Is technical SEO holding most Shopify brands back from ranking?

Rarely. Of the 100+ brands audited each month, only two or three have a genuine technical SEO issue holding back growth. For 99% of brands, what's missing isn't a technical fix — it's page optimization, content, and link building. Technical SEO should be set up correctly and maintained, but treating it as the primary barrier when it isn't wastes months and budget.

Why is a 'shop all' collection page bad for Shopify SEO?

Shop-all pages are the least effective SEO pages on an e-commerce site. They're vague, target no specific keyword, convert poorly, and can cannibalize against the homepage. The agency almost always noindexes shop-all pages. Every product use case, demographic, size, color, and application deserves its own dedicated collection page with a specific target keyword — not a catch-all landing page.

How much should a Shopify brand spend on backlinks per month?

For six- to eight-figure brands, niche-relevant links at $150–$400 each outperform high-DR PR links at $600+ each. The agency builds five to fifteen links per month per client in that price range and gets strong results without spending $5,000+ on flashy PR links that move the needle less. Nine- and ten-figure brands with PR budgets and brand reputation needs can justify the higher spend — but most e-commerce brands below that threshold cannot.

How long should you commit to SEO before evaluating results?

A minimum of four to six months before drawing conclusions. SEO is a compounding channel — the impact of each month's work builds on the previous month. One or two months produces almost no usable signal. If results are appearing at month four or five with a competent team, the brand won't want to stop. If the plan is to try SEO for two months and see, the money is better spent elsewhere in the short term.

Should a brand pause paid ads and other channels to invest in SEO?

No. SEO is a channel to add, not a channel to substitute. Pulling spend from paid ads, email, influencer, or social to fund SEO removes momentum from channels that produce results now, while waiting for a channel that takes months to compound. A brand that went all-in on SEO by pulling all other spend saw its momentum collapse across every channel simultaneously. SEO works best as an additional growth channel running alongside existing ones.

Is it too early to pivot from SEO to GEO or AEO?

Yes, for most brands. People are still finding and buying products on Google — organic search sessions are actually increasing post-ChatGPT adoption. One brand that pivoted entirely to GEO after the agency's work ended lost 50% of non-branded transactional traffic and 762 money-page keywords from the top three. GEO and AI search tactics should run alongside traditional SEO, not replace it.

10 SEO Mistakes Every E-Commerce Brand Is Still Making

Auditing 100+ e-commerce websites in a month — across agency clients, consulting work, and coaching — means seeing the same patterns repeat at every revenue level. These are the ten mistakes that show up most consistently, and most of them come down to one fundamental misunderstanding: SEO is a growth channel, not a one-time fix.

1. Thinking SEO Is Something That Needs to Be "Fixed"

The most common framing: "our SEO must be broken — how do we fix it?" This framing is usually wrong and almost always expensive. Agencies have made a lot of money on long technical SEO contracts that don't move the needle, by convincing brands that their site is broken before anything else can happen.

Of the 100+ brands audited each month, two or three have a genuine technical issue limiting growth. The others don't have broken SEO — they have no SEO strategy. There's a difference. A brand that has never done SEO hasn't broken anything; they've just never invested in it. Treating it as a channel to build rather than a problem to fix changes everything about how the budget gets spent.

2. Using a 2021 Playbook

SEO in 2021 was forgiving. Write blogs, build some links, optimize category pages, repeat. That basic playbook still has a foundation of truth — internal links, backlinks, and optimized product and category pages are still core — but it's no longer sufficient on its own.

The 2025 playbook adds: middle- and bottom-funnel content (competitor comparisons, alternatives articles, buying guides), branded Reddit mentions, and AI search optimization. Brands still paying a few hundred dollars per month for generic blog posts and calling it an SEO strategy are burning money with minimal return.

3. Thinking Too Small With Collections

The most common collection page mistake: a "shop all" page plus a handful of vague category pages. Shop-all pages are the worst SEO pages on an e-commerce site — they target no specific keyword, convert poorly, and can cannibalize the homepage. The agency almost always noindexes them.

Every product attribute deserves its own collection: by use case, by demographic, by size, by color, by material, by activity. A compression sock brand doesn't just have "compression socks" — it has men's compression socks, women's compression socks, compression socks for flying, for running, for wide calves, for plantar fasciitis, and more. Each one is a collection that targets a distinct keyword, reaches a buyer with a specific need, and converts at a higher rate than a generic shop-all page ever could. Those same pages also serve email, SMS, and paid ad campaigns — the SEO investment pays across every channel.

