Seasonal retailer: a staged plan around the peak

A retailer with several related stores, websites, and Google Business Profiles does most of its business in a short season. Its search signals were tangled across sites, and a previous migration and a falling-out with its last SEO provider left loose ends.

My role

Hired as the accountable lead for an initial SEO and migration audit, working with the owner and his technical contact, with a seasonal engagement planned to follow.

What the audit is finding

• Legacy URLs and redirects from the earlier migration, including links from other sites that now point at pages that no longer exist.
• Conflicting versions of the same domains.
• Duplicate and conflicting structured data.
• Business names and addresses that differ between sites, profiles, and directories.
• Overlapping location pages competing with each other.
• Product-page headings and outdated template content.
• Sitemaps that need cleanup, and Google Business Profiles that need aligning with the sites.

The plan

The real judgment here is timing. Foundation work and anything that risks volatility, including Google Business Profile category changes that can trigger reverification, happens months before the season. Seasonal pages go live and get indexed early. A change freeze covers the peak, because nobody should deploy a site change in the busiest weeks of the year. A competitive local-search baseline makes progress measurable.

Coordination

I'm organizing access across several sites and Google properties, preserving the historical Search Console data, and turning a complicated account into a short sequence of actions with an owner for each.

Status

Audit in progress. See multi-location and connected businesses and fractional technical lead.

Updated October 5, 2026