How To Find the Right SEO Ecommerce Agency for Your Business

This blog was originally published on October 5, 2022 and was updated on June 9, 2026.

Online shoppers are savvier than ever these days. Ecommerce giants have paved the way for customer expectations with lightning-fast site speeds, clean user experiences, and super simple checkout processes.

Of course, digital marketers know how much is happening under the surface of that online purchase: optimizations and updates to ensure  customers can not only make that purchase with ease but also find the product they're looking for amidst a sea of competing options.

And "finding your product" no longer means just showing up on Google. Today's shoppers are discovering products through ChatGPT's shopping integrations, Amazon Rufus, Perplexity Shopping, and a growing range of AI-powered platforms.

The question has evolved from "how do I rank on Google?" to "where do my products show up across the entire discovery landscape?"

When and where to start your search for an SEO agency

Not every ecommerce business has a wealth of web developers, designers, paid media masters, and SEO experts at their disposal. For those who have resource constraints or have seen diminishing returns for their online shop, it may be time to consider hiring outside support.

But what sort of considerations should digital marketers make when searching for agency or practitioner support for their efforts?

In this post, some of our best ecommerce minds share their advice on what considerations companies should make in seeking help growing their online business.

Want to hear how Seer would approach strategic opportunities for your specific ecommerce site? Contact us to speak with a member of our team and learn more!

What are some common mistakes digital marketers make with ecommerce sites?

Hiring an ecommerce marketing agency is a great way to mitigate risk and avoid common pitfalls on your own website. When choosing an agency partner, be sure to inquire about the variety and breadth of their experience with different sizes and types of ecommerce businesses — the more varied situations they've come across, the more likely they can help with your unique business needs. 

Many ecommerce businesses make strategic errors within the following areas:

• Unoptimized product descriptions based on search behaviors
• Making assumptions about the target keyword set
• Neglecting useful imagery of products or not understanding what their audience wants from product imagery
• Lack of streamlined UX in the product search or checkout process
• Issues with crawl budget, page speed, and canonical tags — particularly with large sites
• Ignoring more nuanced KPIs that may not seem directly tied to revenue goals, but can have an impact on them (i.e. strategy around out-of-stock products, no suggested product strategy to increase average purchase size, etc.)
• Chasing every new AI commerce feature without evaluating whether it delivers real ROI — the market is flooded with tools wearing the AI label, and not all of them are worth the added complexity to your product catalog

Weighing margin data against resource requirements

Another common mindset for ecommerce marketers, and one that we often see at Seer, is the desire to optimize for every single product available on their site. While this desire is understandable, it is often beneficial to have a partner who is thinking about the profit margins tied to the product so that you can prioritize your efforts accordingly.

Margin data is extremely important to refine the strategy, as sometimes pouring resources into keyword rankings for lower-margin products is not the best path forward. If your marketing agency partner isn’t asking about product pricing, profit margins, and business revenue goals, you may want to reconsider your options.

Of course, for some newer brands, the profit margin will not be as important as brand visibility, so having an agency that can look at the data holistically and make those recommendations for your specific business is essential. In these cases, you’ll want to vet your marketing partner for expertise within third-party marketplace recommendations and their ability to speak to where your products should be listed outside of your own website (such as AI shopping interfaces like Amazon Rufus, ChatGPT Atlas, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews).

What’s more, your agency partner shouldn’t simply be asking you for your target keyword set, as optimizing for this list is often based on assumption. Ideally, your agency partner would perform thorough keyword and search landscape research to identify strategic keyword sets that will affect your bottom line and avoid any “losing fights” where optimization efforts would be a waste of resources.

How do I evaluate an agency's AI commerce capabilities?

With AI reshaping how products are discovered and purchased, this is now one of the most important questions to ask a prospective agency. It's also one of the easiest areas to get a vague, buzzword-heavy non-answer.

You need to know that an agency can do more than talk about ChatGPT Shopping or Amazon Rufus — that they've actually tested AI tools and features.

Ask directly: have they run campaigns or experiments on specific AI commerce platforms with actual clients? If not, what's holding them back? There's no single right answer, but you want an agency that's been in the weeds rather than just reading industry newsletters.

Equally important is whether an agency exercises real judgment about which AI capabilities to prioritize. With new announcements dropping constantly, it's impossible for any brand to participate in all of them.

A good agency partner will help you narrow down the innovations that are most impactful, easiest to adopt, and most aligned to your business.

Some of these tools have failed publicly in early rollouts, which is a reminder that speed and caution aren't mutually exclusive.