4. Viewing SEO as a Checklist

SEO checklists are useful lead magnets. They are not strategies. Completing a checklist doesn't finish SEO any more than setting up a Meta ad account finishes paid advertising. There's no endpoint.

The agency doesn't use checklists because the work is ongoing — more keywords to find, more pages to rank higher, more link gaps to close, more competitor content to create. SEO is a compounding growth engine. Treating it as a box to check produces checklist-level results: minimal, temporary, and soon forgotten.

5. Overspending on Backlinks

High-DR PR links — Forbes, Yahoo, MSN, major publications — are glamorous and expensive. At $600+ per link and $5,000+ per month for a PR agency, they're also a poor use of budget for most e-commerce brands. Nine- and ten-figure brands with real PR needs can justify the spend. Six- to eight-figure brands almost always can't.

Niche-relevant links at $150–$400 each move the needle more per dollar for most brands. They're not as exciting to report on, but they're cheaper, more topically relevant, and produce better results. The agency builds five to fifteen of them per client per month and consistently outperforms what larger link budgets spent on PR would produce.

6. Underspending on Backlinks

The opposite problem is more common. For competitive keywords, internal links and topical authority get a brand most of the way there — but not all of the way. Without external authority signals, ranking number one on high-competition keywords isn't achievable regardless of how good the content is.

A furniture brand consulting session produced clear action steps: optimize pages, build longtail categories, add internal links, then build backlinks to the strongest pages. The brand skipped steps one through three and spent $800 on five links, expecting to outrank Wayfair — a brand that almost certainly spends over $100K per month on links. Five links at $800 total, with no foundational work done first, produced no results. The order of operations matters, and the budget has to be proportional to the competition.

7. Trying SEO Out

A two-month SEO trial is not a trial — it's a waste. SEO is compounding. Month one plants seeds. Month four starts to show movement. Month twelve is where the investment becomes clearly profitable. Brands that commit for one or two months and then evaluate are measuring the wrong thing at the wrong time.

A real example: a brand with previous success in affiliate content came in needing traffic recovery after core updates and self-inflicted traffic drops. They wanted it fixed in 60 days. It wasn't fixable in 60 days. The lesson applies in both directions — the brand should have been willing to go longer, and the agency should have been clearer about realistic timelines from the start. If the plan is to try SEO briefly and re-evaluate, the budget is better deployed in paid channels that return faster.

8. Expecting SEO to Be a Silver Bullet

SEO is a supplementary channel. It works best alongside paid ads, email, social, and every other channel — not instead of them. A beauty brand pulled spend from paid ads, influencer partnerships, email, and organic social to fund SEO, stopped posting on social entirely, and watched momentum collapse across every channel simultaneously. When the SEO results eventually started appearing, there was nothing else running to amplify them.

Adding SEO while keeping everything else running is the right approach. Sacrificing existing momentum for a channel that takes months to compound is not.

9. Pivoting Too Early to GEO

People are still finding and buying products on Google. Organic search sessions per user actually increased after ChatGPT adoption — from 10.5 searches per week to 12.5 on average. The search landscape is expanding, not contracting.

A brand the agency grew from $12K to over $100K in revenue over a year and a half pivoted entirely to GEO after the relationship ended. A few months later: 50% decline in non-branded transactional traffic, 762 money-page keywords lost from the top three, and the number-one rankings the agency built were gone entirely. GEO and AI search tactics belong in the strategy — but alongside traditional SEO, not as a replacement for it.

10. Not Building Enough Internal Links

Internal links are consistently the most underused lever in e-commerce SEO. Four to five internal links to a page from a DR30 site is roughly equivalent in ranking value to one external backlink from a similar domain. The internal links cost nothing and take minutes. The backlink costs around $200 and takes days to secure.

Most brands audited haven't fully tapped internal link potential before turning to backlinks. Internal links get a page 80% of the way to the top position. For brands that aren't ranking as high as their content quality suggests they should, internal linking is almost always the first place to look and the fastest lever to pull.

Top 10 Most Common SEO Mistakes (I audited 100+ brands last month)