SEO is one of the few marketing channels where you pay for work you cannot see. Paid ads show impressions, clicks, and spend in real time. Email marketing shows opens and revenue per campaign. But SEO? You pay a monthly retainer and trust that meaningful work is happening behind the scenes.

That opacity creates a problem. Too many ecommerce brands pay £2,000–£4,000 per month for SEO and have no idea what they are getting in return. They receive a monthly report full of graphs and rankings, but they cannot tell whether the work being done is competent, comprehensive, or — in some cases — happening at all.

This article pulls back the curtain. It is a complete, transparent breakdown of what a good SEO agency should be doing every month for an ecommerce brand. Not what they should be promising. What they should be doing. Use it as a checklist against your current agency, or as a framework for evaluating a new one.

Why SEO agency transparency matters

The SEO industry has a trust problem, and it is largely self-inflicted. For years, agencies could get away with minimal work because clients did not understand what SEO involved. Monthly retainers were paid, vague reports were sent, and nobody asked hard questions because the subject matter felt too technical.

That era is ending. Brands are more sophisticated. They have access to the same tools their agencies use. They can see their own Google Search Console data. They know that "we built links" is not a sufficient answer to "what did you do this month?"

Transparency is not just good practice — it is the minimum standard. If your SEO agency cannot clearly explain what they did, why they did it, and what impact they expect it to have, you should be concerned. As we discuss in our companion guide on how to tell if your SEO agency is actually doing anything, the inability to articulate work is often an indicator that the work is not happening.

Technical SEO: the foundation work

Technical SEO is the plumbing of your site. It is not glamorous, but without it, nothing else works. A good SEO agency should be monitoring and maintaining your technical foundation every single month.

Monthly technical SEO tasks

Crawl analysis. Your agency should run a full site crawl at least monthly using tools like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or similar. This identifies broken links, redirect chains, missing meta data, duplicate content, crawl errors, and orphaned pages. For an ecommerce site with 500–5,000 pages, this is essential maintenance. New products, retired SKUs, and content changes create technical issues that compound if left unchecked.

Indexation monitoring. Your agency should monitor Google Search Console for indexing issues — pages that should be indexed but are not, pages that should not be indexed but are, and any manual actions or security issues. For ecommerce sites, product pages going in and out of stock creates indexing complexity that needs active management.

Core Web Vitals tracking. Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and Interaction to Next Paint are ranking factors. Your agency should track these metrics monthly, identify pages that fail, and work with your development team (or handle directly) to fix them. For Shopify stores, this often involves app performance optimisation, image compression, and lazy loading adjustments.

Site speed monitoring. Beyond Core Web Vitals, overall page load time impacts user experience and conversion rate. Your agency should monitor key page types (homepage, collection pages, product pages) and flag any degradation. A new app installation or a theme update can tank performance overnight.

Schema markup maintenance. Structured data helps Google understand your content and can earn rich snippets in search results. Your agency should ensure Product schema, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage, and Article schema are correctly implemented and maintained. For ecommerce, Product schema with price, availability, and reviews directly impacts click-through rate from search results.

// Monthly technical SEO checklist
const technicalSEO = {
  crawlAnalysis:      'Full site crawl, fix critical errors',
  indexation:         'Review GSC coverage report',
  coreWebVitals:      'Track CWV scores, flag regressions',
  siteSpeed:          'Monitor key page load times',
  schema:             'Validate structured data',
  redirects:          'Audit redirect chains/loops',
  mobileUsability:    'Check GSC mobile usability report',
  xmlSitemap:         'Verify sitemap accuracy',
  robotsTxt:          'Review for unintended blocks',
  securityHeaders:    'HTTPS, HSTS, CSP validation',
};

What this looks like in practice

For a Shopify store with 800 products and 40 collection pages, a monthly technical audit typically uncovers 5–15 issues that need attention. Some are trivial (a missing alt attribute). Some are significant (a canonical tag pointing to the wrong page, bleeding SEO equity from a high-value collection). The point is that technical issues are continuous, not one-off. They need ongoing attention.

On-page optimisation and content

On-page SEO is where strategy meets execution. This is the work of optimising your existing pages and creating new content that targets specific keywords and search intent.

Existing page optimisation

Every month, your agency should be reviewing and optimising existing pages. This includes updating title tags and meta descriptions for underperforming pages, improving internal linking between related content, enhancing product descriptions and collection page copy, optimising heading structure (H1, H2, H3 hierarchy), improving image alt text and file names, and updating content that has become outdated.

