What an Ecommerce SEO Audit Actually Covers

Search for an ecommerce SEO audit and almost every result is an agency’s own sales page, each listing a version of the same generic checklist: crawl errors, titles, backlinks, Core Web Vitals. Only one of the ones I read gives a real price. None of them names Google Merchant Center, and none of them says anything specific about product variants — the two places a Shopify store’s actual technical debt lives.

How much does an ecommerce SEO audit cost?

Mine are published and one-time: SURFACE is $450, three to five business days, up to 100 pages. CORE is $700, five to seven business days, up to 100 pages, and needs read access to Search Console and Analytics. SPECTRUM is $1,500, seven to ten business days, up to 250 pages, and adds a Google Ads audit and three competitor teardowns. A site over the page limit is quoted separately. If you start a retainer within 30 days of delivery, the fee is credited in full against the first month — so the audit itself ends up costing nothing if there turns out to be enough to work on together.

For comparison, one of the agencies I read for this post, Pixel Chefs, publishes a range of roughly $2,500 for a store under 1,000 products up to $4,500 to $8,000 for a larger, more complex catalog. The other two agencies I checked, OuterBox and Polaris, give no number at all and ask you to request a quote.

What’s the difference between a flat fee, hourly, and a ‘free’ audit?

Three pricing models show up across the agencies I read, and each one rewards a different behavior from the person selling it.

• A flat one-time fee (mine, and Pixel Chefs’s) is priced to the page count and scope up front. The incentive is to scope accurately, because the agency eats the cost of a job that runs long.
• Hourly or ‘quoted separately’ (OuterBox, Polaris) has no ceiling until you ask for one. That isn’t automatically worse work, but you are buying an open-ended line item, not a fixed number.
• A ‘free’ audit is a sales call with extra steps. It is usually shallow by design, built to show just enough to justify a retainer pitch, and the agency’s incentive is to find things wrong whether or not that is actually the biggest problem on the site.

Should you hire someone, or check this yourself first?

If your store is small enough that the management fee on an ongoing engagement would be a meaningful share of revenue, hiring anyone for a first pass is usually the wrong move. Google’s own documentation on duplicate content and Merchant Center’s product data rules, both linked below, are free, and a founder who is comfortable in Shopify’s admin can check most of what this post covers directly.

Where it stops making sense to do it yourself is volume and judgment: a 40-page store with one collection structure is a few hours of manual checking. A 4,000-SKU store with nested filters and a daily-synced feed needs a crawl tool and someone who has seen the failure modes before. If that is not you yet, that is a reason to wait, not a reason to overpay for a report you could have produced yourself.

What makes an ecommerce audit different from a general SEO audit?

A general SEO audit checks titles, headings, crawl errors and backlinks on any site, store or not. What changes on an ecommerce site is that three of its biggest technical problems are created by the platform itself, not by content choices, and a checklist built for a blog or a brochure site walks straight past all three.

Collection pages and faceted navigation

Every collection page on a Shopify store can usually be reached through several different URLs once sorting and filtering are involved — by price, by size, by color, by tag. Google’s own guidance on duplicate content names exactly this: “the results of sorting and filtering functions of a category page” as one of its listed causes of duplicate content (Google Search Central, What Is URL Canonicalization). A general audit tool flags duplicate titles; it does not tell you that your own filter combinations are the thing generating them.

My own audit folds this into the technical layer at every tier — the findings are written up as “the duplicate product URLs, the thin collection pages and the faceted navigation” specifically, not as a generic duplicate-content line item.

Your product feed

If your store feeds Google Shopping or Performance Max, your product feed is a second surface Google reads about your store, separate from the pages it crawls, and almost none of the audit pages I read for this post check it by name. Google’s own product data specification defines item_group_id as the field that ties a product’s size or color variants together in the feed, and says it is required for variants to appear in free listings in six countries including America (Google Merchant Center, Product Data Specification). Get that field wrong, or leave it blank, and Shopify’s own variant structure stops telling Google the variants are related at all.

A feed check that is actually ecommerce-specific looks at whether item_group_id is populated and consistent, whether color, size and other variant-defining attributes match what is required for your category, and whether the feed and the live page agree on price and availability — a mismatch there is one of the most common causes of a product being disapproved.

Variant and duplicate product pages

The on-site twin of the feed problem is variant duplication: a product in four colors often means four near-identical pages with the same description, the same images beyond one swapped photo, and the same target keyword. None of the three top-ranking audit pages I read addresses this directly — “cannibalisation” and “duplicate URLs” both get a passing mention, but none of them says what to actually do about a color variant competing with its own parent product in search.

What a real check looks at: whether each variant has a canonical pointing at the right target (not always the base product, since a high-volume color variant can legitimately outrank its parent), whether variant pages share enough unique content to avoid being folded together by Google, and whether internal links are pointing at the variant you actually want to rank or getting split evenly across all of them.

What should actually be in the report you get back?

A report that is just an exported tool list with a logo on the cover is not a finished audit; it is raw data with a markup. What you should expect back is each finding written as a plain claim, the evidence behind it, and a specific fix — ranked by what to do first, not alphabetized by category. For the ecommerce-specific items above, that means the report names the actual filtered URLs competing with each other, the actual feed attributes that are missing or malformed, and the actual variant pages splitting a keyword, not a generic line that says “review faceted navigation.”

Questions people ask