E-commerce SEO costs vary wildly based on three factors: catalog size, technical debt, and market competition. A small Shopify store selling 200 products in a niche market might run $2,500–$4,000 monthly. Mid-size operations with 1,000–5,000 SKUs competing in moderately competitive verticals typically pay $5,000–$8,000 per month. Enterprise platforms with tens of thousands of products, custom builds, or migrations often hit $10,000+ monthly, sometimes split between an agency and in-house team. One-time projects follow similar logic. A technical audit and category page optimization for a 500-product store might cost $15,000–$25,000. Full-scale migrations, faceted navigation fixes, or schema overhauls for larger catalogs can push past $50,000 because they require developer coordination, QA, and staged rollouts. What you're paying for breaks down like this: - Technical SEO: crawl budget management, duplicate content fixes, URL structure, site speed, mobile optimization - On-page optimization: product and category page templates, internal linking architecture, schema markup for products and reviews - Content strategy: category descriptions, buying guides, FAQ sections that target informational queries before purchase - Link building: harder for e-commerce since product pages don't attract natural links; requires creative outreach or content plays - Performance tracking: rank monitoring across thousands of SKUs, conversion rate analysis, revenue attribution The widest cost swings come from platform choice. Shopify and BigCommerce sites cost less to optimize because they handle technical fundamentals out of the box. Custom WordPress/WooCommerce builds or legacy platforms like Magento often need extensive fixes before traditional SEO work even starts. At Ottawa SEO, we see most sustainable e-commerce engagements land in the $4,000–$7,000 monthly range after an initial onboarding phase. Anything under $2,000 monthly usually means you're getting cookie-cutter checklist work, not the strategic category expansion and conversion optimization that actually move revenue. One-time projects make sense for pre-launch or pre-migration work, but e-commerce SEO is inherently ongoing because inventory changes, competitors adapt, and Google updates product search features constantly.