From F&B to fintech, clinics to law firms, startups to enterprise. If your customers search on Google, we make sure they find you first, not your competitors.
One specialist team, focused only on the organic rankings that put you in front of ready-to-buy Singapore customers.
A clear, sequenced path from audit to rankings. You always know what we’re doing and why it matters for your leads.
Quick answer: Ecommerce SEO services normally cover a catalogue audit, URL and facet control, category architecture, product and template optimisation, structured data, internal linking, content and reporting. Feed management, conversion testing, photography, development time, marketplace listings and replatform support are usually outside the retainer unless named.
Scope is where store engagements go wrong, and it goes wrong in a specific way. A proposal for a shop reads almost identically to a proposal for a services website, because the vocabulary is shared, but the underlying work is distributed very differently. A line reading “on-page optimisation” means something entirely different when there are 3,000 pages generated from four templates than when there are eleven pages somebody wrote. This post breaks a catalogue retainer into its real line items, states a sensible volume for each, names what is routinely excluded, and explains how the shape should change with catalogue size and platform. If you want to compare it against a published scope, our e-commerce SEO service page lists what sits inside a standard engagement, and the pricing tiers show where those line items land.
Two providers can quote the same monthly figure and allocate it in opposite proportions. One puts most of the hours into publishing. Another puts most into templates and crawl control. Neither is wrong in the abstract, and the right answer depends entirely on what your catalogue is missing.
Ask for the hour split by discipline rather than the deliverable list. A store engagement has roughly six workstreams and they compete for the same budget. A provider who can tell you that the first quarter is 50 per cent technical, 30 per cent category work and 20 per cent reporting and analysis has scoped your site. A provider who gives you a list of twenty deliverables with no weighting has scoped a template.
The second thing to ask is what work is template-level and what is page-level. This is the fundamental economic distinction on a catalogue. Changing a title pattern across 2,000 product pages is a few hours of work with an enormous footprint. Rewriting 2,000 product descriptions individually is a project that costs more than the retainer and will never finish. Proposals that blur the two are the ones that produce disappointment in month four, and we have inherited several where the entire content budget had been consumed hand-editing pages that a template change would have fixed in an afternoon.
The third is who deploys. On a hosted platform most changes are made in the admin panel. On a custom build they are tickets. Your real timeline is your developer’s queue, not the agency’s, and a scope that does not say so is describing a schedule it does not control.
Every credible store engagement opens here, and unlike a general SEO audit it has catalogue-specific components you should check are present.
A full crawl with parameter capture, so you learn how many URLs actually exist against how many products you sell. This single ratio drives most of the first quarter’s priorities.
An index coverage breakdown by template, separating home, category, subcategory, product, filter and content URLs. Aggregate coverage numbers are useless on a store; the value is knowing that 90 per cent of your product pages are indexed while 40 per cent of your categories are not.
A revenue and entrance map, listing every category and product by organic entrances and transactions, with a keep, improve, merge or remove recommendation attached.
A demand map at type level, showing what Singapore shoppers search for in your categories, grouped into clusters rather than a flat export.
A structured data and feed check, comparing what the page displays against what the markup declares, in SGD, including availability.
Expect this inside the first three to four weeks and expect to be walked through it live. What separates a real catalogue audit from a generated one is the ordering. Any tool produces 400 issues. The deliverable is the argument about which six matter this quarter. Where a standalone diagnosis is what you actually want, that is a legitimate product in its own right and we sell it through our SEO audit and consulting line rather than folding it invisibly into a retainer.
This is the line that most distinguishes store scopes from general ones, and the one most likely to be absent.
It covers the facet policy itself, canonical rules for variants and cross-listed products, robots and parameter handling, pagination treatment, removal of legacy or orphaned URL patterns, and the internal link cleanup needed so your own navigation stops contradicting the rules you just set.
A realistic volume is 10 to 25 hours in the first two months, dropping to two or three hours of monitoring per month afterwards. It is genuinely front-loaded work. Be sceptical of a proposal promising constant facet work for twelve months on a 600 product catalogue, because it runs out.
The exclusion to watch is enforcement. Setting the rules is analysis. Making the platform obey them can be anything from a settings change to a development sprint, and on custom builds it is frequently the latter. Establish before signing whether the provider implements or specifies, because “we will control your faceted navigation” quietly means “we will tell your developer how to” on a meaningful share of stores.
The highest-return recurring work on most catalogues, and the one with the clearest unit of measurement.
