If you’re evaluating Shopify SEO agencies in Canada, here’s an honest checklist from an agency that competes for the same work.
1. Ask about Shopify specifically, not SEO generally
Good Shopify SEO agencies will talk about /collections/ URLs, faceted filters, app bloat, Shopify Plus scripts and image strategy. Generalist SEO agencies will talk about ‘keyword research’ and ‘content marketing’. Both are needed; the Shopify specifics are how you separate experts from generalists.
2. Ask to see real Shopify stores they’ve worked on
Not screenshots. Live URLs you can visit and inspect. Most agencies will share this with NDAs in place. If they won’t share anything, that’s a flag.
3. Ask about reporting cadence and metrics
Bad reporting: weekly ‘activity’ reports showing ‘blog posts written’, ‘backlinks earned’, ‘keywords tracked’.
Good reporting: monthly reports tying organic sessions, organic-attributed revenue and revenue-per-session to specific changes. Bonus if it includes Core Web Vitals trends.
4. Ask what they’ll do in the first 90 days
A good agency can describe a 30/60/90-day plan after one discovery call. A bad one will hide behind ‘every engagement is different’ and leave specifics for the contract.
5. Ask about link building methodology
Listen carefully. ‘Guest posting on relevant blogs’ is fine. ‘We have a network of high-DR sites’ is a red flag. PBN signals are how rankings get torched in 18 months.
6. Pricing transparency
Good agencies publish at least price ranges or describe how they scope. Bad agencies refuse to give numbers until a third call. We publish ours on SEO Packages.
7. The reference question
Ask: “Can you connect me with a client who fired you?”. The answer doesn’t have to be yes — but how they handle the question tells you a lot.
8. When agency, when freelancer, when in-house
We wrote a longer piece on this: Ecommerce SEO Agency vs Freelancer. The TL;DR: agencies for breadth and continuity, freelancers for depth in a single specialty, in-house when SEO is core to the business model.
If you’re considering us, we’d rather lose a bid than win on overpromise. Free audit, no commitment — see Shopify SEO for what an engagement actually looks like.
