priced a guess at all four.
Comparing two quotes that look the same
When two proposals carry the same monthly figure, the difference is almost always in three places. First, implementation: does the agency ship the fixes, or produce recommendations for your developers to implement? Recommendations are much cheaper to produce and much slower to become value, and a store with no development capacity should not buy an advisory package by accident. Second, content volume and who writes it, especially category page copy and buying guides, which are real writing work and are frequently assumed to be your job. Third, what is excluded: marketplace listings, product feed management, paid shopping campaigns and international versions are separate disciplines that regularly get discussed in a sales call and then quietly absent from the scope. Ask for each proposal to state implementation, content volume and exclusions explicitly, then compare. This is also the point at which many store owners realise they are buying two things at once, the search work and the site work, which is why store owners frequently shop for website and search services together rather than sequentially.
Judging progress in the first two quarters
Revenue is the goal and a poor early indicator, because indexing and ranking changes on a catalogue take time to reach the checkout. Better early indicators are specific and countable. How many product and category URLs are indexed compared to how many should be, and is the gap closing? Are the duplicate and parameter URLs falling? Is structured data valid across the catalogue rather than on a sample? Are impressions rising for category-level queries, which are the commercial ones? Are the category pages that matter getting content and internal links? Ask for those to be reported monthly against a baseline captured before the work starts, because without a baseline the first report is unfalsifiable. A provider who resists establishing a baseline is protecting the ambiguity, and on a catalogue of any size ambiguity is the default state unless somebody deliberately removes it.
Questions people ask about ecommerce website seo packages
Are ecommerce SEO packages worth it, or should we buy custom scope?
A package is fine when your store is small and typical, because the work genuinely is fairly standard. Above a few hundred products, or on a platform with structural constraints, packaged tiers stop describing the job and a scoped engagement based on an actual crawl is more honest. Ask for the crawl first either way.
How should filtered and faceted URLs be handled?
Deliberately, which is the whole answer. Some filter combinations serve real demand and deserve indexable pages; most produce near-duplicates that waste crawling and dilute signals. Google's guidance on consolidating duplicate URLs covers the mechanics. Ask any prospective agency what their rule is and how they will implement it on your platform.
Do we need product structured data?
It is one of the higher-return technical items for a store, because it lets price and availability appear in results and it is implemented once across a template rather than per product. Google documents the required and recommended properties for product data; ask whether validation across the whole catalogue is included or only a sample check.
What about out-of-stock and discontinued products?
Decide a policy rather than deleting pages ad hoc. Products returning to stock should usually keep their URL, seasonal items likewise, and permanently discontinued items should redirect to the closest relevant category rather than to the homepage. This is one of the most common sources of lost ecommerce traffic and one of the cheapest to fix.