When it comes to AI-driven features worth pursuing, look for those with tangible ROI attached. Two areas that have shown clear results for ecommerce brands:

• Streamlining inventory management across multiple marketplaces through unified platforms

• Leveraging hyper-personalized advertising that surfaces products to individual users based on deep behavioral signals 

What marketing channels or services should I prioritize for my ecommerce business?

Like any good SEO question, the answer to the above would be “it depends!” Ecommerce sites have so many things to consider in their optimization efforts. Sometimes knowing where to put your resources is dependent on knowing where the friction or drop-off points are for your users.

If your agency partner offers a multi-faceted health check of your website, this is a great place to start uncovering any overlooked opportunities and learning what types of marketing channels or services should be prioritized for your goals.

At Seer, we use an Ecommerce Foundational Audit that considers multiple features of ecommerce websites to make sure that they are meeting the minimum threshold of expectation for success, whether the site has 5 or 50,000 products.

Ecommerce foundational audit

One area to watch closely is product feeds. As LLMs increasingly adopt shopping features, structuring product data in ways that go beyond Google Merchant Center will matter more. The agencies thinking ahead are already considering how to make product data legible to AI-powered platforms.

Find a partner that will develop a well-rounded strategy

Ideally, your agency partner will have capabilities with multiple service lines, including technical SEO, holistic SEO, paid media, UX/UI, and conversion rate optimization — these are all top considerations for ecommerce sites. A well-rounded strategy inclusive of all these service lines will ensure that no opportunities go unnoticed and resources aren’t wasted; the interplay of channels tends to complement each other and compound results.

For instance, an SEO agency should always take into account your paid ads data in order to make the most of what can be learned from historical performance.

Here's an example: consider a product category that's historically been de-prioritized in paid because the unit economics don't work — it has high shipping costs and low margins. Paid retargeting tests focused on lapsed customers in that category can reveal new demand signals, while organic work on taxonomy and site structure opens up a parallel lane for the same products. Paid and SEO aren't always pushing toward the same goal; sometimes the real insight is finding where each channel can do different work for the same product.

Google Ads has several campaign types that are built specifically for ecommerce, including Performance Max and Demand Gen. But the power of these campaigns is only as good as your conversion tracking. At Seer, we always audit your GA4 analytics environment before making recommendations around strategic changes. This ensures that attribution can be trusted as results are monitored.

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Never look at paid ad campaigns as a “set and forget” solution. Proactive monitoring and testing is the best way to maximize results, prevent performance drops, and capture new opportunities.

Look for an agency that starts by conducting a technical audit

At the onset of all of this is a thorough technical SEO audit — all of the best SEO and UX practices will be a waste of resources if your site isn’t built with search crawlers and indexing in mind!

Given the size of most ecommerce sites, a full architecture audit can be a daunting process, so this is a great place to begin your relationship with an agency partner.

Make sure you have a good understanding of how hands-on and consultative your support partner is during the audit process. Depending on the development resources you have in-house, you may need the agency to provide code snippets, ad hoc support, or QA hours after implementation.

At a minimum, your partner should be able to help you manage the project so that critical fixes get prioritized and other fixes are weighted according to site impact.

How do I develop my ecommerce marketing strategy?

For most digital marketers working for an ecommerce business, the question in focus will be, “How do I attract more qualified buyers to my site and products?”

While acquiring new customers is an obvious way to grow your business, it is important to think about where you stand in the context of the entire search landscape if you want to build a long-lasting strategy.

Focusing on customer acquisition before concerning yourself with the foundation of the site will cause you to make mistakes or pour energy into efforts that may not actually maximize your conversion. Your strategy will depend heavily on the type of industry you are in, the price of your product, the authority of your brand, and several other factors.

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When developing a strategy for your ecommerce site, use the following question as your north star: “How can I make it easier for someone to find what they are looking for and complete a transaction?”

Where your brand should start

If you are in a highly competitive product space or if your products cost more than the average of everything else that’s available online: You may need to first focus your time on the unique value proposition you bring to market and building top-of-funnel, educational content.

If you are competing with enormous online brands that have a lot of awareness: The key will be to dig into user research to see if there are any new angles or queries that fit your brand and that you can work to optimize for. Bringing in an agency with ecommerce experience that can think of your business goals in the context of what is already available online can be beneficial, as the recommendations they make will certainly vary depending on your product and market space.

