This is for a Shopify store doing real revenue that has decided to hire someone for SEO. It is not for a pre-launch store with no sales data, not for a store whose margin cannot survive a monthly retainer, and not for anyone who wants a ranking guarantee. If that rules you out, stop here.
Free, no obligation
Send me your Shopify store and I’ll tell you the three things I’d fix first
Thirty minutes, on a call, looking at your actual site and your actual search results. If the fixes are things you can do yourself, I’ll say so. Pricing is published below — $800 or $1,500 a month, no contract. Cancel any month and keep everything I build.
Everything below is the detail. What I build, what it costs, who touches the store, and what happens to the work if you leave.
Who this is for, and who I turn down
The stores I work well with have a shape. Past validation, so there is order data to reason from. A catalogue big enough that collection structure matters. Somebody internal who owns the store and can approve a theme change without a three-week committee. And gross margin that leaves room to pay for acquisition at all.
I turn down three kinds of store, usually on the first call. The first is the brand-new store with no traffic and no sales. SEO with no history is a bet on demand you have not proven exists, and you spend six months finding out. Run paid or a marketplace first, learn what people actually buy, then come back.
The second is the dropshipping or heavy-reseller store selling the same catalogue as four hundred other sites, with the same manufacturer copy and the same images. Search does not need another set of those pages and will not rank them. That business can work. It is a paid media business, not an SEO one.
The third is anyone who wants a position promised in writing. I do not sell rankings by date. I will show you what I plan to build and how we judge it. Turning that into “page one by March” is a guess with an invoice attached.
What I actually do on a Shopify store
In rough order: audit the crawl and index picture, because most stores ship Google far more URLs than they have useful pages. Rebuild collection architecture so there is a page for every way a buyer describes what they want. Fix the duplicate and parameter mess filters and sorting create. Rewrite the product pages that carry commercial weight. Get structured data right in the theme and keep it right through updates. Work on speed at the template and app level, where Shopify speed is decided. Publish content aimed at searches that produce orders rather than sessions.
What I do not do: social media management, influencer sourcing, email flows, or a general awareness program. Those matter. They are not what a store with unclaimed category demand should buy first.
Collection pages: the biggest unclaimed asset on most stores
Most stores rank for their brand name and their product names, then stop. The searches with real volume are category searches — the material, the size, the use case, the price bracket, the “for” phrase. Those want a collection page, and on most stores the matching collection either does not exist or is an automated collection with a title, a grid, and nothing else.
So I build them properly. Decide which collections deserve to exist based on demand rather than on how the merchandising team thinks about inventory. Write genuine above-the-grid copy answering what a buyer at that stage is weighing, plus a below-grid section for the follow-up questions. Set titles and meta descriptions at the template level so they stop reading Collection Name – Store Name.
The part people skip is internal linking between collections. Two hundred collections with no cross-links asks Google to infer the hierarchy from the nav menu alone. I build links inside the collection copy, parent to child, and from high-intent content back into the collections it supports.
Faceted navigation and the duplicate-URL tax
This is where Shopify quietly generates the most damage. Filters create parameter URLs. Sorting creates more. The same product is reachable at /collections/anything/products/handle for every collection it sits in. On a store with a few hundred products and four filter attributes, the crawlable URL count stops being a number anyone has counted.
Shopify handles part of this itself. Product canonicals normally point back to the clean product URL, and the default robots file blocks some of the worst patterns. It does not handle all of it, and themes break the parts it does handle. So I check what canonicals actually render rather than what the theme docs claim, edit the robots template where blocking is the right answer, and decide which filtered combinations deserve to be indexable pages because they match queries people type.
That last decision is the interesting one. A filtered view matching genuine demand should become a proper collection with its own handle and copy, not a parameter URL you hope Google reads. The rest stays crawlable without competing against the page you want to rank. If you want the checklist before hiring anyone, I published a 14-step Shopify SEO audit you can run yourself.