It includes title and meta patterns at template level, H1 logic, introductory copy above the product grid, subcategory creation or consolidation, breadcrumb and internal link structure, and the decision about which filter combinations get promoted into real pages.
State the volume in pages per month. A typical mid-tier Singapore store retainer covers six to fifteen categories or template variants per month. If the proposal will not commit to a number, you cannot tell whether month six will include any of this work.
Distinguish tuning from rebuilding in the document. Adjusting a title pattern and adding two internal links to a category is an hour. Researching a category, writing a genuine introduction, restructuring its subcategories and relinking it properly is most of a day. Both get described as category optimisation and the cost difference is several thousand SGD a year. Where we work on local SEO for Singapore businesses with retail outlets attached, this is the line that most often needs renegotiating mid-engagement, because the categories turn out to need rebuilding rather than tuning.
Here the honest scope is explicitly partial, and any proposal implying otherwise is misleading you.
Nobody rewrites an entire catalogue. The workable model is template plus tier. Templates handle titles, heading structure, attribute display, schema markup, image alt patterns and internal links across every product at once. A revenue-ranked tier of individual products then receives original writing, typically 10 to 30 products a month.
Structured data deserves separate mention because it is the cheapest win available and the most commonly broken. Product markup with accurate price in SGD, availability that reflects real stock, valid identifiers, review data where it is genuinely collected, and breadcrumb markup. Mismatches between displayed price and declared price are the most frequent cause of lost rich results we encounter on Singapore stores, and they almost always appear after a promotion or currency feature is added post-launch.
Confirm who writes and who publishes. Some providers write and hand over a document. Some publish directly. On a catalogue the publishing step is not trivial, because it usually means touching the product record rather than a page editor.
Buying guides, comparison pages, sizing and compatibility references, and category-adjacent editorial. This is the layer that earns the queries a marketplace cannot serve well, which makes it strategically important in Singapore specifically.
Market rates for this kind of content run roughly SGD 300 to SGD 900 per piece depending on length, research depth and whether product photography or specification checking is involved. Two to five pieces a month is a normal retainer range for an SME store.
Conventional wisdom in this market is that stores should publish frequently to build authority. We have consistently seen the opposite on smaller catalogues: a store with unresolved facet problems that publishes twelve posts a month ends up with more thin URLs competing for attention it does not have. Four genuinely useful guides that link properly into categories outperform twelve generic posts on essentially every Singapore store account we have run. Sequencing beats volume.
Watch the exclusions here. Product photography, lifestyle imagery, video, translation into Chinese or Malay, and uploading into the store are commonly out of scope or in scope only for the first few pieces.
Reporting appears in every proposal, which makes the word meaningless. On a store, specify the contents.
A package worth paying for contains organic revenue and transactions by landing page, indexation coverage by template type, crawl allocation across URL patterns, ranking movement for a fixed tracked set, the work completed, the work planned, and a written interpretation. An automated dashboard is not a report. It is a data feed. A report says revenue fell nine per cent because two categories were deindexed after a theme update, and here is the fix.
Call frequency should be explicit. Monthly is standard above roughly SGD 2,500. Confirm account ownership as well: you should own the analytics property, Search Console, the merchant account and the rank tracking project, with the provider added as a user. If those are created under an agency account, you lose every historical benchmark the day you leave, which is a retention mechanic rather than an administrative accident.
The table below is the honest exclusions list based on store scopes we see in this market, including our own.
| Item | Usually in scope? | What it typically costs in Singapore | Why it sits outside |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product feed and merchant centre management | Rarely | SGD 600 to 2,000 monthly | Usually owned by the paid media team |
| Development work to enforce URL rules | No | SGD 80 to 200 per hour | Codebase liability sits with your developer |
| Conversion rate optimisation and A/B testing | Rarely | SGD 1,500 to 6,000 per programme | Needs traffic volume many stores lack |
| Product photography and lifestyle imagery | No | SGD 40 to 150 per product | Production, not search work |
| Writing the full product catalogue | No | SGD 25 to 120 per description | Cost exceeds any sensible retainer |
| Marketplace listing optimisation | No | Separate scope entirely | Different platform, different ranking system |
| Translation into Chinese, Malay or Tamil | No | SGD 0.15 to 0.40 per word | Specialist linguists, not SEO writers |
| Paid search and shopping campaign management | No | Often 10 to 20 per cent of ad spend | Distinct discipline and billing model |
| Replatform and migration support | Sometimes | SGD 3,000 to 12,000 project fee | Time-boxed, intensive and high risk |
| Review generation platform setup | Sometimes | SGD 50 to 300 monthly tooling | Tooling and process, not search work |
Our ecommerce case study shows a scope weighted toward the catalogue rather than article count. For a WooCommerce home and lifestyle store with 200+ products, Months 1 to 2 went on crawl and index repair: robots.txt rules for 14 faceted navigation parameter combinations, a clean XML sitemap and 200+ redirect chains resolved. Product indexation moved from 34% to 79% in that window. Product schema, 15 category pages and internal linking followed, and the 20 product guides only started in Month 3.
