Ecommerce SEO cost, priced by how many SKUs you carry

Catalogue size sets the bill, not ambition

Ecommerce quotes look irrational until you understand what's being priced. A 50,000-product store is not 50,000 pages of work. It's one product template, one or two category templates, a filter system, a search page, a pagination scheme — and, if the filters were configured by whoever set up the theme, several hundred thousand crawlable URL permutations that nobody meant to create.

That last number is what you're paying for. Content on a store is comparatively cheap and comparatively optional. Crawl control is neither. Which is why the honest way to quote ecommerce SEO is to ask three questions before anything else: how many SKUs, are filters generating URLs, and which platform. The answers usually predict the retainer to within about 20%.

Three catalogue sizes, priced

Indian ecommerce retainers cluster around three shapes. Ex-GST, assuming one country and one language — add roughly ₹15,000 a month per additional language, and more if you're running country domains with hreflang.

The cost cliff: faceted navigation and crawl budget

Filters multiply. Five colours, six sizes, twelve brands, four price bands and three sort orders on a single category produce thousands of unique URLs, every one of them crawlable unless somebody decided otherwise. Multiply by 80 categories and you have a site whose real URL count is two orders of magnitude larger than its product count.

Google will crawl a lot of that. It won't crawl all of it, it will spend the effort on the wrong URLs, and your new products will sit unindexed while a bot works through /category?colour=blue&sort=price-desc&page=7. That's what crawl budget actually means in practice, and it's the single biggest reason large stores underperform relative to how much content they've bought.

The work isn't a config toggle, which is why it's expensive.

1. Demand research per facet. Which filter combinations do people actually search for? "Running shoes for men under 5000" has demand. "Running shoes, blue, size 9, sorted by newest" does not. Only the first deserves an indexable URL.
2. A written rule for every facet. One or two get real, indexable, linkable URLs with their own copy. Some get canonicalised to the parent. Some get parameter handling and no internal links pointing at them. Some get blocked outright.
3. Implementation, usually with your developers. Template changes, internal link logic, canonical rules, sitemap regeneration, pagination behaviour. This is where a locked stack turns three hours into three weeks.
4. Log-file verification. The only honest proof. Pull the server logs 30 days later and check whether Googlebot's crawl actually moved from filter URLs to product and category URLs. Without this step you've bought a theory.

Category pages earn. Product descriptions defend.

The most common way to waste money on ecommerce content is to rewrite every product description. On a 5,000-SKU store, bespoke copy at ₹300 a product is ₹15,00,000, and the overwhelming majority of those pages will never rank for anything because nobody searches for that exact product name.

Category and collection pages are where the searchable demand lives. "Running shoes for men", "cotton kurtas under 1500", "gaming laptops with RTX" — head and mid-tail queries with volume, intent and margin. A properly researched category page with real copy, correct internal links and a sensible filter set costs ₹6,000–₹12,000 and can carry a hundred products behind it.

Product pages have a different job: don't be a duplicate, don't be thin, be technically correct. Split the catalogue and spend accordingly.

• Top 10% by revenue and by impressions get bespoke copy. These are the products people search by name, compare, and abandon. Worth ₹300–₹800 each.
• Everything else gets a unique templated structure. Specs, materials, use case, care, size guidance — generated from real attribute data, not spun text. The goal is uniqueness and usefulness, not word count.
• Product schema on all of them, without exception. Price, availability, review count, GTIN where you have it. It's cheap, it's template-level, and it's what makes your listing look like a product rather than a paragraph.
• Budget split we'd recommend at 5,000 SKUs: roughly 70% of content spend to categories and buying guides, 30% to the product tail. Reverse that and you'll have paid for a great deal of prose nobody was searching for.

Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento: same job, different bill

Platform doesn't change what needs doing. It changes how much of it is free and how much needs a developer, and that lands directly on the retainer.

Judge the spend on revenue per session, not rankings

Store rankings are noisy by nature. They move with stock levels, price changes, seasonality and whatever a marketplace discounted this week. Reporting on them produces a chart that always has an explanation and never has a conclusion. Two numbers tell the truth instead: organic revenue and organic revenue per session. The second matters more, because it separates traffic that buys from traffic that merely arrived.

Run the break-even openly. A ₹1,25,000/mo retainer is ₹15,00,000 a year. At a 25% gross margin it has to add ₹60,00,000 of organic revenue to pay for itself — ₹5,00,000 a month. If your organic sessions currently produce ₹60 each, that's roughly 8,300 extra qualifying sessions a month. Swap in your own margin and revenue-per-session figures; the structure holds and the sum takes two minutes.

Track three things monthly and you'll know long before the revenue tells you: indexed product count against published count, organic revenue per session, and the share of organic revenue from non-brand queries. The third shows whether you're growing or just harvesting demand you already had.

What we charge, and what we guarantee instead of rankings

Our SEO starts at ₹75,000/mo, with smaller sites from ₹40,000/mo. A catalogue past a few thousand SKUs prices above the start line for the reasons on this page — faceting, crawl engineering and template work are real hours, and we'd rather quote them than absorb them badly. Organic Social & Content is ₹30,000, ₹50,000 or ₹70,000 a month; Performance Marketing is ₹40,000, ₹75,000 or ₹1,50,000. Bundles: SEO plus social ₹99,000/mo, social plus performance ₹75,000/mo, all three ₹1,75,000/mo. All ex-GST, ad spend billed separately with zero media markup.

We don't promise a ranking position for a product term — nobody controls Google's index, and stock availability alone will move you three places in a week. What we freeze on day one is your trailing-90-day count of qualified leads from organic search, agreed in writing before anyone touches a template. Miss it in 90 days and we keep working free until we beat it. It's why we take three new clients a month and no more.

If you want to sanity-check the number you've been quoted, the seven variables that move an SEO quote attaches a rupee swing to each one, and our pricing page has the current card.