Ecommerce SEO consultant: decide who owns the catalogue first

Hiring a consultant for your online shop works much better if you first decide who has the last word on the catalogue. It sounds like an organisational detail, and it is what most often holds results back.

Why ecommerce SEO is not only technical

SEO for a shop touches decisions that are not purely technical. Merging two categories that compete with each other, retiring pages for discontinued products, giving a product its own description instead of the manufacturer's, redirecting what is no longer sold: all of this affects stock, prices and relationships with suppliers. A consultant can point these things out clearly. Carrying them out depends on someone on your team who can say yes.

What to settle before you start

• Who authorises changes to categories and product pages, and how quickly they respond. A week's wait for each decision turns a job of months into one of years.
• Which products really matter to the business. Ranking the whole catalogue is a vague ambition; prioritising the products that leave margin and can be delivered well is a plan.
• Who can touch the platform: the developer, the agency that built it, or you. Some fixes depend on it.

A useful question for the first conversation

Ask any consultant what they would do if the client were slow to respond. Someone with experience in shops will talk to you about priorities in blocks and about how to move forward with what needs no sign-off. Someone who promises quick results without asking about your catalogue has probably not worked with a large one.

Fit matters more than method

The method matters less than the fit with how you work. A good consultant adapts to your pace of decision-making, not the other way round.

Related: our online store design and ecommerce web design, SEO consulting and case studies. To talk through your shop, get in touch, or start with an SEO audit.