If your brand and product are fairly well known and getting clicks through search isn’t necessarily an issue for you: Focusing on your site’s browse experience and points of conversion can lead you to a more solid strategy. Ecommerce websites have a unique challenge (and opportunity!) of not only bringing searchers to their site but also maximizing the efficiency and ease of their experience to make the checkout as effortless as possible. What’s more, ecommerce sites usually have a far greater number of pages to optimize for search than that of traditional sites, so prioritizing those page updates according to your overarching business goals and creating scalable solutions will be key to maximizing your investment.

Site structure and hierarchy are extremely important foundational elements. Category pages tend to drive the most traffic from organic search, so a great jumping-off point is to take browse experience, subcategories, and how users expect to engage with your products into consideration. However, working on assumptions of how your users search will likely lead you to make the wrong strategic decisions. Work with an agency that has the time and resources to deep dive into the data and ask questions like:

• Are there subcategories that your customers are seeking that don’t fit into a hierarchy on your site?

• Are searchers having trouble finding what they want and are your most popular products easiest to find?

• Are there specific points where your users are dropping off or leaving the purchase process? 

User research, competitive research, your specific site search data, and third-party heat mapping tools like Hotjar can help you drill deeper into these questions.

Make sure the agency partner you choose takes the time to research your product, audience, and competitors. A quality marketing strategy cannot be built in a silo or in the context of marketing best practices. Instead, your agency must consider the whole picture of the business, including more nuanced considerations like seasonality, specific challenges facing the marketplace, or the resources at your disposal.

What should the first 90 days with an ecommerce agency look like?

Choosing the right agency is only half of the equation. The early months of the relationship will tell you a lot about whether it will actually work.

There are two red flags worth watching for.

 🚩 Unexpected drops in KPIs. Note the word unexpected: some dips are normal, especially if you're entering a slow seasonal period or running tests that were always going to carry some risk. What matters is whether those risks were surfaced and discussed upfront. If your agency is introducing changes without walking you through the downside scenarios, that's a problem.

 🚩 Misalignment on strategic direction. The first 90 days are when an agency should be doing its deepest learning: understanding your historical performance, identifying quick wins, and laying the groundwork for long-term execution. If it starts to feel like you and your agency are working from different playbooks, address it immediately. A lot of early misalignment comes down to gaps in what was (or wasn't) shared during onboarding, and those are fixable if caught early.

One thing that's changed in how good agencies operate are the deliverables. The days of the big, formal deliverable as the primary output are largely behind us. Clients in 2026 are moving faster and need insights in smaller, more actionable pieces. If your agency is still leading with lengthy analyses before showing any tangible direction, it's worth having a conversation about pace. The best agency relationships adapt to how you want to work — not just the process the agency has always used.

What you should be thinking about that's on the horizon: agentic commerce

One development worth having on your radar as you think about long-term ecommerce strategy is the rise of AI agents that browse, evaluate, and potentially purchase on behalf of users. This is still early, but it's moving fast — and it changes some fundamental assumptions about who (or what) you're optimizing for.

Think about it this way: ecommerce strategy has always been built around understanding how humans search and browse. But if a meaningful share of traffic eventually comes from AI agents making decisions on behalf of users, you're now optimizing for a different kind of "customer" that:

• Processes structured information differently

• Operates conversationally rather than through keyword searches

• Follows its own logic for evaluating products

For agencies, this means building expertise in new advertising platforms — ChatGPT has already launched self-service advertising options that will attract ecommerce advertisers — and rethinking how product data is structured and surfaced.

The technical ecommerce skills that matter most today (clean product feeds, well-structured data, streamlined conversion paths) are actually well-suited to the agentic future. The key is making sure that path to conversion is legible not just to human shoppers, but to the systems acting on their behalf.

In summary

• The right agency partner can help your ecommerce business prioritize scalable initiatives that match up with your goals
• No two ecommerce websites are the same, and “best practices” should be delivered in the context of your product and market landscape
• An ecommerce marketing strategy with a holistic approach that leverages insights from user and search landscape data is the best way to maximize your investment
• Evaluating an agency's AI commerce capabilities is now as important as evaluating their SEO or paid media chops — look for concrete experience, not just familiarity with the platforms
•  The first 90 days of an agency relationship are a strong signal of long-term fit: watch for alignment on strategy, transparency about risks, and a willingness to adapt how they work to how you work

Additional Resources

• Should I Hire an SEO Company? or an Analytics Company? or a PPC Agency?
• How to Build an In-House CRO Team or Train a CRO Specialist
• Have You Outgrown Your Agency?

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