How to Get Ecommerce SEO Clients With a Three-Finding Store Teardown
Crawl a store's public site and send three neutral findings: one collection page, one product page, one crawl issue. Then ask which categories matter most.
Before you contact a store, crawl its public site and send three specific findings, each tied to a page type that earns money. The method:
- Crawl the public store: Count the pages in the sitemap and crawl the site. No login, Search Console or GA4 access is needed at this stage.
- One finding per page type: Take one from a collection page, one from a product page and one from how the store is crawled and indexed.
- Leave out platform defaults: A Shopify product URL under /collections/ with a correct canonical is the platform working as designed. Send only what is broken.
- One fix and one number: Name the fix you would do first and put one count beside it, such as 12 of 20 sampled products.
- State it neutrally, then ask: Say what the page served. End with one question: which categories matter most to the business?
After the store signs and grants access, the same crawl joins Search Console and GA4 to show which collections and products lose clicks and revenue.
This is a sales method for agencies that want online stores as clients. Before the store signs, CrawlRaven's crawl and the free ecommerce tools produce the three findings with no access. After it signs, the crawl joins Search Console and GA4 in a workspace with content priorities and separate audits. Try CrawlRaven free for 7 days: 1 website, no credit card →
Point a crawler at a Shopify store and the duplicate URL report fills up before the crawl finishes. Most of those rows are the platform working as designed. An agency that forwards that report as a pitch tells the owner their store is broken in a way it is not.
The short version: to get ecommerce SEO clients, crawl the store's public site, send three specific findings tied to the pages that earn money, name one fix, and ask which categories matter most. I have run an SEO agency for more than 15 years, and this is the pitch I would send to a store.
Three things I saw on store-a.example
The page has no category copy under the heading, and the title tag reads "Rugs | Store A".
Confirmed with: Collection page SEO checker
The page carries 2 Product blocks in its markup: one from the theme and one from a reviews app.
Confirmed with: Schema validator
On 12 of 20 sampled products, the copy of the product URL under /collections/ names itself as the canonical.
Confirmed with: Shopify duplicate URL checker
Restore the canonical line in the theme layout so each copy points at the plain /products/ URL. One template change covers every product.
Which categories matter most to the business this year? I looked at rugs because it is first in your menu.
Illustration with placeholder names and numbers. Each finding says what the page served on the day you checked.
The example above uses a placeholder store. It has three findings: a rugs collection with no category copy and the title “Rugs | Store A”, a product page with 2 Product blocks in its markup, and a canonical problem on 12 of 20 sampled products. The canonical is marked as the fix to do first.
Why three findings get a reply from a store owner
A store earns from a small set of page types. A teardown that names one real issue on each of them reads like work done for this store.
- It is about their pages. Each finding carries a URL the owner recognises.
- It is short. Three findings fit in one message and can be read on a phone.
- It is checkable. The owner or their developer can open the URL and see the same thing.
- It ends with a question. The owner gets to tell you what you could not see from outside.
Owners search for this help. Google Ads data for the United States on 11 October 2026 shows 1,300 searches a month for “ecommerce seo services”, 1,300 for “shopify seo agency” and 170 for “ecommerce seo audit”.
Advice for agencies is thin. On the same day, the Google results for “how to get ecommerce seo clients” were general pieces about getting SEO clients from Search Engine Land, Moz, Contentellect, Reddit, Quora and YouTube. None was specific to online stores.
The store teardown before first contact
Crawl, pick three, pick one fix, send, ask
Count the pages in the sitemap, then crawl the store. You need no login and no access to Search Console or GA4.
One from a collection page, one from a product page, one from how the store is crawled and indexed.
Choose the finding that a single template change repairs across the store, and put one count beside it.
A short message or a one-page link. Each finding states what the page served, with the URL and the date.
Ask which categories matter most to the business. The owner's answer decides what you look at next.
The owner's answer in step 5 sends you back to step 2 with the categories they named.
The flow has five moves: crawl, pick three, pick one fix, send, ask. The steps below split “pick three” into its three page types, which makes six steps.
