Ecommerce SEO agency: a 90-day onboarding plan

The first three months with a new ecommerce SEO agency decide most of what follows. If onboarding is rushed, the agency spends months guessing how your catalogue, platform and release process work. If onboarding is well run, the agency understands which categories make money, which templates cause problems and who can ship a fix, and the first improvements reach the live site within the quarter. This plan describes a 90-day onboarding for an online shop, written from the client's side: what to prepare, what the agency should deliver in each phase and how to judge whether the relationship is working. It complements our general guide to the first 90 days of an SEO engagement with the questions that are specific to ecommerce.

Before day one: access, data and people

Most onboarding delays come from missing access. Prepare user access, not ownership transfers, for Search Console, analytics, the ecommerce platform's admin or a staging copy, your product feed or Merchant Center account if you have one, and the ticketing tool your developers use. Share the last twelve months of revenue by category and, if possible, margin or stock priorities, because an ecommerce SEO agency that only sees traffic will optimise for traffic.

Name the people as well. The agency needs one contact for merchandising decisions, one for development and one budget owner who can approve priorities. Agree the channel and rhythm for communication from the start.

Days 1 to 30: understand the catalogue and the crawl

The first month is about diagnosis. A good agency will map the site's page types, such as the home page, category and subcategory pages, filtered listing pages, product pages, brand pages, content and search results, and then check how each type is crawled and indexed. Google's guidance for ecommerce sites covers much of the same ground: URL structure, navigation, how products are shared with Google, pagination and structured data.

Expect particular attention to faceted navigation. Filters for size, colour, price and brand can generate a very large number of URL combinations. Google's documentation on faceted navigation explains that these URLs can cause overcrawling and slower discovery of new content, and describes options such as preventing the crawling of filter URLs that do not need to be indexed, or, where filtered pages should be indexed, keeping parameters consistent and returning a 404 status when a combination has no results.

By day 30, you should have in hand:

• A page-type inventory with the number of URLs per type and their indexing status.
• A list of crawl and indexing issues, each with evidence, affected templates and a first estimate of impact.
• A view of which categories bring organic revenue today and which have demand but little visibility.
• A shortlist of quick fixes that can be released without major development work.

Days 31 to 60: templates, structured data and priorities

In the second month the work moves from pages to templates. On an online shop, one change to the category template affects hundreds or thousands of URLs, so this is where most of the leverage sits. Typical areas include category page copy and internal links, product page titles and descriptions built from product attributes, handling of out-of-stock and discontinued products, canonical rules for product variants, and pagination.

Structured data belongs in this phase too. Google distinguishes between product snippets, for pages where people cannot buy directly, and merchant listings, for pages where customers can purchase. Adding the properties required for merchant listings can also make product pages eligible for product snippets. The agency should check which markup your templates output today, whether it matches visible content and which properties are missing.

By day 60, you should have a prioritised backlog: each item with the template it affects, the evidence, an effort estimate from your developers and an expected benefit expressed as a range or a direction, not a promise. Ask the agency to separate items that protect existing revenue from items that aim to win new visibility.

Days 61 to 90: first releases and a reporting baseline

The third month is about shipping. Pick a small number of backlog items that are low effort and clearly beneficial, release them, and verify the result: status codes, canonical tags, indexing and rendering on the live site. Releases on ecommerce platforms often interact with apps, themes or plugins, so every change needs a check after deployment, not only before it.

At the same time, agree a reporting baseline. A useful ecommerce SEO report shows organic sessions and revenue by page type and by priority category, indexing status for key templates, and progress on the backlog. Avoid reports that only list keyword positions; they say little about whether the shop sells more.

By day 90, you should know whether the agency understands your business, whether your team can ship its recommendations and what the plan is for the next two quarters. You can see how we report results on our results page.

Warning signs during onboarding

• The agency starts producing content before the crawl and indexing review is finished.
• Recommendations are generic and do not mention your platform, templates or categories.
• Nobody asks about margins, stock or seasonal peaks.
• The agency asks to take ownership of your Search Console or analytics instead of being added as a user.
• Reports promise rankings or traffic numbers by a fixed date.

No ecommerce SEO agency can promise a fixed ranking outcome. What a good one offers is a clear diagnosis, a backlog your developers can act on and honest reporting on what changed. If you want an onboarding built this way, our ecommerce SEO services start with the same 90-day structure.

Sources

• SEO best practices for ecommerce sites — Google Search Central
• Managing crawling of faceted navigation URLs — Google Search Central
• Introduction to product structured data — Google Search Central