A founder-led health snack brand had a live Shopify store that looked finished but wasn't doing any of the work it needed to do to be found search. I reviewed it, then rebuilt it.
The background
Ghuttie Snacks makes superfood-coated sunflower seed snacks, formulated by Dr Leke Asong, a GP and gut health specialist. I'd originally scoped a clean, SEO-led migration from Squarespace to Shopify. That migration went ahead through another developer on cost, and the store launched without me.
Once the first store was live, Leke asked me to assess the SEO properly. Not a glance at the homepage. A full audit, a check of the structured data in the page source, and a comparison against what a well-executed migration is supposed to deliver.
What the review found
The photography and ingredient copy were genuinely strong. Everything sitting underneath them wasn't.
A full crawl and a check of the page source told a clear story. This was a poorly implemented, off-the-shelf theme: unused app code sitting in the product page files with no visible trigger anywhere on the site, a single FAQ block reused word for word across every product regardless of relevance, an empty review widget showing on every product tile, and no structured data despite content that was more than ready for it. Add a 55/100 PageSpeed score, driven largely by 62 unoptimised images, and 59 internal links still routing through the old pre-launch domain, and the pattern was clear: nobody had checked the work before calling the job finished.
None of this needed specialist skill to catch. It needed someone to check their own work before calling the job finished. That hadn't happened.
The approach
I don't treat branding and technical SEO as two separate jobs bolted together. There's limited value optimising the technical performance of a page that isn't yet saying the right thing about the brand. So I worked through Home, the collection page, and each product page in the same order every time:
- Branding and messaging first. Getting each page to actually present Ghuttie Snacks as a founder-led, health-credible brand, not a generic theme demo.
- Functionality and technical second. Once the content was settled, writing the schema, alt text, and meta descriptions against final copy, not copy that was about to change again.
The product content already in Shopify, the photography and the ingredient knowledge, carried forward. I reviewed each piece for fit, tightened what needed it, and built the templates properly around it. Fixing the underlying problems meant moving off the off-the-shelf theme entirely and building on a custom theme instead, one shaped around how Ghuttie Snacks actually sells rather than a generic template with the logo dropped on top.
What changed
Home. A redesigned hero with a header that stays legible against any image. Copy and layout rebuilt around the brand's health credibility and Dr Leke's story, not the theme's default presentation.
The collection page. Proper on-page copy with enough context and keyword relevance to let the page rank on its own merits, not just ride on the product pages beneath it.
Every product page. Each of the four flavours, Cacao, Baobab, Maca and Moringa, now has its own FAQ block, answering the specific questions a shopper would actually ask about that product rather than a shared list padded out with irrelevant ingredients. The unanswered question is gone. The unused size-chart code is gone. The leftover "packaging may vary" note is gone. Meta descriptions are complete and within the character limit, not cutting off mid-sentence.
Supporting pages. The Science and Gut Health pages now carry proper explanatory content and their own FAQ sections, the kind of clearly structured, directly answered content that both Google's rich results and AI search tools can read and cite with confidence, rather than having to interpret loose, unmarked text.
About Us. A specific, detailed founder story from Dr Leke, not a generic "who we are" page.
Where the numbers stand now
A PageSpeed Insights run on the rebuilt collection page comes back at 97 out of 100 for performance, 95 for accessibility, and a clean 100 for both Best Practices and SEO. The page loads fully visible in 1.1 seconds. Against a homepage that originally scored 55 out of 100, with a 10.9 second wait before anything meaningful appeared, that's the difference between visitors leaving before the page loads and a store that's ready before they've finished clicking.
The SEO score means structured data, crawlability, and descriptive links are all doing their job, the technical foundation that lets strong FAQ and product content actually earn rich results in Google and get picked up accurately by AI search tools, rather than sitting there unread.
Lighthouse's newer Agentic Browsing check, which tests how well a page can be understood and used by AI browsing agents, scores 3 out of 4. Most Shopify stores aren't even measuring that yet, let alone passing it.
Why it matters commercially
Every one of those gaps had a cost attached to it, even if it wasn't obvious from the storefront.
Structured data doesn't move rankings by itself, but it's what turns a plain search listing into a rich result: star ratings, price, expandable FAQ answers, all shown directly in the search listing. Pages with that markup earn more clicks than a plain blue link next to them for the same search term. And AI search tools lean on the same structured, well-answered content to pull accurate facts and cite a page directly, rather than treating it as loose text to guess at.
A 10.9 second Largest Contentful Paint means most visitors on a typical mobile connection have moved on before the page has finished showing them anything, a conversion problem and a ranking problem at the same time, since Core Web Vitals is a confirmed ranking input.
Fifty-nine internal links routing through an unnecessary redirect burns crawl budget on resolving redirects rather than indexing content. A shared FAQ block with irrelevant questions, an unanswered question, and an empty review widget at the point of purchase all undermine the one thing a health and food brand is actually selling: trust.
None of that is complicated to fix. It just has to actually get done, and checked, before the job is called finished.
The result
A store built properly the second time, on a custom theme shaped around the brand, with the same product photography and ingredient knowledge Ghuttie Snacks already had, now doing the work it was always meant to do: presenting the brand accurately, answering the questions shoppers actually have, and giving both search engines and AI tools clean, structured content to work with.
Built properly. Made to work. That's the whole job.
If your Shopify store looks finished but isn't converting or ranking the way it should, I'll review it properly and tell you exactly what's holding it back. Get in touch to start with a straight, no-guesswork review of where your store actually stands.