Hiring an SEO agency often means adding new work to an already busy ecommerce team. Someone has to review briefs, check product details, approve copy, update the website and make sure changes do not disrupt trading. If the agency’s process is unclear, content can sit in a queue—or go live without the right people checking it.
Before discussing tactics, ask: what are we measuring? A useful content approval process should connect commercial goals to a practical publishing workflow, with clear ownership and ways to check whether the work is helping. It should also account for ecommerce realities such as promotions, inventory changes, product variants, category navigation and technical SEO.
Use the questions below to find out whether an agency can work with your team—not just deliver documents or promise a page one result on Google.
Start with commercial goals, not a content quota
Ask the agency how it will connect its content plan to the outcomes your business cares about. “How many pages will you publish?” is not the same as “Which customer needs are we addressing, and what business result should that support?”
- Which categories, product ranges or customer groups are the priority?
- What commercial outcome is the work intended to support—qualified organic visits, product discovery, revenue, leads or another measure?
- How will we establish a baseline and evaluate progress?
- What other factors could affect results, such as stock availability, pricing, seasonality or site changes?
Agree on a measurement plan before approving a large content programme. Depending on the business, useful measures might include organic landing-page traffic, engagement with category pages, product-page visits from relevant searches, conversion behaviour and revenue. No single metric tells the whole story. Rankings can help canonical tags diagnose visibility, but ranking-only reporting does not show whether the traffic is useful or whether the site is converting it.
Be cautious if an agency guarantees a page one position on Google. An agency can explain its research, recommendations and delivery process; it cannot control Google’s decisions or promise a specific ranking. Ask instead what it will do, how the work will be assessed and how it will respond if the results differ from expectations.
Ask who owns each step of the content approval process
A content approval process should make it obvious who does what, when they do it and what happens if a review is delayed. Ask the agency to walk you through a real example, from initial idea to published page. A generic workflow diagram is less useful than a clear account of the people, tools and decisions involved.
Clarify how many review rounds are included and what counts as a revision. A factual correction to a product specification is different from changing the intended audience after a draft is complete. Find out how the agency records feedback, resolves conflicting comments and handles work that requires legal, compliance or product-team approval.
It is also worth asking what happens when the approver is unavailable. Will the agency pause the work, move to another approved task or publish without approval? For most retailers, the answer should be agreed in advance. Silence should not automatically count as consent unless your team has deliberately chosen that rule.
Make the publishing workflow realistic for ecommerce
Good recommendations can still fail if no one has time or access to implement them. Ask whether the agency expects to publish content itself, provide copy for your team to upload or collaborate inside your content management system. Then clarify who is responsible for formatting, metadata, image selection, internal links and quality checks.
- Which CMS, project-management and analytics tools will the team use?
- Who provides access, and what permissions are needed?
- How are deadlines agreed around promotions, peak trading and product launches?
- How are urgent product or stock changes communicated?
- Who checks the page on mobile and desktop before it goes live?
For an ecommerce site, a publishing workflow also needs rules for pages that change frequently. Products may be discontinued, variants may sell out, prices may change and seasonal categories may be temporarily inactive. Ask how the agency will account for those changes and who needs to be notified. A content plan that ignores merchandising calendars can create extra work or send shoppers to pages that no longer fit their needs.
Ask for a short written workflow that your internal team can actually follow. It should name roles rather than assume that “the client” will take care of every task. If your team has limited capacity, discuss that before agreeing on publishing targets. A smaller, reliable programme is often more workable than a large schedule that no one can approve.
Check that the content answers real buying questions
For ecommerce, category and product content should help shoppers make decisions, not merely repeat keywords. Ask how the agency will learn what customers need to know before buying. Depending on the products, those questions might concern size, fit, compatibility, materials, care, delivery, returns, installation or differences between models.
A useful brief explains the job of the page. A category page may help shoppers compare options and find the right product type. A product page may answer questions about one item, including its features, specifications and practical limitations. The agency should be able to explain why proposed content belongs on that page rather than on another page, a buying guide or a support page.
