Data Solutions
The pricing tells you almost nothing
Shopify SEO retainers are quoted from a few hundred dollars a month to several thousand, and the number correlates with agency overhead far better than it correlates with what gets done. Two engagements at the same price can differ completely in what arrives each month.
So the useful question is not what it costs. It is what a given month is supposed to produce, and whether that thing would still be worth something if you cancelled in month four.
Here is what the work consists of when it is done properly, and what it consists of when it is not.
What the work actually is
The query set
Everything starts here, and it is the step most often skipped because it is the least visible thing to bill for.
A query set is the list of what your buyers actually search, mapped against what you actually sell and what actually carries margin. Not a keyword export sorted by volume. The output should tell you which terms are worth a page, which are worth a paragraph, and which are worth ignoring despite the volume next to them.
The reason it comes first is that the alternative is guessing, and guessing at this stage invalidates everything built on top. I audited my own 44-article library against six months of Search Console data recently and found that one article was producing 78 percent of all clicks while a 22-article section I had treated as the site's foundation accounted for 4.6 percent. I had been planning around that section for months. The data had been available the whole time.
If a proposal does not start here, ask what it starts with instead.
The structure
Once you know the demand, the question is which pages should exist and how they connect.
For a Shopify store this is mostly collection architecture: which collections exist, which are indexable, which filter combinations deserve a page of their own, and what links to what. It is unglamorous and it is usually where the largest single gain sits, because most stores have collections that are three clicks deep with no editorial links pointing at them.
The pattern generalises. On a reference site I built to roughly 1,300 articles, the two highest-traffic URLs were both category hub pages rather than any individual article, because every article in a category linked up to its hub and no leaf page had anything comparable. Collections behave the same way when you treat them the same way.
The content
Content fills the structure. It is not the starting point, and a proposal that leads with a monthly article count has skipped the two steps that decide whether those articles land anywhere useful.
What matters more than volume:
- Collection copy, which almost nobody writes, and which is often the difference between position 20 and position 6 on a category term.
- Content that answers a question a buyer has before choosing, which tends to rank because it deserves to.
- A publishing rate the site can absorb. Rate is a constraint, not a target. I know that one specifically: on the site mentioned above I kept publishing past the point I should have stopped, and Google issued a spam action that removed most of its search traffic overnight. The growth strategy and the failure had the same cause.
The technical work
Real, necessary, and routinely oversold. Technical fixes matter when a technical problem is the constraint. On plenty of stores the crawl is basically clean and the actual problem is that the catalog is organised around terms nobody searches.
A crawler always finds something, which is exactly why a crawl makes such a convenient deliverable. If the technical section of a proposal is the longest one, ask which of those items is currently preventing a page from ranking.
What is activity rather than results
Four things that appear in most retainers and produce little on their own:
| Item | Why it looks like work | What it actually is |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly PDF reports | Arrives regularly, full of charts | A record of what happened, not a cause of it |
| Keyword rank tracking | Numbers that move | Rankings on terms nobody buys from move too |
| Blog volume with no query set | Visible output every month | A larger pile of pages nobody searches for |
| Directory and citation building | A list of completed submissions | Barely moves a national e-commerce store |
None of these is fraudulent. They are all things somebody genuinely did. The problem is that they are all easy to produce at a steady rate regardless of whether anything is working, which is what makes them attractive to bill and unreliable to judge by.
Five questions to ask before signing
What does the first month produce? You want an answer naming an artifact you keep, like a query set and a structural plan. If the first month produces onboarding, the first month produces a relationship.
Which of my terms do you expect to move, and by when? Specific terms with a stated horizon can be checked later, which is precisely why the common answer is "improved visibility". Four to six months on anything competitive is an honest number. Faster than that means either uncontested terms or a different starting line.
Who writes the content, and who reviews it? Ask to see three pieces written for a store in a category the writer did not already know. Read them as a buyer rather than as a marketer.
What happens if I leave in month four? Content, structure and documentation on your own domain stay yours. Anything living in the agency's tooling, or rankings resting on links they control, walks out with them.
What would you not do for me? The most useful question on this list. Anyone who says yes to every part of your situation has not looked at it closely. A good answer names something specific about your store that makes a common tactic a bad idea.
What I do, and what I do not
Since this article is on my own site, the disclosure belongs here rather than in a footer.
Full Stack Data Solutions is one person. I do the query set, the structure, the content pipeline and the technical work, and nothing is subcontracted. The production system is AI-assisted, which is how one person handles the volume, and every piece is reviewed before it ships.
What I do not do: local SEO and Google Business Profile work, link building as a service, or paid media. If your problem is that people nearby cannot find your shop, I am the wrong call.
There is one case study behind this rather than a portfolio, and it is a mixed one. The site described above reached 658 daily organic visitors in nine weeks with no ads and no social distribution, and then lost most of its Google traffic to a spam action caused by my own publishing rate. Both halves are written up in detail, because a case study that reports only the first half is the kind of claim this article is about.
If that is the sort of engagement you want, tell me what you sell. If you have three proposals on your desk already, the five questions above will do more for you than another one will.