Blog

Check the New Server’s IP Before You Migrate

Ecommerce Strategy, General

We moved a customer from DigitalOcean to a managed host. Code transferred, everything tested, the migration looked textbook. Then we discovered the new server’s IP address was already sitting on three blacklists, inherited from whoever used it before us. Now we re-clone, re-point DNS, and verify first. Here is the […]

How to Fix Shopify’s Collections Sitemap in GSC

Ecommerce Strategy, General

If you run a Shopify store, open Google Search Console and look at the Sitemaps section today. Shopify updated the structure for collections and pages sitemaps, the old XML URLs now parse-error or 404, and GSC is showing Failed for stores that have not caught up. Here is the issue […]

Shopify Changed Its Sitemaps and Google Noticed First

Ecommerce Strategy, General

Shopify quietly introduced from/to parameters for collections and pages sitemaps. Google Search Console did not recognise the change, so the previous sitemap_collections_1.xml URLs broke, and stores started collecting failed-sitemap notices without anyone touching anything. Here is what happened and why this class of silent platform change is worth a standing […]

Why We Started Visiting Our Customers in Person

Founder Insights, General

We are establishing a new tradition at MageCloud: visiting customers where they work, talking through their problems face to face, and filming a little of it. The first visit was to Where Saints Go, the furniture brand Mark Wilman built, and an hour in the room taught me things three […]

The SEO Boost That Came From Ignoring the Advice

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

It might look like all my posts are about failed SEO engagements, so here is a success story with a twist. One client worked through five different SEO vendors while his site stayed flat. Then traffic jumped, significantly and durably. The boost came from changes his ecommerce manager made against […]

He Paid $5,000 a Month for Four Clicks

Ecommerce Strategy, General

On May 8th I emailed a prospect that his SEO advice was bad and turned the project down. Months later we finally got on a Zoom, opened his Google Search Console together, filtered the brand terms, and found 4 organic clicks a month against a $5,000 monthly SEO bill and […]

I Sold Onions at Twelve. Now I Hire Hustlers

Founder Insights, General

My first business was selling onions at a market in Ukraine. I was about twelve, taking produce from the farm and selling it when times were tough for my family. Flowers came next. That hustle is why I am obsessed with helping young people find their first opportunity, and why […]

My Developer Replied From a Basement in 24 Minutes

Founder Insights, General

I was not sure I wanted to share this. Clients are sometimes afraid to work with development teams that are not based in the US or UK. Then I texted my developer in Dnipro and he answered from a basement during a missile attack, and was back online 24 minutes […]

Why Hosting Support Should Open the Ticket First

Ecommerce Strategy, General

Our own MageCloud.agency site was down for about six hours. Uptime Robot told me before my hosting company did, and the only way to reach support was fifteen minutes on hold. The fix I want from the entire hosting industry is embarrassingly simple: when monitoring sees a site go down, […]

Filter Out Your Brand and Face the Real Traffic

Ecommerce Strategy, General

A US automotive brand with around 20,000 products let me into their Google Search Console. Two thousand of those products were not even indexed. And once we filtered out brand-related keywords, including the misspellings, the site’s real organic acquisition was about 26 clicks a day, against a realistic potential of […]

Why I Still Answer Emails That Pay Nothing

Founder Insights, General

The standard advice says pre-screen everyone, protect your calendar, and only talk to people who can pay. I generally agree, and I still answer emails from people who will never be clients. In Silicon Valley, founders who had built and exited companies gave their time to a nobody with questions, […]

One Office, a War, and Thirteen Cities

Founder Insights, General

A few years ago I could not have imagined being in the UK. We had just invested about 400K into our own office space in Ivano-Frankivsk, we were serving more than 100 brands worldwide, and revenue was around 2.5M a year. Then everything changed. Today the same team works from […]

Three Calls, Three Ways Stores Break in Silence

Ecommerce Strategy, General

Company A lost half its traffic to broken links created by an automated translation tool. Company B’s sitemap had been dead for eight months because a cron job never made it to the new server. Company C’s caching stopped when a licence quietly expired. Three calls in one day, three […]

Run the Spam Email’s Own Website Through PageSpeed

Ecommerce Strategy, General

You just received an email claiming your website is slow, your rankings are falling, and your links are broken. Before you delete it, here is a sixty-second test that occasionally finds a real one: grab the sender’s own website, run it through Google PageSpeed Insights, and see whether they pass […]

Three Steps to Verify Your SEO Agency’s Work

Ecommerce Strategy, General

Ecommerce marketing managers inherit SEO engagements they did not scope and get asked whether the money is working. Here is the three-step verification I give them: demand the backlink list, test the linking pages against Google’s own index, and read the brand-filtered trend in Search Console. No tools to buy, […]

How a Headless Migration Erased Years of SEO Overnight

Ecommerce Strategy, General

A Canadian agency showed me the Google Search Console chart: organic traffic fell off a cliff on the exact day their client migrated to headless Shopify. Not because of Shopify, and not because headless is bad technology. Because canonical URLs, sitemaps, and robots.txt were never configured. Here is the question […]

The Questions That Expose a Weak SEO Engagement

Ecommerce Strategy, General

Before you contract an SEO consultant or agency, there are five questions your marketing manager should be able to answer, and a sixth that the agency itself has to answer about timelines. None of them require SEO expertise to ask. All of them require honesty to answer. Here is the […]

Ask ChatGPT About Your Brand Before Customers Do

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

The first thing I did when I started using ChatGPT for general searches was ask it about myself and my company. It knew us. It cited customer reviews. And it also mentioned a scam website that had been impersonating our brand. That mix, accurate and damaging in the same answer, […]

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