Ecommerce SEO pricing: what agencies charge, and why quotes differ.

Ecommerce SEO pricing usually takes one of four shapes: a monthly retainer, a one-time project, hourly consulting or pay for performance. As of October 16, 2026, starting retainers on the agency price pages we checked run from $899 a month for local SEO and $1,499 for national SEO (1Digital Agency) to $7,500 (Uproer), and Ahrefs' worldwide survey of 439 SEO providers found $501 to $1,000 the most common monthly band.

We don't publish our own prices, because two catalogs the same size can hide very different amounts of work. Every figure below is someone else's, read at its source on October 16, 2026 and labeled as either a vendor's published price or someone's estimate, with the survey, directory or author behind each estimate named.

Two details matter more than any headline price. 1Digital Agency's tier sheet stops at 10,000 SKUs: above that, the agency scopes a custom tier, with pricing "built up from hours at $185/hour". And none of the four agencies whose price pages we read (1Digital Agency, SeoProfy, Uproer and WebFX) says how many developer hours come in the box, though on a large catalog the fixes that matter are usually template code or platform configuration. Uproer's FAQ is explicit about the code: "While we don't write code, we provide detailed technical specs, collaborate closely with your engineering teams, and QA every implementation."

Ecommerce SEO pricing at a glance#

How much does SEO cost for ecommerce? Every figure below carries its publisher and its kind.

Vendors' published prices are the only figures tied to a real offer. 1Digital Agency publishes ten monthly tiers: Local SEO from $899 to $4,499 a month, and National SEO, "for brands selling across the country instead of inside a metro", from $1,499 to $5,999. SeoProfy's ecommerce SEO starts at $3,000 a month, and the page adds that "most clients invest between $5,000 and $8,000 per month". Uproer's managed program for enterprise stores starts at $7,500 a month on a 12-month commitment. WebFX publishes four priced tiers: Silver opens with an $8,600 initial campaign investment over two months, then $2,900 a month for the other four months of a six-month commitment, and Diamond runs $21,400, then $9,200 a month, none of it ecommerce-specific. Coalition Technologies publishes an average, not an offer: its "Ecommerce SEO Campaigns" line reads "Avg. Price of $2,500 / mo", from a list it calls "a rather crude outline".

Estimates from surveys and directories describe the whole SEO market, not ecommerce. Ahrefs polled 439 SEO service providers worldwide; its page says "Updated: August 15, 2024" and doesn't say when the poll ran. Its most common retainer band is $501 to $1,000 a month, and the agencies in it average $3,209. For the U.S. and Canada alone, Ahrefs says "79.1% charge at least $1,001 per month". Clutch, working from "65,550 SEO companies and their client project reviews" and updated September 21, 2026, puts the average monthly cost of SEO projects at $3,199.19, without saying how it calculates the average.

Editorial estimates are the softest numbers. Shopify's blog puts ecommerce SEO at $2,000 to $10,000 a month without citing a source, and its subtitle and body give two different overall ranges.

Last reviewed October 16, 2026. Every price below names the agency that published it, and the table links each one.

SeoProfy and Uproer publish only a starting price; 1Digital Agency and WebFX publish full tier tables and send larger scopes to a custom quote. A starting price tells you where a price list begins, not what your catalog will cost.

The four pricing models#

Retainer, project, hourly or performance: which is normal? Retainers, by a distance. Of the 439 providers in Ahrefs' survey, 78.2% charge a monthly retainer, 48.9% charge per project and 34.8% charge by the hour. The shares add up to well over 100% because many providers sell more than one way.

• Monthly retainer. A fixed monthly fee for ongoing work: technical fixes, content, links and reporting. The survey's most common band is $501 to $1,000 a month (20.4% of respondents), and agencies average $3,209.
• Project fee. One scope, one price: an audit, a migration plan, a cleanup. The most common band is $2,501 to $5,000 (21.2%).
• Hourly. Consulting and out-of-scope work. The most common band is $75 to $100 an hour (24%), though the page's own summary says "$100-$150, with 25% of SEOs charging this amount". Clutch says most SEO agencies on its platform charge $100 to $149.
• Pay for performance. The fee follows rankings, traffic or revenue. Ahrefs doesn't list it among the three most common models. If you're offered one, check who picks the metric.

Read Ahrefs' numbers with two caveats. Its averages assume every respondent charges "the upper end of their pricing tier", so they lean high. And its summary disagrees with its body on the retainer band too: "23% of SEOs charge $500-$1,000 per month" there, against 20.4% at $501 to $1,000 in the body. This guide quotes the body and flags the summary.