The approach should be data-driven. Your agency should use Google Search Console to identify pages that rank on page two (positions 11–20) and could be pushed to page one with targeted optimisation. These "striking distance" keywords represent the fastest path to traffic growth because the page already has some authority — it just needs refinement.

For a typical ecommerce brand, optimising 5–10 existing pages per month is a realistic target. Each optimisation should be documented with the specific changes made and the expected impact.

New content creation

Content is the fuel of SEO. Without new, high-quality content, your organic traffic will plateau. Your agency should be producing or coordinating content every month, based on keyword research and competitive gaps.

For ecommerce brands, effective content types include buying guides and comparison content, category-level educational content, FAQ content targeting question-based searches, seasonal and trend-based content, and long-form guides that establish topical authority.

The volume depends on your retainer, but even at a modest budget, your agency should be producing at least 2–4 pieces of optimised content per month. Quality matters more than quantity — a single 2,500-word guide that targets the right keyword and provides genuine value will outperform ten thin blog posts.

We cover the importance of collection page content specifically in our guide on collection page SEO as a growth lever, which is one of the most overlooked opportunities in ecommerce SEO.

Links remain one of the strongest ranking factors. A good SEO agency should have an active, ethical link building strategy running every month.

What ethical link building looks like

Let us be clear about what link building should not involve: buying links from PBNs (private blog networks), spamming blog comments, submitting to hundreds of low-quality directories, or any other tactic that violates Google's guidelines. These approaches carry real risk of a manual penalty that could wipe out your organic traffic overnight.

What good link building looks like in 2026:

  • Digital PR: Creating newsworthy content, data studies, or expert commentary that journalists and bloggers naturally want to link to.
  • Resource link building: Creating genuinely useful resources (tools, guides, calculators) that other sites link to as references.
  • Guest contributions: Writing expert content for relevant industry publications with natural links back to your site.
  • Broken link building: Finding broken links on relevant sites and suggesting your content as a replacement.
  • Supplier and partner links: Ensuring you have links from your suppliers, manufacturers, and business partners where appropriate.
  • Unlinked brand mentions: Finding mentions of your brand online that do not include a link, and requesting one be added.

For a brand spending £2,000–£4,000 per month on SEO, expect your agency to secure 3–8 quality links per month. "Quality" means links from relevant, authoritative sites — not spam directories. One link from a respected industry publication is worth more than 50 from random blogs.

Monthly link building reporting

Your agency should report each link acquired with the source URL, domain authority, relevance to your niche, and the target page on your site. You should be able to visit every link and verify it exists, is followed (or nofollow, with explanation), and is on a real, relevant site.

Ongoing keyword research and strategy

Keyword research is not a one-off task at the start of an engagement. Markets shift, new products launch, competitors enter and exit, and search behaviour evolves. Your agency should be doing keyword research every month.

Monthly keyword activities

Rank tracking. Your agency should track rankings for your target keywords — typically 100–500 keywords depending on your site's size. Monthly tracking shows trends, identifies drops that need investigation, and highlights opportunities where rankings are improving.

New keyword discovery. Every month should include research into new keyword opportunities. This might come from competitor analysis (what are they ranking for that you are not?), seasonal trends, new product launches, or emerging search patterns in your market.

Search intent analysis. Understanding what users actually want when they search is critical. For ecommerce, the same keyword can have informational intent ("best running shoes for flat feet") or transactional intent ("buy Nike Air Max UK"). Your agency should map keywords to intent and ensure the right page types are targeting each one.

Competitor monitoring. Your agency should monitor your key competitors' organic performance monthly. What new content are they publishing? What keywords are they gaining or losing? What links are they acquiring? This competitive intelligence informs your strategy and helps you spot opportunities before they become competitive.

For brands looking to understand more about evaluating their SEO performance, our guide on how to tell if your SEO agency is doing anything provides a practical framework for assessment.

What reporting should look like

Monthly reporting is where many agencies fall down. They send automated dashboards with graphs and assume that counts as reporting. It does not.

What a good monthly SEO report includes

Executive summary. A concise overview of the month's performance, key wins, and challenges. This should be readable by a non-technical stakeholder in under two minutes.