Product pages, thin descriptions, and variant sprawl
Product page problems come in a few flavours. Manufacturer copy pasted verbatim, which every competitor also has. A description that is three bullets and a size chart, giving Google nothing to match a query against. Variants split apart when they should be one, or merged when they have genuinely different demand. Reviews rendered in JavaScript that never reach the HTML. Specification data locked inside an image.
I rewrite the pages that carry commercial weight: bestsellers, high-margin lines, and anything on page two where a rewrite moves something. I do not rewrite four hundred product pages, because that spends your retainer on your slowest movers. On large catalogues I work at the template level — metafield-driven sections that pull specification data into real HTML on every product, so the improvement lands across the catalogue at once.
The variant question gets decided per store. Colour usually belongs together. Size sometimes does not, when a size has its own demand and its own buyer. That needs your order data, not a rule of thumb.
Structured data that survives a theme update
Nearly every Shopify theme outputs some Product markup, and nearly every one gets something wrong. Common failures: price and availability hardcoded to the first variant so the markup contradicts the page, a review app injecting a second conflicting Product block, aggregate ratings with no reviews behind them, missing GTIN or MPN, and Breadcrumb markup describing a path the site does not have.
I fix it at the source in the theme rather than bolting on an app that adds a third competing block, then test against real pages including an out-of-stock variant, because that is the case that breaks. I recheck after any theme change.
The reason to care goes past rich results now. Clean product data is what AI answer surfaces read when assembling a shopping response. The long version is in the 15 schema properties that matter on a Shopify store, with the companion piece on how Shopify stores get surfaced in AI search.
Theme performance, app bloat, and LCP on product pages
Shopify hosts the store, so nobody argues about servers. What is left is the theme and everything installed on top of it. The usual suspects: a product image lazy-loaded when it is the largest paint element, images served at desktop dimensions to phones, three review and upsell apps each loading their own bundle, a third-party font without a display swap, and an above-the-fold slider that blocks rendering.
My approach is unglamorous. Inventory every app and what it injects, then ask which ones earn their weight — most stores pay rent to two or three apps nobody uses. Move the LCP element out of lazy loading and preload it. Serve properly sized images through Shopify’s image transforms. Defer what can be deferred, delete what nobody will miss, and measure on a real phone rather than a desktop test that flatters everyone. Speed is a ranking input and a conversion input on mobile. The method is written out on the Shopify Core Web Vitals playbook.
Content, internal linking, and links worth having
Ecommerce content fails when it is written for traffic. A blog full of general lifestyle posts produces a traffic chart and no orders. What produces orders sits close to the purchase: comparisons between products you sell, sizing and fit guides, material and care explanations, category buying guides, and the questions your support inbox answers all day. Every piece links into the collection or product it supports, with an anchor describing the destination. That linking matters more than the article itself, because it is how authority moves into the pages that take money.
On external links I am direct: I do not buy them. I go after placements a real store can earn — stockist and supplier pages, category roundups, reviews from people who cover your niche, and digital PR angles that come out of what your business genuinely knows. Slower than buying links, and it does not get your store filtered later. If you are moving onto Shopify from another platform, the URL and redirect work is a different job with a different risk profile, and I keep a migration checklist for it.
SEO against paid on a store with thin margins
Worth saying plainly, because it decides whether to hire me at all. SEO is a fixed monthly cost against a return that arrives later and then keeps arriving. Paid is a variable cost against a return that arrives immediately and stops the day you stop paying. They fail differently.
If your margin after cost of goods, shipping, processing and returns is thin, a retainer is a real percentage of your profit, and you need to be honest about how many months you can fund before payback. If your margin is healthy and you already buy every click you get, organic is the cheaper channel over any horizon longer than a year. I wrote the comparison out in Shopify SEO versus Google Ads at each store stage, including the stages where I would tell you to skip SEO for now.
What it costs
Two tiers, flat monthly, published here so you can decide before you talk to me.