Step 1: Crawl the public store
You have no access yet, so everything comes from the public site. If you do not have a prospect, build a list of stores that need SEO and qualify each store first.
- Count the pages. The website page counter reads the sitemap and breaks the count down by section.
- Pull the URL list with the sitemap extractor, so you can see which collections and products the store lists.
- Crawl the site. CrawlRaven's crawl reports pages with no internal links, crawler access rules, rendering problems and schema errors.
- Open the main menu and write down the first three collections. They are your first guess at what the store cares about.
On Shopify the sitemap is a fair starting list. Shopify's help center says the sitemap.xml file is generated automatically and links to separate sitemaps for products, collections, blogs and pages.
Step 2: Take one finding from a collection page
A collection page is the page a store wants to rank for a product-type search such as “wool rugs”. Pick one collection from the menu and run it through the collection page SEO checker, which runs 13 checks on one category URL and shows the value the page served.
- Title tag. Is the title tag only the collection name plus the store name?
- Category copy. Is there any text on the page besides the product grid?
- Page 2. Does ?page=2 carry a canonical to itself? Google's pagination guide says the first page of a sequence should not be the canonical for the other pages.
- Product links. Does the grid link to products with plain links a crawler can follow? Google's site structure guide says Googlebot may miss products that category pages do not link to.
Choose the one that is clearly present on the page. My guide to category page SEO covers the fixes you will deliver later.
Step 3: Take one finding from a product page
Open one product from that collection. The check that produces the clearest finding is the Product structured data, because Google publishes what it requires. Paste the product URL into the schema validator.
- Count the Product blocks. Google's merchant listing guide says product rich results only support pages that focus on a single product or its variants.
- Read the Offer. The same guide lists name, image and offers as required on the Product, and price and priceCurrency as required on the Offer.
- Compare the price in the markup with the price shown on the page.
The Shopify canonical and duplicate content guide on this site records a second Product block from a reviews app on a live store. The product schema generator writes a clean block for the fix, and product page SEO covers the rest of the page.
Step 4: Take one finding from crawling and indexing
This finding is about how search engines reach the store and which URLs they are told to index. Stores create many URLs for the same content. Google's canonicalization guide lists sorting and filtering on a category page as one cause of duplicate URLs.
A line in a page's code that names the main address for that page. When the same product can be reached at several addresses, the canonical tag tells search engines which one to index.
- Duplicate product URLs. The Shopify duplicate URL checker samples 20 products and reports the canonical tag on the /collections/ copy, the plain page and the ?variant= form.
- Filters and sorts. Google's faceted navigation guide says filter URLs can generate infinite URL spaces and recommends robots.txt to stop crawling of the ones you do not need. Test one filter URL in the robots.txt tester.
- Sitemap. Compare the sitemap list from step 1 with the collections in the menu. A menu collection missing from the sitemap is worth a line.
- App scripts. The Shopify app script checker lists every script on a product page, grouped by theme, platform, app and third party. A script with no async or defer attribute pauses the browser's parsing of the page while it loads.
Page type, finding, and the free tool that confirms it
| Page type | What to look for | Free tool that confirms it | What the tool reads |
|---|---|---|---|
| Collection pages | Title, H1, category copy, page 2 canonical, links to products | Collection page SEO checker | 13 checks on one category URL |
| Product pages | One Product block, with a price and currency in its Offer | Schema validator | The markup one product URL serves |
| Crawling: duplicate URLs | Canonical on the /collections/ copy and the ?variant= form of a product | Shopify duplicate URL checker | 20 sampled products |
| Crawling: filters and sorts | Whether stacked filter and sort URLs are blocked | Robots.txt tester | One URL against the live robots.txt |
| Crawling: sitemap | Which products and collections the sitemap lists | Sitemap extractor and website page counter | Every URL in the sitemap, counted by section |
| Crawling: app scripts | Scripts on a product page and who added each one | Shopify app script checker | The script tags in one page's HTML |
Every tool here reads the public site. None needs a login to the store, Search Console or GA4.
The matrix has six rows: collection pages, product pages, and four crawling rows for duplicate URLs, filters and sorts, the sitemap and app scripts. Every tool in it reads the public site. For the order to fix these in after signing, see technical SEO for ecommerce.