Most of the ecommerce prices we read sit well above those worldwide figures; 1Digital's $899 Local tier is the exception. SeoProfy's ecommerce floor of $3,000 a month is three times the top of the survey's most common worldwide band, and Uproer's enterprise floor of $7,500 is seven and a half times it. SeoProfy explains the spread within its own range in two lines: "A clean store with a small catalog needs one level of effort. A large ecommerce site with technical debt needs a deeper setup." A catalog brings faceted URLs, thousands of category and product pages built from a few templates, and platform code someone has to change.

What ecommerce SEO packages include#

What's in an ecommerce SEO package? Ecommerce website SEO packages count what's easy to count: pages, posts and articles. Here's one published tier sheet, 1Digital Agency's Local SEO tab, read tier by tier. Every tier opens with a first month that includes a "Tech & Onsite Audit", XML sitemap submission, keyword research and basic GA4 and Search Console setup. Then:

• Launch, $899 a month: onsite SEO on up to 4 pages in month one, then 1 onsite blog and 1 offsite article a month.
• Essential, $1,599: up to 7 pages, then 2 onsite blogs and 2 offsite articles a month.
• Pro, $2,499: up to 10 pages, then 1 onsite blog, 1 long-form blog and 3 offsite articles a month.
• Plus, $3,299: up to 14 pages, then 3 onsite blogs, 1 long-form blog and 3 offsite articles a month.
• Premium, $4,499: up to 16 pages, then 3 onsite blogs, 2 long-form blogs and 4 offsite articles a month.

Each tier runs on a six-month initial term, then month to month, and work outside the tier costs $185 an hour. The National SEO tab, for brands selling nationwide, uses the same five names at $1,499 to $5,999 a month, with onsite SEO on up to 5 to 20 pages in month one and no Local Listings. Catalogs "over 10,000 SKUs" get a custom tier.

What a package like this doesn't count is the work a large catalog hits first:

• Developer time. The sheet promises "Technical fixes and content in every package" but not how many hours, or who writes template code.
• Migrations. 1Digital lists platform and data migrations as separate services. A replatform is its own project, with its own SEO risk.
• Structured-data builds. Product markup, often alongside a Merchant Center feed, is what makes product pages eligible for product snippets and merchant listings, and on a catalog it's a template build, not a page edit.
• Speed. Core Web Vitals fixes live in templates, scripts and hosting. That's speed and Core Web Vitals work, not a monthly page count.

Before you sign any package, ask what happens when the audit finds a problem in a template.

What drives ecommerce SEO pricing on a large catalog#

Why do ecommerce SEO quotes vary so much? Because page count alone is the wrong unit. Ecommerce SEO cost follows the work, and on a catalog the work follows templates: a store with tens of thousands of product pages may run on a handful of templates, so one product-template fix reaches every product. Six drivers move a quote: catalog size and template count, platform constraints, technical debt, content volume, product data and integrations, and who implements fixes on your side.

Google's guide says faceted navigation's most common implementation, "which is based on URL parameters, can generate infinite URL spaces", and that "if crawling is spent on useless URLs, the crawlers have less time to spend on new, useful URLs." Google rates rel="canonical" and rel="nofollow" as "generally less effective in the long term" than blocking those URLs in robots.txt or moving filters into URL fragments, so the fix is usually platform configuration and code, not a tag.

The platform shapes those fixes. Shopify, for one, says "You can't edit subdirectory names", and its developer docs caution, about the within filter, that "a standard product page and a product page in the context of a collection have the same content on separate URLs."

Three more move the number:

• Competition. A category where every rival ships strong category pages takes more content and links to move.
• Markets and languages. Each country or language is another set of pages to localize, and Google's hreflang guidance is strict: "Each language version must list itself as well as all other language versions."
• A migration in flight. If the store is about to change platforms, the SEO plan starts with the redirect map.

Our receipt for doing all of it together:

Organic lead volume up sharply after a technical SEO and content rebuild.

One-time projects: audits, migrations and fixes#

How much does an SEO audit cost? None of the four agencies whose price pages we read lists a standalone audit price. 1Digital folds its "Tech & Onsite Audit" into the first month of every retainer, SeoProfy lists no one-time prices, and Uproer shows its one-month strategy project without a price. 1Digital also sells one-time Onsite SEO by the hour: $1,699 for 5 hours, $3,199 for 10 and $4,399 for 15.

The other published project figures come from the wider market. Ahrefs' survey found $2,501 to $5,000 the most common per-project fee (21.2% of respondents, worldwide). Clutch puts the average project with an SEO agency at $37,158.66 and doesn't say how it gets there. Shopify's blog estimates $2,500 to $15,000 for a one-time technical SEO audit, and $5,000 to $30,000 for a full audit with help implementing, without a source.

An audit without implementation is half a job. On a catalog the findings are template changes, redirect rules, structured data and robots.txt edits, and someone has to build, test and ship each one. If your developers will do it, ask for findings written as tickets: the template, the change, the test. If nobody on your side writes code, price the fixes when you price the audit.