Starter — $800 a month. Technical audit and the fixes that come out of it. Collection and product page optimisation on the pages carrying commercial intent. Structured data corrected in the theme. Index and crawl control, including the parameter and canonical work. Analytics and Search Console configured so we can tell what changed. A monthly report and a call with me to read it.
Core — $1,500 a month. Everything in Starter, plus new collection pages built to match category demand, four published content pieces a month aimed at purchase-adjacent searches, internal link building across the catalogue, ongoing link earning, and Core Web Vitals work at the theme level. Most stores with a real catalogue end up here.
Theme builds, redesigns and migrations are quoted separately as projects, because folding them into a retainer hides what each side is worth. Paid media management is quoted separately too, and ad spend goes to Google on your card, never through me.
Still reading? That usually means the fit is about right. The call costs nothing and I don’t run a pitch deck.
What the price does not include
Ad spend. Apps and software you already pay for or will need. Product photography, though I will tell you what to shoot. Paid link placements, which I do not buy. Custom app development. And a theme rebuild, if the audit concludes you need one — which I will say before you pay a retainer, not in month four.
I list this because a quiet “starting at” price is how an $800 retainer becomes a $3,000 invoice by month two. For market context beyond my own numbers, there is a comparison of Shopify SEO agencies that puts my pricing next to everyone else’s, and a breakdown of real Shopify CRO invoices.
How the first 90 days run
Days 1 to 30
Week one is audit and access. I crawl the store, pull twelve months of Search Console and analytics data, review the app stack, and test collection structure against what people search in your category. I want order data too, because the products that sell are not always the products the site pushes.
By the end of week two you get a written findings document, ranked by what moves revenue fastest rather than by what is easiest. Weeks three and four are execution on the technical items and the highest-intent pages. On Core, the first content piece and the first new collections ship in this window. Do not expect ranking movement in 30 days. Expect the index picture cleaned up and the obvious leaks closed.
Days 31 to 60
The build-out stretch. Collection pages get written and published. Product templates get structured data and specification sections. Internal linking gets built across the catalogue rather than page by page. Speed work lands on the templates carrying the most traffic. Link earning starts, because it is the slowest item.
Long-tail movement usually appears in here, well before anything shifts on head category terms. We track those queries separately, because an average position across the whole store hides everything worth knowing.
Days 61 to 90
By day 90 we should be able to answer a real question: is non-brand organic converting differently than in month zero, and on which page types. Brand search separated out, because brand traffic makes any organic report look better than it is. Month three is also when I recommend or rule out paid based on evidence. And it is the point at which cancelling costs you nothing, which is the design of this arrangement.
Who does the work
I lead every account personally, supported by a team of 17.
The strategy, the audit, the findings document and the monthly call are mine. I read your search data. I decide what gets built and in what order. When you email, you get me. Production work — content drafted to my brief, Liquid implementation, structured data, page builds — runs through specialists on my team, because that is how the work gets done at a sane price and a sane speed.
I run Sprout Sage Solutions out of Chandigarh, India, and have been running it since 2020. I say that up front because you will find it anyway. My hours overlap the US morning and the European afternoon, and I schedule calls around your day.
Proof, and what it is actually worth
Here is what I can substantiate. I have shipped 450+ websites since starting Sprout Sage Solutions in 2020. I have 224 jobs delivered on Upwork with a 96% Job Success score, where the review history is public and you can read every line of it. There are 17 Google reviews on the business profile.
There are case studies on this site with real client work behind them. I will describe what each engagement was, rather than quoting a number from someone else’s store as though it forecasts yours.
The Shopify organic engagement is closest to what this page describes: collection architecture, index control, product page work and content built around category demand. The Shopify Core Web Vitals engagement covers the theme and app-stack side — LCP work, image handling and script auditing, judged against revenue rather than a lab score. The form rebuild teardown is not a Shopify project and I will not imply otherwise; it is here because multi-step flows and thumb-reach mobile calls-to-action apply directly to checkout and lead capture. The full set sits at the case studies hub.
