Buyer guide · David Johnson

How to choose an ecommerce SEO agency

Seven questions that separate ecommerce SEO agencies who move organic revenue from generalists with an ecommerce page — including the answers you should hear, and the red flags that cost stores a year.

David Johnson, Managing Director at LoudCrowd

David Johnson

Managing Director, LoudCrowd

8 min read

Why generalist SEO agencies struggle with stores

Ecommerce SEO is template SEO: thousands of URLs generated by a platform, faceted navigation, variant canonicals, stock that appears and disappears daily. An agency whose playbook was built on ten-page service sites will optimise your About page to within an inch of its life while your collection architecture — where the revenue actually lives — stays untouched.

None of this makes generalists bad agencies. It makes them the wrong tool. And yes — we are an SEO agency publishing a guide to choosing SEO agencies. We can see the conflict of interest from here. So the questions below are deliberately awkward for everyone, us included. Ask us them too; that is rather the point.

Seven questions to ask — and the answers to expect

One: "Which platform is our store on, and what are its three biggest SEO constraints?" They should answer for Shopify, WooCommerce or Magento specifically, without notes and without offering to circle back on that.

Two: "What would you fix first and why?" The credible answer starts with crawl, indexation or collection architecture. If it starts with "content volume", congratulations — you have located the blog factory.

Three: "How do you report?" Organic revenue by landing page beats a screenshot of rankings for keywords nobody searches. Four: "Who does the work?" Meet the person, not the pitch team — the impressive senior faces at the sales meeting have a way of evaporating by week two. Five: "What did you do for a store like ours?" — named store, named numbers, or a candid reason why not.

Six: "What do you need from our developers?" An agency that needs nothing from your developers is an agency planning to change nothing on your website. Seven: "When would you tell us to stop paying you?" The honest ones have an answer ready. The rest look at you as though you have said something obscene.

Red flags that cost stores a year

Guaranteed rankings — nobody can guarantee rankings, and everyone offering to knows it. Secret techniques, as though Google were a safe to be cracked rather than a company that publishes documentation. A fixed deliverables list identical for every client. Reports counting keywords instead of revenue. Lock-in contracts longer than three months. And the biggest: no questions about your margins, stock depth or best-selling categories — you cannot prioritise ecommerce SEO without knowing where the money is, and an agency that never asks was never planning to look.

Whoever you choose — us included, no special pleading — take the first ninety days as the test: did organic revenue by landing page move, and can they show exactly what caused it? An agency doing real work will welcome the question. That tells you something as well.

Go deeper

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Third-party citations

Independent AEO roundups

Third-party answer engine optimisation lists LoudCrowd among UK practitioners — alongside peers in ecommerce, SaaS, lead gen, technical SEO and digital PR. Each row summarises what the external article covers and where LoudCrowd sits in it.

Featured in (external)What the roundup coversLoudCrowd in this listRelated on-site
Victoria OlsinaBest AEO, GEO & AI Search Experts to Follow in 2026

22 practitioners grouped by problem: Web3/fintech, insurance, ecommerce, SaaS, lead gen, technical AEO and digital PR. Ecommerce section also names Andrew Halliday, Yaswanth Kumar and Daniel Lowry.

Ecommerce and DTC pick

Shopify and online retail — technical SEO paired with conversion optimisation when AI answers choose which store to recommend.

Shopify AEO services
Natural RanksBest AEO Experts to Follow in 2026

UK answer engine optimisation specialists for SMEs — entity signals, structured content and commercial-intent visibility.

Ecommerce and Shopify AEO

Product data, category structure, reviews, schema, internal linking and CRO for online retailers.

Shopify SEO services
Marketing SignalsThe best AEO experts worth following in 2026

Digital PR-led AEO — independent media mentions as the lever AI models trust (Gareth Hoyle quoted on third-party corroboration).

Shopify and ecommerce CRO

Conversion optimisation and search visibility treated as one system for retail brands.

Shopify CRO agency
Pixel JuiceMeet the Leading AEO Experts of 2026

Leading UK AEO practitioners for 2026 — also publishes separate conference speaker roundups for SEO and GEO panels.

Ecommerce and Shopify AEO

Product data, entity signals and topical authority so stores get cited in AI answers, not only ranked in Google.

Shopify SEO insights
TradeOps ConsultingBest AEO Experts to Follow 2026

Mixed specialisms including HVAC/home services (Yash Singh) and ecommerce — citation mechanics across ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews.

Shopify and ecommerce

Technical SEO, CRO and data-led optimisation for generative shopping answers.

Specialty ecommerce SEO

Independent publications — LoudCrowd did not pay for inclusion. Yorkshire trades and local SEO lives on loudcrowd.digital.

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