What Should I Ask an Agency to Show Me in Google Search Console?
If you hire an SEO agency for a Shopify store, “we’ll monitor Google Search Console” is not a useful deliverable by itself. Ask what they will inspect, what they will compare it with, and how they will connect changes in Search Console to organic revenue—not just impressions or screenshots.
Google Search Console (GSC) can help explain whether Google is discovering, crawling, and indexing your pages, and how your site appears in search. But the tool does not diagnose every SEO problem, and a chart going up does not automatically mean the business is growing. A strong agency should use GSC alongside Shopify analytics, a baseline, and a clear record of site changes.
Use the questions below to turn a vague reporting conversation into a practical review of your store’s technical health and growth opportunities.
Start with the baseline, not the pitch
Before approving recommendations, ask the agency to establish a baseline. That means documenting the current state of the property and agreeing on a comparison period before changes are made. Without one, it is hard to tell whether a later change helped, did nothing, or coincided with a seasonal shift.
Which GSC property will you use: the domain property, a URL-prefix property, or both? What date range and comparison period will you use, and why? Can you show the same period year over year where seasonality matters? Will you segment results by page type, country, device, and branded versus non-branded queries? How will you connect organic search activity to Shopify sessions, orders, and revenue?
Ask for access through the appropriate GSC user permissions rather than relying on screenshots. Screenshots can hide filters, selected dates, property scope, and context. A useful performance report should state what data it uses, what changed, and what action follows.
Ask for a performance report that explains outcomes
In the Search results report, GSC shows clicks, impressions, average click-through rate (CTR), and average position. These are diagnostic measures—not business results by themselves. More impressions may mean Google is testing a page for new searches, but they do not prove the store earned more qualified visits or sales.
Ask the agency to show the data in a way that separates meaningful movement https://technivorz.com/why-do-shopify-plus-seo-retainers-start-around-7500-a-month/ from noise. For example, a storewide average can conceal that collection pages are losing clicks while https://bizzmarkblog.com/how-do-i-estimate-the-value-of-traffic-im-missing/ https://bizzmarkblog.com/how-do-i-estimate-the-value-of-traffic-im-missing/ a few blog posts are gaining impressions.
Which landing pages gained or lost organic clicks, and what query groups contributed? Are clicks moving to commercially relevant collection and product pages, or mostly informational content? What changed in CTR and position for important non-branded queries? How do GSC clicks compare with organic sessions and revenue in Shopify or your analytics platform? What are the limitations in attributing an order to organic search?
Ask the agency to explain the next step for each notable trend. If a page has strong impressions but weak CTR, the team might review its title and description, the search intent, and the competing results. If clicks have declined, they should investigate the affected queries, pages, dates, and any related site changes before prescribing a rewrite.
Inspect index coverage and page indexing issues
Many people still say “index coverage” when discussing whether pages are indexed. Google’s Search Console interface now presents this information in the Page indexing report. Ask the agency to show that report and explain which URLs matter to your store—not just read out counts of indexed and not-indexed pages.
A Shopify site can have many URLs that should not be treated as search landing pages, including filtered or parameterized URLs, duplicate product paths, and utility pages. A large number of excluded URLs is not automatically a problem. The key is whether valuable canonical pages are available to Google and whether unintended URLs are competing for attention.
Ask the agency What a useful answer should cover Which important URLs are not indexed? Specific product, collection, or content URLs, their business importance, and the likely reason. Which exclusions are intentional? Examples such as duplicate URLs or pages that should not be search results, with evidence for the decision. Are there unexpected canonical or redirect patterns? Whether Google-selected canonical URLs align with the intended version and whether redirects lead to the right destination. What will you verify after making a fix? The affected URL set, the validation process, and how the agency will confirm the change rather than assume it worked.
For a store with many products, request a URL sample organized by template and status: active products, discontinued products, collections, and content pages. That makes it easier to distinguish one isolated issue from a theme-wide problem.
Review sitemaps—and check what they do not tell you
Shopify provides an auto-generated sitemap, typically at /sitemap.xml. That is a helpful default: the store does not usually need a custom sitemap simply to list its key URLs. Still, ask the agency to confirm that the sitemap is accessible, submitted in GSC, and being processed without relevant errors.
Submitting a sitemap is not a guarantee that every listed URL will be crawled or indexed. It is also not a substitute for good navigation, internal links, or correct canonical signals. Ask the agency to compare sitemap URLs with important pages in the store. Are key products and collections included? Are retired or unintended URLs appearing? Does the sitemap structure make sense for the catalog?
Show the sitemap submission and its latest status in GSC. Explain whether sitemap URLs are being indexed and investigate meaningful gaps. Identify how product and collection URLs are represented, especially if products appear through multiple paths. Describe what happens to sitemap inclusion when a product is unpublished, discontinued, or redirected.
Be wary of a recommendation to “fix the sitemap” without specific examples. The agency should identify the affected URLs, explain why they are a problem, and separate sitemap cleanup from indexing, canonical, or internal-link issues.
Ask how the agency diagnoses plateaued growth
A plateau is a pattern to investigate, not a diagnosis. It can come from a lack of new demand, stronger competitors, declining rankings, weak snippets, limited product availability, or technical changes. A good agency should narrow the cause before recommending more content or a redesign.