The three objections I hear most
“Why not just install an SEO app?”
Install one if you like — several are useful for bulk meta editing and broken link tracking. What an app cannot do is decide which collections should exist, write the copy that makes them rank, judge which filtered views deserve to be real pages, or tell you that two of your apps cost more in load time than they return. Apps handle the mechanical layer. Most of the value sits in decisions.
There is also a specific trap. Several SEO apps inject structured data on top of what your theme already outputs, producing two competing Product blocks that contradict each other. I have removed more app-injected schema than I have added.
“Why not hire a big ecommerce agency?”
Sometimes you should. If you need a dedicated account team, security paperwork, a named strategist per channel and a vendor your board recognises, hire the big firm. That model is built for it and mine is not.
For an independent store the trade is straightforward. At a large agency you get depth of process and an account manager who is not the person doing the work. With me you get the senior person on the account continuously, transparent pricing and no contract, in exchange for a smaller firm in a different time zone with a finite roster. Both models are defensible.
“What if it doesn’t work?”
Then you cancel. No notice period, no termination fee, and you keep everything I built. That is the only guarantee I make, because it is the only one I control.
What I ask in return is that we define “work” together in month one, in writing, using something measurable — non-brand organic sessions, organic revenue by landing page type, or visibility on the category terms we agreed to chase. Vague expectations are how both sides end up unhappy by month five.
What you keep if you leave
Everything. The theme changes, in your Shopify account. The collection pages and their copy. The content, published on your store. The structured data, which lives in your Liquid files. The tracking setup. Any account I provision is created under your ownership from day one.
No contracts. Cancel any month. Keep everything built. I do not build agency-locked stacks where leaving means losing your analytics history or a working integration. That is a way of keeping clients who want to go, and I would rather keep the ones who want to stay.
Questions store owners ask me
Will you work with a competitor in my category?
No. If I am already working with a store selling the same thing to the same buyer, I will tell you on the first call and decline. Category exclusivity is the only kind that means anything when the work competes for the same queries.
Do you need access to my theme code?
Yes, for anything structural. I work on a duplicated theme, never the live one, and changes publish after you have seen them. If there is custom development you would rather I not touch, I will hand implementation notes to your developer instead.
How many products do I need before this is worth it?
No threshold number, but the value comes from category depth. A store with 30 products across three genuine categories can work. One with 30 products that are variations of a single item usually cannot support enough distinct pages to justify a retainer, and I will say so.
What about Shopify Plus, headless, or a custom front end?
Plus changes very little here. Headless changes a lot — rendering, canonicals, sitemaps and structured data become your front-end team’s responsibility rather than Shopify’s, and the audit takes longer. Tell me your setup on the first call so I can be accurate about scope.
Do you handle multiple markets and languages?
Yes, though it is real additional scope. Shopify Markets creates localised paths needing correct hreflang, and translated content needs actual translation rather than machine output nobody has read. Say so early — it changes the collection plan.
How do you report, and what will I actually see?
A monthly document plus a call. Non-brand organic separated from brand. Traffic and revenue by page type, so we see whether collections, products or content are moving. Rankings on the terms we agreed to track, not a vanity list. And what shipped that month.
Can you do conversion work as well as traffic?
Some of it comes with the territory, since page structure and speed affect both. A full testing programme is a separate engagement. My thinking is written up in the ten Shopify CRO levers I would test first, so you can judge whether it is worth buying.
How long before I should expect results?
Technical fixes and tracking land inside the first 30 days. Long-tail movement typically appears before anything shifts on head terms. Content and links compound over quarters, not weeks. Anyone giving you a firm date for a specific position is guessing and charging you for the guess.
Book a 30-minute call
The call is free and there is no deck. I open your store, Search Console and analytics live, and give you three specific things to fix that week whether or not you hire me. If we are not a fit, I will say so and tell you what I would do instead.
Book the free 30-minute call, or call me directly at +91 97297 12388.
