Specialty retailer: cleaning up after Squarespace to Shopify

A family-owned specialty store moved from Squarespace to Shopify. The new store looked good, but search visibility was slipping and the indexed page count was shrinking.

My role

A four-part audit, then hands-on product optimization and structured data work in the store's theme.

What the audit found

• Duplicate product URLs: old Squarespace-style paths and Shopify's own paths competing in Google for the same products.
• More than 3,400 404 errors left over from the migration.
• A duplicate FAQ page.
• Organic traffic dominated by misspellings of the brand name, a sign the store wasn't being found for what it sells.
• Broken product meta descriptions and default metadata inherited from the theme.
• A spammy backlink profile, poor mobile speed, and weak visibility in AI assistants.

What I did

A product optimization pass across titles, descriptions, metadata, and categories. Then structured data work in a duplicated copy of the live theme, so the store was never at risk: Organization schema added, and a new Product schema block that turned out to duplicate an existing, more complete block from the theme. I traced the duplication so only one valid block remains, and identified that the review rating data depended on confirming the right metafield namespace from the reviews app.

How it was checked

Structured data validated on product pages, crawls compared before and after, and every change made in the duplicate theme first and previewed before publishing.

Status

The audit and a product pass were delivered; remaining items, such as thin descriptions and missing categories, are being reconciled with the owner before further edits. See e-commerce SEO.

Updated October 5, 2026