Our client is an online retail store for home and commercial gym equipment. They sell new and remanufactured machines, offer nationwide delivery and installation in the US, and have a warehouse showroom in Benicia, California.
In May 2025, the site moved from Volusion to the Shopify platform, and organic clicks and impressions dropped sharply. In August 2025, the team hired us to diagnose the migration issues and revive SEO visibility. After key fixes, Search Console shows clicks and impressions steadily rising again by late August.
The Challenge
Unplanned migration changes caused host mix-ups, broken or missing redirects, indexing blocks, on-page/content parity, slower pages, etc., to be the major culprits. As a result, the average GSC clicks dropped from approximately 1,200 to 500.
Major challenge: The main challenge was to revive organic traffic by fixing these technical issues and consolidating signals on the correct host.
Where the Platform Migration Went Wrong?
During the platform switch, several critical SEO mistakes disrupted how search engines crawled, indexed, and ranked the site. These errors resulted in a significant decline in organic visibility and traffic. Key issues included:
- Moved from the www host to the non-www host by mistake, causing a sharp drop in clicks and impressions.
- Created long redirect chains and missed critical 301 mappings from top Volusion URLs to Shopify equivalents.
- Left staging noindex in production and poorly optimized robots and indexing directives.
- Kept an old sitemap that listed 404s and non-canonical URLs, giving Google mixed signals.
- Poor internal linking, reducing crawl depth, and equity flow.
- Added Shopify apps that increased JS bloat, hurting LCP and CLS.
- Lost content parity and on-page signals. Titles, descriptions, H1s, and copy did not match the Volusion versions.
- Under-implemented structured data for key templates such as product, collection, homepage, and generic pages.
How Are We Turning It Around?
We rebuilt core SEO foundations by fixing host issues, adding clean 301s, resolving indexation and sitemap errors, restoring content and structured data, and improving site speed. These steps lead to steady growth in clicks and impressions by late August.
- Rolled back to the correct www host, built a clean 301 redirect map, and removed redirect chains starting with top-performing pages.
- Ran a full technical audit with Screaming Frog and Ahrefs. Cleaned up 404s, fixed redirects, and well-optimized robots.txt.
- Audited Google Search Console. Resolved indexation issues and submitted sitemaps that reflect canonical URLs.
- Completed segment-based on-page audits for collections, products, blogs and generic pages. Restored titles, descriptions, H1s and key content to match high-performing Volusion versions.
- Optimized site speed and Core Web Vitals by reducing app bloat and addressing LCP and CLS.
- Implemented advanced schema markup for product, collection, homepage and other page types.
The Results
Image: The Google Search Console data clearly reflects the impact of the migration fix. When the site was mistakenly moved from the www to the non-www version, clicks and impressions dropped sharply in early June and remained suppressed for several weeks. After rolling back to the correct www version, implementing a proper 301 redirect map, and resolving redirect chain issues, we can now see a strong revival. By late August, both clicks and impressions are climbing steadily, signaling that rankings and visibility, as SEO equity, are consolidating back to the primary domain.
Image: The non-www property shows a clear decline in clicks and impressions through late July and August, which is exactly what we want after restoring the www host. That drop indicates that queries and signals are consolidating to https://www.fitnesssuperstore.com/as the 301 redirects and canonicals take effect, not a loss of demand. We’ll continue to validate that every non-www URL redirects directly to its www equivalent, canonicals and sitemaps reference www only, and internal links use www, ensuring consolidation is complete.
Image: The Ahrefs “Top pages” view shows the www host re-indexing and traffic recovering. Organic pages are climbing again, which aligns with the rollback to the www version, direct 301 mapping, and chain cleanup, as well as schema and indexation fixes that consolidated signals onto the primary host.
Image: Indexation restored on www. Indexed pages rose from near zero to ~4.65K by Sep 13. This aligns with rolling back to the www host, implementing direct 301 redirects, cleaning redirect chains, and resubmitting clean sitemaps and canonicals, which helped Google recrawl and reindex pages.
Image: The Product snippets report now shows 5..31K valid items and 0 invalid as of Sep 15, with a sharp ramp-up. That confirms Google is reading clean Product JSON-LD on the www pages after the fix. Moving the JSON-LD into the head and standardizing the required fields resolved the parsing issues that were preventing eligibility for rich results.
