From Invisible to 900 Organic Clicks a Day

The site had been moved to a new domain before we got involved, but the migration was never finished. Redirect chains were scattered throughout internal links, the sitemap still had old URLs, and robots.txt was accidentally blocking crawl access to parts of the catalog. Until all of that was cleaned up, Google couldn't reliably index the site - regardless of the content.

The sitemap.xml existed and was accessible, but a large number of product and category pages weren't in it. Combined with the robots.txt issue, whole sections of the store had no clear path for Googlebot to find them. A page can't rank if it's not indexed, and it can't be indexed if it can't be crawled.

13 pages had no H1 at all. 15 had no meta description. 2 had descriptions that were too long. On product pages, that means Google had almost no keyword signal to work with. For a store where every category and product page should be pulling in search traffic, this was a problem across the board.

Microdata was already on the site, which was a decent starting point. But product images were missing from the schema, there was no review markup, and several required fields weren't filled in. The result: search snippets with plain text, while competitors were showing rich results with images, star ratings, and prices right in the SERP.

W3C validation flagged 22 CSS issues plus a range of HTML errors. Product titles and prices were in the wrong semantic tags, footer and menu items were marked up as headings, and 26 product images had no alt attributes. Broken semantic structure makes it harder for search engines to understand what's on the page.

Mobile PageSpeed score was 53. The main culprits: full-resolution images being served on mobile, several render-blocking JS and CSS files, and no lazy loading on product images. Speed is a direct ranking signal, and on an ecommerce site it directly affects whether users stick around long enough to buy anything.

Domain authority was 5, with 268 backlinks - most of them low quality. Competitors in the same niche were showing DA 40-70+, with hundreds of relevant referring domains behind them. With that kind of authority gap, even a technically clean site struggles to rank on anything competitive. Link building was part of the fix, not an afterthought.