Shopify SEO Agency: What to Check Before You Sign

Shopify SEO Agency: What to Check Before You Sign

A Shopify SEO agency worth paying handles four things a generic SEO shop does not touch: collection and product page templates, internal linking built to scale with your catalog, the speed cost of installed apps, and the duplicate pages Shopify creates on its own. If a proposal talks about “keyword research and monthly blogs” without naming those four, you are buying a content subscription, not store SEO.

I run Sprout Sage Solutions. I lead every account personally, supported by a team of 17, and most of the stores that reach me have already spent somewhere between $4,000 and $20,000 with someone else before we talk. This page is the diagnostic I would run on your store first, written so you can run it yourself before you pay anyone.

Start by proving the flatline is a demand problem

Flat revenue and flat traffic feel like the same problem. They usually are not.

Open Search Console, set the range to the last 16 months, and split your Queries report into two buckets: queries containing your brand name, and everything else. Then look at only the non-brand line. In the accounts I review, a “traffic plateau” is almost always a non-brand line that stopped growing 14 months ago while brand searches held steady because email and paid social kept feeding returning buyers. That distinction matters, because those two lines get fixed by completely different work. Brand demand is a marketing problem. Non-brand demand is a page problem.

Now filter the Pages report by /collections/ and note the click share. Then filter by /products/.

Most stores I audit find something uncomfortable here. Products get 70 to 90 percent of organic clicks, collections get almost nothing, and the blog gets a respectable-looking number that adds zero to cart. That pattern means you are winning searches from people who already know the exact product name, and losing every category search where a new customer starts. Collections are where the money queries live. “Merino wool base layer women” is a collection search. Your product page can rank for it, but it converts worse and it caps out.

The five checks you can finish before lunch

Every one of these takes minutes, and each one tells you whether an agency’s pitch is grounded in your store or in a template.

• Duplicate paths. Search site:yourstore.com inurl:/collections/ in Google, then click three products from your own navigation and look at the address bar. If your theme links products as /collections/winter/products/parka while Google indexes /products/parka, your internal links are pointing at a version of the page that is not the one ranking.
• Variant sprawl. Count how many separate products exist for what is really one item in different colors. Each one is a near-identical page competing with the others, and Search Console will file most of them under “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” or “Crawled – currently not indexed” in the Pages report.
• App weight. Open a product page, view source, and count