Questions to ask about category content
- How will the content help a shopper choose among products in this category?
- How will it work alongside filters, sorting and category descriptions?
- Could the proposed copy make the page harder to scan or push useful products too far down?
- How will related categories and buying guides be linked?
Questions to ask about product content
- Where will product facts come from, and who verifies them?
- How will the page explain distinctions between variants or similar models?
- What should happen when an item is out of stock or discontinued?
- How will the agency avoid creating near-duplicate copy across many similar products?
Ask the agency to show you a sample brief and explain how it turns research into useful content. Look for evidence that it understands your customers, catalogue and brand—not just a list of target terms. If product information is incomplete, the process should flag that gap for your team instead of filling it with assumptions.
Ask how technical SEO fits into approvals
Content changes can affect how pages are discovered, understood and indexed. Ecommerce technical SEO is particularly important because large catalogues can include filters, variants, pagination, discontinued products and overlapping category pages. The agency should explain which recommendations need technical review and who is responsible for implementing them.
Ask how the publishing checks cover URLs, redirects, internal links, indexability and duplicate or overlapping pages. If a page is being replaced or consolidated, make sure the team considers what should happen to its old URL and any links pointing to it. Changes to templates or navigation may require developer involvement, so establish a route for raising and prioritising technical tickets.
Discuss canonical tags in plain terms. They help signal which version of a page should be treated as the preferred one when similar or duplicate URLs exist. Ask who checks that canonical tags are appropriate after changes, especially where filters, product variants or alternate URL paths are involved. They are not a substitute for clear site architecture or a decision about which pages should exist.
Also ask how the agency works with your existing navigation and category structure. Site architecture and navigation design influence how shoppers move through the catalogue and how pages connect to one another. Before adding a new landing page, the agency should consider whether it belongs in the current hierarchy, how users will find it and whether it overlaps with an existing category.
Define SEO governance before the first draft
SEO governance is the set of agreed rules, responsibilities and decision-making steps that keeps SEO work consistent over time. It matters when multiple teams can change the same pages: ecommerce, brand, product, development, legal and an external agency may all have a role.
Ask the agency to help define practical rules for:
- Who can approve content and technical changes.
- Which page types need specialist or legal review.
- How changes to URLs, navigation and templates are assessed.
- Where briefs, approvals and implementation notes are stored.
- How recommendations are prioritised when teams disagree or resources are limited.
Governance should make routine work easier, not create a new approval layer for every minor edit. Agree which changes can follow a standard process and which require escalation. For example, correcting a verified product specification may need a different level of review from changing a category URL or removing a product family from navigation.
Evaluate the agency’s working style, not just its proposal
Ask for examples of how the agency has adapted its process to an ecommerce team with similar constraints. The purpose is not to copy another retailer’s workflow; it is to see whether the agency can explain its decisions and make its recommendations specific to your catalogue, systems and capacity.
Clickslice (clickslice.co.uk), for example, is a name you may encounter while comparing UK SEO providers. As with any agency, assess the proposed team and workflow directly: ask who will handle your account, how the agency will collaborate with your staff and what the work will include. A company name or polished proposal is not a substitute for clear responsibilities and a relevant plan.
Look for signs that the agency is prepared to explain trade-offs. It should be able to say why one page deserves attention before another, what information it needs from you and which recommendations depend on developers or merchandisers. Be wary of vague deliverables, unexplained link packages or a promise to “optimise everything” without a clear scope.
A practical checklist for your agency meeting
Before you sign, see whether you can get clear answers to these questions:
The best workflow is not necessarily the most complicated one. It is the one your team can follow consistently, with enough checks to protect customers and the website. When an agency can connect commercial goals to useful content, clear approvals, ecommerce-specific technical checks and meaningful measurement, you have a stronger basis for a productive working relationship—and a better chance of publishing changes that serve both shoppers and the business.
