Talk to SEO agency owners and the hardest part of the job is rarely content or link building. It is getting the on-page technical recommendations actually implemented.
The audit gets delivered, everyone agrees it is right, and then it sits in a backlog for months because nobody owns the development side. The work is not hard. It is just nobody’s job.
What actually needs shipping
On a typical Magento, WooCommerce or Shopify store the list is consistent: get the 301 redirects right across www and non-www, make sure robots.txt is correct, generate the sitemap daily and confirm Google can fetch it, clean up the H1, H2 and H3 structure, and get proper on-page content onto the home and category pages.
Then the layer most audits mention and few teams finish: FAQ snippets, product and merchant schema fixes, a CDN properly in place, sub-categories linked from their parents, canonicals set correctly, ratings and reviews snippets, and pushing pages to Google through the Indexing API.
That last one matters more than people expect. Publishing pages that never get indexed is spending money on invisible content, which is the most overlooked thing in ecommerce SEO.
Why it stalls, and how long it should take
It stalls because SEO and development sit in different teams with different priorities. Nobody is being lazy, the work simply falls between two remits. A typical implementation setup like this takes two to three days, not two to three quarters.
Speed work belongs in the same pass, since crawl efficiency depends on how quickly your server responds. Doing them together avoids paying for the same regression testing twice.
Split the work honestly
The healthiest setup I see is an SEO team that owns strategy and a development partner that owns implementation, with neither pretending to be the other. That is part of why an agency cannot just be a dev shop, and why the right partnership starts with fit rather than a fee.
If you have an audit nobody has implemented, book a call and we will tell you honestly how long it should take.