Start with a direct Google search for "ecommerce SEO agency" plus your city name. If you're in Ottawa, Toronto, or Montreal, you'll see agencies that bothered to rank locally—which tells you something about their SEO ability. Check if they rank for commercial terms in their own market before trusting them with yours. Look at their portfolio for actual ecommerce clients with measurable outcomes. Generic "increased traffic 150%" claims mean nothing without context. You want to see they've handled category page architecture, product schema, faceted navigation crawl budgets, and conversion rate optimization—not just pumped out blog posts. Ask for specific examples: How did they handle duplicate product descriptions? What's their approach to seasonal inventory changes? Verify technical depth during initial calls. Ecommerce SEO is fundamentally different from lead-gen or content sites. Your agency needs to understand Shopify's URL structure quirks, how to manage thousands of product pages without cannibalizing rankings, and when to noindex versus canonical tags for filter pages. If they start talking about "creating valuable content" before discussing crawl efficiency and site speed, walk away. Geographic proximity matters less than it did five years ago. We work with ecommerce clients across Canada from Ottawa without issue because the work is mostly technical audits, analytics reviews, and remote implementation guidance. What matters is whether they have dedicated ecommerce experience and can show you the revenue impact, not proximity to your warehouse. Red flags: agencies that pitch link building before fixing your internal linking structure, those without ecommerce platform certifications, and anyone who can't explain how they'd approach your specific product catalog size. At Ottawa SEO, we typically don't take on stores under 100 products because the economics don't work for either party—smaller catalogs need different strategies. Make sure the agency's minimum engagement aligns with your catalog complexity and revenue targets.