The migration row deserves emphasis. If a replatform is planned during the engagement, raise it before signing. A store migration handled without search input is the fastest way to destroy two years of gains, and handled properly it is a substantial project rather than a favour squeezed into a monthly retainer.
A single scope template applied to every store is the clearest sign that nobody looked before quoting.
Under 200 products. Facet control is usually a one-off afternoon. Spend the budget on category differentiation, product tiering, local trust signals and a small number of genuinely useful guides. A crawl budget project here is selling you a solution to a problem you do not have.
200 to 2,000 products. The balanced case. Facet policy and template work in the first quarter, then a steady rhythm of category development and content. This is where the widest quality variance sits in the Singapore market.
2,000 to 20,000 products. Technical work dominates. Index segmentation, template governance, variant strategy, internal link generation at scale and rendering checks. Individual page work becomes the exception rather than the rhythm.
Over 20,000 products. Log file analysis, crawl shaping and engineering collaboration. The scope shifts from marketing deliverables to systems work, and the comparison between providers becomes a comparison of team composition.
Platform changes the effort, not the strategy. Hosted platforms constrain robots and URL control, so some fixes need workarounds rather than settings. Self-hosted stores give full control and hand you performance and plugin conflicts. Custom builds can do anything and frequently launch missing the basics because nobody specified them. Ask how many hours the provider expects to lose to your platform’s constraints, and treat a confident zero as a warning. For stores that sell across several verticals, our industry SEO work shows how the same catalogue rules get re-weighted by sector.
Field notes: In our B2B ecommerce case study, every scope item for the wholesale kitchenware supplier could be counted on delivery: 14 category pages and 6 industry vertical pages built and indexed, Organization and Product schema on all category pages, FAQPage schema on 8 trade buyer content pieces, mobile Lighthouse moved from 48 to 74, and submissions to trade directories. That is the standard to hold any provider to. If the stated scope includes technical and template work, you should be able to point to it in month four, and monthly trade enquiries here moving from 5 to 28 came from the whole programme, not the content alone.
The useful question is not what is included but what is included, at what volume, at template level or page level, and who deploys it. Every store proposal in this market uses the same vocabulary. The differences live entirely in the numbers behind the words: categories per month, products in the written tier, hours allocated to facet enforcement, and whether revenue by landing page appears in the reporting.
We’ve found that two proposals using identical language can imply completely different amounts of work once you ask how many product pages get individual attention versus a template pass. Our team writes scope in units the client can audit later: categories touched, products rewritten, hours on facet enforcement, so nobody is guessing what they bought six months in. In our experience, the vaguest line item in any ecommerce SEO proposal is content, and it deserves the most specific definition of any of them.
Our contrarian position, which costs us work, is that most Singapore stores are buying too much content and too little template and index control, because content is the easiest line to sell and the easiest to show. If two of your revenue categories are not indexed and your filters are generating twenty URLs per product, four more articles will not fix it and may make it worse.
Read the scope as a contract rather than a brochure. Ask for volumes on every line, ask what happens in month nine, ask who owns the analytics. If you want to see how the line items shift once a diagnosis is in, our B2B e-commerce results write-up shows a worked reallocation, and our e-commerce SEO services in Singapore page states what we include as standard.
A normal month covers technical and index maintenance, category or template optimisation for a defined number of pages, a tier of product page work, structured data checks, content production, internal linking, and reporting with a written interpretation. The proportions should shift across the engagement, with facet control and index recovery front-loaded into the first two months and category development and content taking a larger share from month three. Ask for the split in hours or percentages.
Partly, and never for the whole catalogue. The workable model is template-level optimisation covering titles, headings, attributes, schema and internal links across every product, plus original writing for a revenue-ranked tier of roughly 10 to 30 products a month. Any proposal implying the full catalogue will be rewritten inside a normal retainer has not done the arithmetic, since per-description market rates alone would exceed the monthly fee many times over.
