Challenge
The client: a Shopify online store from the Netherlands. The owner could see the site growing, but organic search was not delivering the results he had counted on. The task was to find the cause, not just "add some SEO."
What made it hard
- A problem you cannot see in a browser. For an ordinary visitor, the site worked fine. But bot protection can treat search crawlers differently from people, and the owner has no idea.
- Shopify limitations. Some technical settings depend on the theme and third-party apps, and not everything can be changed without rebuilding the store.
- An overloaded page structure. Pages had 54 headings, including duplicates, which made it harder for both search engines and users to understand what mattered.
- Meta titles that were too long. At 663px, the title did not fit in Google's results, so an important part got cut off.
The goal: find the technical obstacles to search and fix everything that could be fixed within the platform.
What we did
Checking access for search bots
We checked how the site is seen by crawlers specifically, not by a browser. It turned out that the Cloudflare bot challenge on the www version was serving search bots a 403 error, meaning "access forbidden." In effect, the site's protection was partly closing the door on Google. We found the cause and documented for the client's team which settings to change so search bots receive pages normally.
Heading structure
We reviewed the heading hierarchy and removed duplicates: 35 of the 54 headings remained, each in its proper place. The pages became more logical for search engines.
Meta title
We shortened the meta title from 663px to 410px so it fits fully in the results and is not cut off at the most important word.
Measuring the result
We compared the before and after state with Seobility and also checked mobile speed in PageSpeed, to show the client honestly what we managed to improve and what runs into platform limits and needs a separate decision.
Results
What changed after the audit and fixes:
- Access for search crawlers: found and documented for fixing the 403 error the Cloudflare bot challenge was serving on the www version.
- Heading structure: 54 → 35 after removing duplicates.
- Page structure score in Seobility: 25% → 58%.
- Meta title length: 663px → 410px, now fits in the results.
To be honest about what did not work: mobile PageSpeed stayed at 22. The reason is the limitations of the Shopify theme and the third-party apps the store relies on. It can only be improved significantly by replacing the theme or dropping some of the apps, and that is a business decision for the owner, not a cosmetic fix.
The project was completed in 2026.
What makes this project special
The most valuable finding of this audit is invisible to the site owner and to ordinary SEO checks in a browser. A tool that was supposed to protect the store was preventing Google from crawling it. No amount of content or links will fix problems like this until they are found. That is why, for ecommerce, we always check the site through the eyes of a search bot.
After removing duplicate headings and fixing the meta title Source: Seobility, client report, 2026
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