Rows to leave out because the platform is working as designed
Check each crawling finding against what the platform does on purpose. Shopify's help center says canonical tags are auto-generated and that the default robots.txt works for most stores. Leave these rows out:
- A /collections/x/products/y URL whose canonical points at /products/y. That is the intended result.
- A ?page=2 URL whose canonical points at itself. Google's pagination guide asks for this.
- Sort URLs and URLs with two filters. Shopify's reference theme store disallowed both in its robots.txt when checked on 11 October 2026.
A finding is real when the canonical is missing, points at the collection copy itself, or points at a page that redirects or returns a 404. Google treats a canonical as a hint, so a wrong one leaves the choice of URL to Google.
Step 5: Pick one fix and one number
Mark one of the three findings as the fix to do first. Pick the one that meets most of these tests:
- One template or theme change repairs it on every page.
- You can put a count beside it from the public site.
- The owner can verify it by opening one URL.
- It touches a collection or product the store features.
Then write one number. In the example at the top, the number is 12 of 20 sampled products. Say where the number comes from and how many pages you checked. A sample of 20 describes the theme, and you should say it is a sample.
I would leave revenue estimates out of this message. You cannot see the store's clicks or sales from outside, and a made-up dollar figure is the fastest way to lose a careful owner. A count of pages you checked yourself is a number you can defend.
Step 6: Send it and ask which categories matter most
Write each finding as what the page served on the day you checked. “The rugs collection has no text besides the product grid” is a neutral statement. Keep adjectives about the site out of it.
Subject: Three things I saw on [store name] Hi [name], I run an SEO agency and I looked at the public pages of [store name] on [date]. Three things stood out, one for each page type: 1. Collection page ([URL]): [what the page served]. 2. Product page ([URL]): [what the page served]. 3. Crawling and indexing ([URL]): [what the page served], on [n] of the [n] products I sampled. If I could change one thing first it would be [the fix], because one template change covers every product. I looked at [category] because it is first in your menu. Which categories matter most to the business this year?
- Give the URL and the date for every finding.
- Say which tool or check confirmed it.
- Name the one fix and the one number.
- End with the question about categories, and say why you picked the collection you looked at.
The question does real work. You chose a collection from the menu. The owner knows which categories carry the margin, which are seasonal and which they plan to drop. Their answer tells you where to look next. To reach the right person at a larger store, see finding the contact with Apollo.
What loses the client
This pitch fails in three predictable ways.
- Being too sure of your recommendation. If you arrive with the answer and do not listen to their specific requirement, you lose them. You may be the SEO expert, but they know the business. Do not try to teach business to them.
- Bashing their site. Some owners are offended when you go on about how much is wrong. Three findings in plain words are enough.
- Reporting a platform default as a fault. A developer will spot it, and the other two findings lose their weight with it.
When the teardown does not go to plan
What if the crawl finds nothing worth sending?
Then the technical side is in good shape, and you should say so if you write to them. Use a different opening for that store, such as testing which brands AI assistants recommend. Do not stretch a minor warning into a finding.
What if the store is not on Shopify?
The three page types are the same on every platform. The collection page checker reads Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Magento category URLs. The duplicate URL checker and the app script checker are built for Shopify paths, so rely on the crawl for those two checks on other platforms.
What if the store already has an agency or a developer?
Neutral wording helps most here. The person who built the theme may read your message. Findings stated as facts with URLs give them something to check, and the question about categories still stands.
What changes after the store signs
Before signing, you can see what the pages serve. You cannot see what they earn. Once the client grants access, CrawlRaven joins the crawl with Google Search Console and GA4 in a workspace with content priorities and separate audits. That is the full ecommerce SEO audit, and it is where the owner's answer about categories gets used.
- Collections. Which collection pages lose clicks, and which crawl findings sit on them.
- Products. Each product URL with its Search Console clicks and impressions and its GA4 revenue.
- Order of work. Findings ranked by the pages that earn, so the owner's top categories come first.
