Ecommerce SEO costs
Online shops usually need more SEO work than service businesses. Here’s why, and where you can keep the cost sensible.
Why shops cost more
More pages. A small service business might have 15 pages. A shop can have thousands of product and category pages, and each one is a chance for something to go wrong: duplicate content, thin descriptions, out-of-stock pages left hanging, filters creating endless URLs.
Competition is often national, too. You’re up against big retailers and marketplaces, not just the shop down the road.
The jobs that take the time
Category page content and structure. Product descriptions that aren’t copied from the manufacturer. Handling faceted navigation so Google doesn’t waste time on filter combinations. Structured data for products, prices and stock. Site speed on image-heavy pages.
Where automation helps
Checking thousands of pages by hand isn’t realistic. Software can flag missing titles, duplicate descriptions, broken images and pages blocked from indexing across the whole catalogue every day. That’s exactly the kind of work that shouldn’t be billed by the hour.
Where people still matter
Deciding which categories to build out, writing descriptions that sell and planning seasonal content need judgement. Our ecommerce SEO guide covers the priorities.
Questions to ask about shop SEO
How will you handle filter and sort URLs? Which category pages will you improve first, and why? Will product descriptions be rewritten, and by whom? How will out-of-stock and discontinued products be handled? Good answers show the provider understands shops. Vague answers usually mean they’ll treat your store like a brochure site, which misses most of the work. Ask, too, how they’ll measure success: rankings for category terms, organic revenue, or both. Shops have better data than most businesses, so there’s no excuse for a report that only lists keyword positions.
What shops are typically quoted
Whito’s planning ranges put ecommerce SEO at about £2,000 to £8,000 a month, well above local service firms. The extra cost comes from scale: hundreds of category and product pages, filter URLs that can create thousands of near-duplicate pages, and product data that changes every week. Those ranges are a guide for planning, not quotes.
Start with the categories
If your budget is small, put it into category pages first. They target the broader searches people make before they pick a product, and there are usually far fewer of them than product pages. Clear category titles, a useful paragraph at the top, sensible internal links and clean filter handling often do more than rewriting every product description.
What we can do at £99
For a small or medium shop, our plan covers daily technical checks across the site, monthly improvements to your key category and product pages, and a report. Large catalogues with heavy content needs will need more than that. For a sense of agency pricing, Whito’s UK agency retainer research lists single-channel SEO retainers at £1,250 to £3,500 a month.
Common questions
Does AffordSEO work for online shops?
For small shops, yes: we check the site daily and improve key category and product pages each month. Large catalogues usually need more hands-on work than £99 covers.
Should I rewrite every product description?
Not at first. Start with your best sellers and the categories people search for, then work outwards.
Do platform choices change the cost?
They can. Some platforms make filter URLs and duplicate pages harder to control, which adds work.
Where this guide to ecommerce SEO costs quotes prices, the figures come from Whito’s UK SEO cost research and Whito’s UK agency retainer research (2026). They’re typical ranges for planning, not quotes.
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