E-Commerce SEO Services

WBD is a small e-commerce agency in Oxford. We build complete stores for independent brands, and the search work happens inside the build. Most people searching for e-commerce SEO services are in a different position: the store exists, somebody else built it, and a proposal for monthly work on top of it is sitting on the desk. This chapter is for that reader, because the proposal is almost certainly a mix of two different jobs, and the price only makes sense once you know which is which.

The first job sits on the surface of the store: titles, descriptions, alt text, a blog. The second job is the store itself: what the collections are called, how the products are written, what the URLs look like, how quickly a page appears on a phone with a weak signal. Monthly work can do a great deal of the first and very little of the second, because the second was decided when the site was built. That's why our SEO services for e-commerce come in two shapes only: inside a build or redesign, or as a repair when something specific has broken. The general version of that position is in SEO Services for Small Business; this page is the e-commerce one.

Take each item in the proposal and ask where the fix would actually be made. If it's a field in the admin, it's cosmetic — which doesn't mean worthless; it means quick, cheap and finite. If it's the template, the catalogue's structure or the words on the pages, it's structural, and structural work is project work.

Some structural faults are bounded, and a bounded fault suits a bounded job: rankings that fell after a theme update, a migration that left collections dead, a site that has slowed. Those have a cause that can be traced, and the fix is a matter of days. That's The Workshop: a bench day at £500, diagnosis first, fixes second, a written summary at the end, with typical durations by fault on the page. It covers platforms, code, SEO and copy, so a repair can reach further than a redirect file. What it can't do is make a store into something it was never designed to be, and we'd rather say so before a day is booked.

A store built around a theme's default categories, with product pages that list specs but never explain the product, is fighting search from the foundations. Renaming its collections properly is the clearest case: the catalogue has to be re-merchandised, every old URL mapped to a new one, and the navigation and internal links rebuilt so the new names carry weight. The same goes for product copy, which has to be written again for the whole range in the maker's own vocabulary, and for speed, where the real gains sit in the template and the app stack.

Each of those is a design decision. When we build a store they're made in the same room as the layout and the typography, by the same people, because a customer meets the words, the structure and the speed as one impression. The structure and the copy are ours to get right, so when something moves in search afterwards we know why. That's the search work we sell, and it comes inside a full design and build, quoted as a project rather than billed monthly — the UK cost bands are in Building a Shopify Website. If the store is moving platform, the same discipline runs through the migration, where redirects and internal links are most of what protects the rankings you've already earned.

Search work arrives here by two routes. One is a store we're designing and building, so the collection scheme, the product copy, the URLs and the speed are decisions we get to make. The other is a Workshop repair, booked by the day, when a particular fault needs tracing back to what caused it. Ongoing content, digital PR and link acquisition are legitimate work in categories that call for them, and they belong to a different trade; if that's what your store needs, we'll tell you, and the advice costs nothing.

There's a third thing, and it isn't a service: Fly Away Paul, the SEO and outreach app we built to do our own search work. It finds the phrases worth a page and says whether they're winnable, tracks where each page ranks and whether the AI answers have started citing it, follows your links as they build, and counts visits without cookies. This chapter began as one of its briefs. If the ongoing part is yours to do, it's the tool we use to do ours.