Ask for a breakdown of the plateau by page type, query type, and timeframe. Did clicks flatten because impressions stopped growing, or because CTR declined? Are branded searches stable while non-branded discovery has stalled? Have collection pages plateaued while product pages continue to gain traction? The answers lead to different actions.
Questions that reveal the cause Which query and landing-page groups account for the change? Did the plateau begin after a theme release, app installation, migration, or catalog change? Are important pages ranking for the intended searches, or are less relevant URLs appearing instead? Are organic clicks converting at a rate that supports investment in those page groups? What evidence would change your recommendation?
Ask for a short list of prioritized hypotheses, each with supporting evidence and a test or next step. “We need more backlinks” is not an adequate explanation unless the agency can show why links are relevant to the observed problem and explain the sources it proposes to pursue.
Look for technical debt from apps and themes
Shopify includes useful SEO foundations. SSL is included by default, and Shopify generates a sitemap. Those defaults do not guarantee strong rankings, however, and they do not cover every technical decision. A customized theme, an app, or an old migration can create problems that the platform’s defaults cannot resolve on their own.
Apps may add scripts, structured data, or content elements. Themes may affect heading structure, canonical tags, navigation, rendering, and page performance. Over time, overlapping apps, custom code, and rushed theme edits can leave technical debt: the store may still function for shoppers while its templates produce inconsistent signals for search engines.
Ask the agency to inspect representative templates and show examples—not simply say that your site has “technical issues.” Useful checks include:
Whether product and collection templates emit consistent titles, canonicals, and indexability signals. Whether app-generated content or structured data duplicates what the theme already outputs. Whether important links and content are accessible in the rendered page. Whether recent theme or app changes line up with the timing of a search-performance change. Which fixes require developer work, and how they will be tested in a safe workflow.
Ask for a change log that records the affected templates or URLs, the proposed fix, the owner, and the verification method. “Ongoing optimization” is not a technical plan. You should know what work is included, how often it happens, and what evidence will show it is complete.
Check SKU scale and internal linking consistency
As a Shopify catalog grows, the challenge is not only getting more URLs discovered. It is helping shoppers and search engines navigate a logical structure. A large SKU count can make inconsistent collection membership, orphaned products, and competing product URLs harder to spot.
Ask the agency to show how it checks internal linking across product and collection pages. Can shoppers reach priority products through relevant collections and navigation? Do collection pages link to the right products? Are important products reachable through more than an onsite search box? If a product belongs to several collections, does the site still present a consistent canonical URL?
Request an audit sample that reflects the catalog’s scale: top-selling products, new arrivals, seasonal items, discontinued SKUs, and products in multiple collections. Ask the agency to explain its rules for linking and URL selection so that changes remain consistent as the catalog changes.
What to expect in a useful agency deliverable
An actionable GSC review should be more than a dashboard export. It should give you enough detail to verify the work and make decisions. Ask whether each recurring review will include:
A defined reporting window: date ranges, comparison periods, property, filters, and known limitations. Page- and query-level analysis: findings grouped by page type and business intent, not only sitewide averages. Indexing and sitemap checks: important URLs, relevant exclusions, sitemap status, and follow-up validation. Prioritized actions: a clear explanation of the problem, expected impact, owner, effort, and dependencies. Revenue context: how organic traffic relates to Shopify outcomes, with attribution caveats stated plainly. Change documentation: what was changed, when, where, and how the team checked the result.
For example, a useful finding might say that a set of high-value collection pages lost clicks after a theme release, show the affected URLs and search queries, identify a template-level canonical or navigation change to investigate, and assign a verification step. That is much more actionable than “visibility is down” or “we need to optimize collections.”
Questions to ask before you sign
Whether you are speaking with a specialist such as OneLittleWeb or another provider, ask the same practical questions of every agency. The company name matters less than the clarity of the scope, the quality of the evidence, and who will actually do the work. If your store is on Shopify Plus, ask how the agency’s process accounts for your specific theme, integrations, catalog, and release workflow; the platform tier alone does not resolve SEO issues.
What baseline will you establish before making recommendations? Can you walk me through one finding from GSC to an implemented and verified fix? Who will be my day-to-day contact, and who performs the analysis? How will you explain proposed link sources and measure their relevance? What is explicitly included each month, and what is outside the scope?
Be cautious of guaranteed rankings, screenshot-only reports, and promises that focus on impressions without explaining clicks, conversions, and revenue. A trustworthy agency will not promise a specific Google position. It will show its evidence, explain uncertainty, and make the work understandable to your team.
The bottom line
Ask an agency to use Google Search Console to explain what is happening to your important pages—not just to display charts. A strong review connects performance report trends to landing pages and queries, examines index coverage and sitemaps in context, and investigates how apps, themes, SKU scale, and internal links affect the store.
Most importantly, start with baseline data and insist on specific deliverables. Shopify’s SSL and auto-generated sitemap provide useful foundations, but they are not a complete SEO strategy. The right agency will show what is working, what is missing, what it plans to change, and how it will verify the result in a way that relates to the business.