Organic traffic data. Sessions, users, and revenue from organic search, compared to the previous month and the same month last year. Year-over-year comparison is critical because organic traffic is seasonal for most ecommerce brands.

Keyword ranking changes. Movement for target keywords, with context. "We moved from position 12 to position 8 for 'organic dog food UK'" is useful. A spreadsheet of 500 keywords with no analysis is not.

Work completed. A detailed list of what was actually done. Pages optimised, content published, technical issues fixed, links acquired. This is the accountability section — it should be specific enough that you could verify every item.

Insights and recommendations. What the data tells us and what we should do about it. Good agencies do not just report numbers — they interpret them and recommend actions.

Next month's plan. A clear outline of planned activities for the coming month. This should be tied to the overall strategy and responsive to the month's findings.

If your SEO report is just graphs without analysis, dashboards without insights, and numbers without context, you are paying for data, not strategy. The value of an SEO agency is not in collecting data — it is in knowing what to do with it.

Reporting cadence

Monthly reporting is the minimum. Most good agencies also provide a mid-month check-in or update, especially in the early stages of an engagement. They should be reachable for questions throughout the month, and proactive about flagging issues that cannot wait for the monthly report.

How the work changes over time

The mix of SEO work should evolve as your site matures. Here is what a typical progression looks like.

Months 1–3: Foundation

The first three months are heavily weighted towards technical SEO and audit work. Your agency should be conducting a comprehensive technical audit, fixing critical issues (crawl errors, broken redirects, indexing problems), implementing and validating structured data, optimising your highest-traffic pages, establishing a keyword strategy and content roadmap, and setting up tracking and reporting infrastructure.

Expect limited ranking improvements in this phase. You are building the foundation that everything else depends on.

Months 4–6: Growth

With the technical foundation in place, the focus shifts to content and links. Monthly work should include regular content creation targeting identified keyword gaps, active link building campaigns, ongoing on-page optimisation of existing content, and expansion into new keyword clusters.

You should start seeing measurable ranking improvements and traffic growth in this phase, particularly for long-tail keywords and content-driven pages.

Months 7–12: Scale

By month seven, the compounding effect of consistent SEO work becomes visible. The focus shifts to scaling what works: expanding content in areas that are showing traction, building on ranking momentum for high-value keywords, optimising conversion rate from organic traffic, exploring new content formats and topics, and competitive offensive strategies (targeting keywords your competitors own).

Month 13+: Optimise and defend

After the first year, SEO becomes about maintaining and extending your gains while defending against competitive threats. Content needs refreshing, technical issues continue to arise, and new opportunities emerge. The work never stops — it just becomes more efficient as the foundation solidifies.

Red flags in monthly SEO work

Not all SEO agencies are created equal. Here are the warning signs that the monthly work is not up to standard.

  • The report is the same template every month with updated numbers. If there is no analysis, no insights, and no adaptation to changing conditions, the agency is on autopilot.
  • They cannot explain the links they have built. If your agency cannot show you exactly where your links are, who they are from, and why they are valuable, the links may not exist or may be from low-quality sources.
  • Organic traffic is flat or declining after six months. Some plateaus are normal, especially in competitive markets. But sustained flat performance after six months of paid SEO work demands an explanation and a revised strategy.
  • They never suggest changes to your website. SEO impacts site structure, content, design, and functionality. An agency that never makes recommendations about your site is not doing comprehensive SEO.
  • They focus exclusively on rankings, not revenue. Rankings are a means to an end. The end is revenue. If your agency celebrates ranking improvements but cannot show corresponding traffic and revenue growth, something is wrong.
  • They are not proactive about algorithm updates. Google updates its algorithm regularly. A good agency monitors these updates, assesses their impact on your site, and adjusts strategy accordingly. An agency that never mentions algorithm updates is not paying attention.

Our detailed guide on SEO audit checklists for Shopify provides a framework for evaluating the technical quality of the SEO work being done on your site.

Monthly SEO is not a black box. It is a defined set of activities — technical maintenance, on-page optimisation, content creation, link building, and strategic analysis — executed consistently and reported transparently. If your agency is doing these things, you should see results. If they are not, you now have a checklist to hold them accountable.

If you are looking for an SEO agency that operates with full transparency and delivers measurable results for ecommerce brands, start a conversation with us. We will show you exactly what we would do for your site, why we would do it, and what results you can realistically expect.