Ecommerce Strategy

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 […]

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, […]

Shopify Checkout Changes: Get Your Tracking Right First

Ecommerce Strategy, General

Shopify forced every merchant to reconfigure checkout tracking when checkout.liquid customisations were retired. Deadlines like that are when tracking quietly breaks for months. Here is the configuration strategy we give Shopify merchants: connect natively first, use GTM for the rest, do not reinvent the wheel, and write down everything you […]

Five Checks Before You Sign With Any Agency

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

We review our customers’ websites across development, analytics, Search Console, and Google Ads, which means we also see the wreckage when a partner choice goes wrong. These are the five checks I give clients who ask me how to choose a development or marketing partner, every one of them learned […]

Your Store Does Not Need an AWS Cluster

Ecommerce Strategy, General

A potential client showed me their setup: RDS, EC2, separate cron server, Redis, Elasticsearch, every component on its own node. Over $2,000 a month, and that was just staging. The pages were still slow. We have downscaled three clients this year from $4,000 AWS bills to a single well-configured VPS […]

Fake Orders Are Hitting Magento Stores Through the API

Ecommerce Strategy, General

Over two weeks we watched a wave of suspicious orders land across Magento stores, all following the same script. We debugged it down to the guest-cart options in the Magento API. On a fully patched store these orders are an annoyance. On an unpatched store they are a door someone […]

Why Agencies and Merchants Keep Failing Each Other

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

We support around 140 ecommerce clients and most of them also use other agencies. Not one of those agencies has ever asked to speak with the development team that maintains the site. SEO firms sell £3-5K PDF audits listing problems my developers find for free. PPC agencies run ad spend […]

Ecommerce Strategy

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