Usually not. Feeds are commonly owned by whoever runs shopping campaigns, and many SEO retainers exclude them explicitly. The overlap is real, because price, availability and product identifiers are shared between the feed and your organic structured data, so mismatches damage both. The important thing is that somebody owns it in writing. Discovering in month four that neither party considered it theirs is common and entirely avoidable.
Small catalogues under 200 products can see progress from roughly SGD 1,500 to SGD 2,500 a month. Most local store retainers sit between SGD 2,500 and SGD 5,000. Catalogues in the thousands, or engagements including implementation rather than recommendations, generally run SGD 4,500 to SGD 9,000. Above SGD 9,000 you are into multi-market or large-catalogue work. Standalone audits typically land between SGD 2,500 and SGD 8,000 depending on catalogue size.
It varies and it is the most expensive ambiguity in any store proposal. On hosted platforms a competent provider can usually implement most changes directly. On self-hosted stores it depends on the access granted. On custom builds most changes become tickets for your developer, which means your timeline is their queue. Get the implementation boundary written into the scope, including who pushes template changes and who tests them.
It should be a separate, named project. A replatform is intensive, time-boxed and carries the highest risk of any work on a store, involving URL mapping, redirect logic, template parity, structured data recreation and post-launch index monitoring. Typical project fees run SGD 3,000 to SGD 12,000 depending on catalogue size. Folding it into a normal month means something else in the scope silently stops happening.
Rewrite both into one table with identical columns: monthly fee, definite inclusions, explicit exclusions, committed volume by line item, and lock-in length. Then convert to unit pricing, so you can see what each additional category or article actually costs. Ask each provider to convert their deliverable list into estimated hours. Some will decline, which is a defensible position, but those who provide it become far easier to compare honestly.
Organic revenue and transactions by landing page, indexation coverage segmented by template type, crawl allocation across URL patterns, ranking movement on a fixed tracked set, work completed and planned, and a narrative explaining anything unusual. Rankings alone are an input metric on a store. If the tracked keyword list changes quietly between months, or the report is a dashboard export with no interpretation, you are being shown activity rather than progress.
Almost never, and they should not be assumed. Marketplace ranking systems are separate from web search, driven by sales velocity, conversion rate, review volume and platform advertising, and they need a different specialist. A good provider will still factor your marketplace presence into strategy, because it shapes where your own domain can realistically compete, but optimising the listings themselves is a distinct scope with its own cost.
Index and facet corrections often show movement within 6 to 10 weeks, because you are unblocking pages that already had demand behind them. Category development and content typically take 4 to 6 months to reach revenue. Payback depends heavily on margin and average order value, and stores with higher order values reach it considerably faster. A new domain should plan on 9 to 12 months before organic search is a channel it can depend on.
If you want to know which of these line items your store actually needs before you speak to anyone about a retainer, we will run a free initial review of your catalogue and tell you where the gaps are, including the ones that do not require hiring us. No lock-in and no keyword-count pricing, and you keep the findings either way. Get in touch with your store URL and product count and we will send back a prioritised summary rather than a crawl export.
Natalie leads SEO strategy at Singapore SEO Agency, helping local and regional businesses build organic search programmes that drive qualified leads. She specialises in technical SEO and content-led authority building for Singapore SMEs.
Get a free SEO audit for your Singapore website — we'll show you exactly where you stand, what's holding you back, and what it would take to rank on page 1.
Get Your Free SEO Audit →
Yoast SEO helps most when its site-wide settings are right. See which settings to choose, what the traffic lights really mean and the mistakes to avoid.
Which free keyword research tool should a Singapore clinic, firm, contractor or tutor use? Combine five free tools to find your first 30-50 keywords. See how.
SEO vs SEM is usually the wrong question. Learn what the terms really mean and how to use ads and Search Console data to decide which searches to earn or buy.
Google Search Console login problems usually start with verification and ownership. Learn how to get in, fix access errors and offboard agencies safely.
The click through rate formula is clicks divided by impressions. Learn what each platform counts, the averaging trap and how to set it up in Google Sheets.
A click through rate means nothing on its own. Learn to compare CTR by position, query type and SERP features, and see what low CTR is really telling you.
Fast, no obligation. We reply within 24 hrs.
Singapore’s specialist SEO agency for SMEs. We rank your business on Google — and only Google. No distractions, just results.
© 2026 Singapore SEO Agency. All rights reserved.