Migrations are where organic traffic is easiest to lose, because every old URL needs a new home before launch day. That's the job behind our ecommerce migration services.

Tens of thousands of redirects mapped for a zero-downtime replatform.

SEO tools you pay for either way#

What do SEO tools cost? Some costs don't care who does the work. As of October 16, 2026, Ahrefs listed Starter at $29 a month, Lite at $129, Standard at $249, Advanced at $449 and Enterprise at $1,499, billed monthly, the last with an "Annual commitment required"; paying annually saves "up to 17%", and billed annually, Lite is $1,290 a year. Screaming Frog's SEO Spider costs $279 (£199) per user per year, and its free version stops at 500 URLs, which a large catalog outgrows on its first crawl. Google Search Console is free.

Ask who holds the licenses. If the agency holds them, the data leaves with it. Keep Search Console in your own name either way: Google's advice, when an SEO offers you an audit, is to "only grant read access to Search Console" at that stage.

Tools are one running cost among several; the platform, apps and hosting are in what an ecommerce website costs.

In-house SEO, freelancer or agency#

Is it cheaper to hire an SEO in-house? Sometimes, but it's rarely a like-for-like swap. Ahrefs' survey puts freelancers at $1,348.63 a month on average, agencies at $3,209 and consultancies at $3,250, worldwide and across industries, calculated from the top of each price band. Clutch says most agencies on its platform charge $100 to $149 an hour.

An in-house hire costs a salary plus benefits, tools and management. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the median annual wage for market research analysts at $78,760 in May 2025, before benefits, and O*NET files search marketing strategists under that occupation, a broad one rather than an SEO job title. A hire also brings one person's skills, and a large catalog needs three: technical SEO, content, and developers who can ship template changes. So the useful question is who covers the gaps:

• In-house fits a full-time workload, with developers who have room to ship fixes.
• A freelancer fits a defined slice, like content or an audit, with your team doing the rest.
• An agency fits when you need several specialties part-time, or nobody on your side writes template code.

Whichever you pick, the cheapest option is the one that gets fixes deployed.

AI search optimization: how it's priced#

Does AI search work cost extra? None of the four agencies whose price pages we read prints a separate price for it. 1Digital Agency scopes "deep AI-visibility work" as a custom tier built from its hourly rate. The AI-search prices we found were for tools: Ahrefs sells Brand Radar AI from $199 a month.

Google's position is plain: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." To appear as a supporting link, a page "must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet". And "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features." In Search Console, AI-feature traffic is "reported on in the Performance report, within the 'Web' search type."

So if a quote prices generative engine optimization (GEO) on top of SEO, ask what it adds and how it's measured: which assistants, which prompts, how often, against what baseline. The llms.txt file is a proposal for helping AI agents use a website; we publish our own llms.txt.

Red flags in cheap and "affordable" ecommerce SEO#

What should a cheap package make you suspicious of? Affordable ecommerce SEO exists: a package that's cheap because it's small is fine. One that's cheap because it skips the work isn't. Google's guide to hiring an SEO is blunt: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google."

Watch for four things:

• A ranking promise. "Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings," Google says.
• Links by the bundle. Google's spam policies list "Buying or selling links for ranking purposes" as link spam. Ask where every link comes from.
• Pages generated by the thousand to rank. Google calls it scaled content abuse "when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users".
• No line for implementation. A plan nobody deploys changes nothing.

By our arithmetic, not Ahrefs': if a $1,000 monthly retainer, the top of Ahrefs' most common worldwide band, were billed at $75 to $100 an hour, the body's most common hourly band, it would cover 10 to 13 hours a month ($1,000 divided by $100, and by $75). At the summary's $100 to $150 an hour, it's about 7 to 10. That won't inventory a large catalog's templates, map its faceted URLs, or write, test and ship the fixes.

How to budget and compare quotes#

How much should an online store budget for SEO? Enough for the work your catalog needs, and a scope is the only way to see that work. Compare scope, not price. Send every agency the same brief:

• Platform and version, and what your team can change in it.
• Catalog numbers: products, categories, indexable URLs and the templates behind them.
• Read access to Search Console and analytics.
• Who ships code on your side, and how often you release.
• Markets, languages and any migration on the calendar.

Then ask each one the same questions back: what's in the monthly fee, in deliverables or hours; who writes template code and how fixes get deployed; what's out of scope, and at what rate; the term and the exit; and how results get measured. Add Google's own question: "Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?"

Quotes built from the same brief are comparable; quotes built from a tier sheet aren't. That brief is also where our ecommerce SEO services start: your templates, your platform and the team that ships the fixes.

Ecommerce SEO pricing questions

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