Tools that make this faster
- CrawlRaven. Our tool. Before the store signs, the crawl finds pages with no internal links, crawler access rules, rendering problems and schema errors. After access is granted, it joins the crawl with Search Console and GA4. Plans run from $29/month, after a 7-day free trial.
- Free ecommerce checks. The collection page SEO checker, the Shopify duplicate URL checker and the Shopify app script checker each read one public URL or one store.
- General checks. The canonical checker confirms a single URL once the fix ships.
CrawlRaven does not track AI mentions or run prompts today. We are also launching an AI SEO tool soon. Join the waitlist to hear when it opens.
Sources used in this post
- Google Search Central – Managing crawling of faceted navigation URLs: infinite URL spaces and the robots.txt recommendation.
- Google Search Central – Pagination and incremental page loading: the canonical on paginated pages.
- Google Search Central – What is canonicalization: causes of duplicate URLs, and the canonical as a hint.
- Google Search Central – Merchant listing structured data: single-product pages and the required properties.
- Google Search Central – Help Google understand your ecommerce site structure: category pages linking to products.
- Shopify Help Center – SEO overview, Shopify Help Center – Editing robots.txt and Shopify Help Center – Finding your sitemap: auto-generated canonical tags, robots.txt and sitemap.xml.
- MDN – The script element: what async and defer change about parsing.
- The robots.txt file on theme-dawn-demo.myshopify.com, fetched 11 October 2026.
- Keyword volumes from Google Ads data and Google results for “how to get ecommerce seo clients”, United States, checked 11 October 2026.
Related reading on CrawlRaven
- Shopify SEO, for the platform defaults you will be asked about on the first call.
- Shopify canonical URLs and duplicate content, for which duplicate rows are by design.
- Duplicate content and robots.txt in the glossary, for plain definitions to share with an owner.
Frequently asked questions
How do I get ecommerce SEO clients for my agency?
Send the store owner three specific findings from their own public site before you ask for anything. Take one from a collection page, one from a product page and one from how the store is crawled and indexed. Name the fix you would do first, give one number, and end by asking which categories matter most to the business.
What is a store teardown in an ecommerce SEO pitch?
A store teardown is a short written review of a store's public site, sent before first contact. This version has three findings, each tied to a page type that earns money: collection pages, product pages, and crawling and indexing. Each finding states what a named URL served on the day you checked, with no judgement about the people who built it.
Can I audit an online store without access to Search Console or GA4?
Yes, for the pitch. A crawl and free checkers read the public site: titles, canonical tags, Product markup, robots.txt, the sitemap and script tags. They cannot show clicks or revenue. Once the store is a client and grants access, CrawlRaven joins the crawl with Search Console and GA4 to rank findings by the pages that earn.
Which Shopify issues should I leave out of a pitch?
Leave out anything the platform does on purpose. A product URL under /collections/ whose canonical points at the plain /products/ URL is working as designed. So is a ?page=2 URL with a canonical to itself, which Google's pagination guide asks for. Sort and stacked filter URLs are already disallowed in Shopify's default robots.txt.
How many findings should an ecommerce SEO teardown contain?
Three, with one marked as the fix to do first. Three shows you looked at the pages that earn money without turning the message into a list of faults. My advice is to keep the full audit for after the first call, when the owner has told you which categories matter.
What should I ask a store owner at the end of the pitch?
Ask which categories matter most to the business. You picked a collection from the public menu, and that is a guess. The owner knows margins, stock and seasons, and you cannot see those from outside. Their answer tells you which collections and products to check next.
Does the store teardown work for stores that are not on Shopify?
Yes. The three page types exist on every platform. The collection page SEO checker reads Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Magento category URLs, and the schema validator and robots.txt tester read any site. The duplicate URL checker and the app script checker are built for Shopify paths, so use the crawl for those checks elsewhere.
15+ years of growing SaaS websites through SEO | Author, 200-Point Audit Checklist
Aditi has spent 15+ years helping SaaS companies scale organic traffic through technical SEO and content strategy. She is the author of the CrawlRaven 200-Point Audit checklist used by agencies and in-house teams to systematically improve search performance.