It’s no secret that hiring an eCommerce SEO agency is expensive, and some eCommerce merchants are getting leery about the prospect, anyway, given that every few months some marketing “guru” says SEO is dead, and that more and more people are moving over to AI engines to find what they’re looking for instead of search engines.

Be that as it may, SEO can still be a fairly lucrative marketing channel, provided you hire smart. On that note, here are 4 solid tactics for assessing the capabilities of an eCommerce SEO agency.

Read Reviews Off the Website

Let’s be crystal clear here since that header leaves a little room for doubt. That’s read reviews off the website, not from the website. In other words, find reviews somewhere else that are live, don’t just trust the ones that appear on the company website.

Reviews you can find elsewhere are less likely to be biased or curated. They still might not be 100% credible, but by every metric they’ll be more likely to be trustworthy than any that you find on the website.

Check Case Studies

Case studies are a close second when it comes to assessing the abilities of an eCommerce SEO company. There should be several published on the company website as most SEO agencies are very eager and willing to share the results they’ve produced for clients.

Which brings up an important caveat. There are a lot of “case studies” out there that don’t have data. Ignore these and be very skeptical of any agency that publishes them. A case study should showcase results in no uncertain terms and you should be able to see from one just what sorts of organic ranking increases and growth in traffic the agency produced, as well as what the keyword research looked like, how the conversion rate changed, and other important insights.

Look at the Organic Search Results

All else being equal, this is the most important thing you can do prior to hiring an eCommerce SEO agency.

Open up Chrome and start an organic search. If you can find the eCommerce SEO agency in question, that’s a winner.

Look for blogs that are ranking from an agency source, but see if you can find pillar pages, or even the homepage for the domain, ranking in the organic results. If the agency can get blogs ranking, they know something about content creation and content marketing.

Don’t hire based on ads alone, because ads are purchased and not earned through eCommerce SEO strategies. If you can find an agency ranking in the organic search results, that means they are doing something right and their own SEO efforts and content are paying off.

This is even more important if only because of how competitive, and saturated, the organic results are for SEO-related keywords.

Ask AI About These “eCommerce SEO Experts”

After the last consideration, this is one of the best ways to vet the abilities of an eCommerce SEO agency. Choose your AI engine of choice and then ask it specific questions about an agency, or ask it for recommendations without leading it.

You can also ask an AI engine, like Perplexity or ChatGPT, for specific recommendations for agencies for your business model, specific to the goals you wish to achieve.

Working with an eCommerce SEO Agency for Marketing Success

While there’s always some risk involved in hiring an eCommerce SEO agency and that risk can never be fully removed from the prospect, taking advantage of some of the suggestions mentioned in here can mitigate it somewhat.

Before you hire any agency, comb the internet for reviews, check out any case studies they may have published, ask AI, and most importantly, look through the search results to see how their domain, or at least some of their website’s pages are ranking.

If you can clear up some of the question marks, you can rest easier not just with the expense of hiring the agency for eCommerce SEO services but in the necessity of the long-term partnership.

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