NimbleDingo
Where we go from here
Hi Francesca,
Thank you so much for your time the other day. You were generous with the detail and it made a real difference, because a few of the things you explained changed how I read the numbers.
I will not repeat the whole walkthrough here, since you have already seen it. This is a short record of what we agreed, what has changed since, and what I would suggest we do about it.
What changed once we spoke
The discounting. Before we spoke, this was the largest figure in the audit: A$28,555 against A$57,082 of gross sales, and up 52% on the year. You explained it is your wholesale channel running through discount codes, gated by a minimum basket of around A$1,000. That reframes it completely, and it also explains the large partially refunded orders of 37 and 91 items I could not account for. It is off the list.
The codes are readable words rather than random strings and carry no customer restriction, so the minimum basket is the only barrier. Coupon browser extensions do scrape codes like these and apply them automatically. If you are happy with it, that is genuinely fine and I would not change a thing without you asking. I just did not want to leave it unsaid.
The theme. You updated it during the call, which clears eleven versions of arrears in one go. Thank you for that.
The free shipping code. You have automated it, so shoppers no longer have to type it in manually. That was almost certainly part of why more than half of the 295 who reached the checkout walked away.
Everything still open, in one place
| Figure | What is still outstanding |
|---|---|
| 6,502 | visits last year were bots, just over a quarter of all traffic. Every funnel number is diluted until this is filtered out |
| 626 | products are duplicates or near-duplicates of one another, and Google suppresses all of them |
| 924 | of 943 products have no SKU or stock reference at all |
| 501 | pages share a title with another page, and 471 share a search summary |
| 0 | pages carry the structured data Google needs to show price, stock or review stars |
| 0 | abandoned baskets have ever been recovered, despite the setup existing |
| Failing | email authentication, so confirmations and marketing are sending from a generic Shopify address and likely landing in spam |
| None | email marketing platform running at all, so there is no welcome flow, no recovery sequence and no way to bring a past customer back |
| 1 | unused email app still installed and connected to the shop, which should simply come off |
| 9.1s | before the main image loads on a phone, against a mobile score of 54 out of 100 |
| 5 | search apps installed, all overwriting each other, all being paid for |
| 117 | pages have no heading, 34 of 69 collections are unlinked, and 49 products sit in no collection |
| 27+ | old Mother's Way and Fabris and Co pages still live and indexed, plus two broken domains still attached |
| 2 | Google Analytics properties reporting different numbers, so nothing can be trusted yet |
I went back and looked specifically at the 487 descriptions already rewritten. They read well, but four recurring templates run through them, 150 open with one of just fifteen near-identical phrases, and 83% share the same stock phrases with each other. None of it is caught by any duplicate checker, because swapping the stone and the colour is enough to slip past. It is exactly why the pipeline you described, photo in and description, SKU and meta out, has to be built as a system rather than run a page at a time.
Your product descriptions, looked at properly
I went through the Maris Lapis Lazuli page line by line. The writing itself is good. It is specific, it carries real product knowledge, and the Complete the Look link across to the matching necklace is exactly the right instinct. Please keep doing that.
The length is not the problem. Around 700 words on a product page is helpful rather than harmful, so there is nothing to shorten.
The two blocks at the bottom are. About Boho & Mala and Wholesale & Retail run to roughly 300 words and appear word for word on all 943 products. On that page around 350 words are unique to the earrings and 300 are text Google has already seen 942 times, so almost half of every description is repeated content.
You currently have 943 pages competing to rank for wholesale, so none of them do. One properly built wholesale page would concentrate that into a single strong result instead of splitting it 943 ways. The same is true of the stone meaning sections, which repeat across every product using that stone.
On turning them into images, I would strongly advise against it. Google cannot read text inside an image, so it would vanish from search entirely rather than simply stop being duplicated. It would also be unreadable to screen readers, impossible to copy an email address from, and it would add weight to pages already loading in nine seconds.
What I would do instead is move both blocks out of the description field and into the theme, as a collapsible section beneath the product. Your customers see exactly the same information on every page and nothing looks different to them. But it comes out of the description field, which matters twice over: Google treats templated page regions as boilerplate and discounts them rather than weighing them as product content, and your Google Shopping and Meta catalogue feeds pull that field directly, so your product feeds stop carrying a wholesale pitch. It is one change to the theme rather than 943 edits.
The last small thing is the opening line. Words like timeless and effortlessly now appear in most of the rewritten descriptions, so the first sentence has become a formula even though each description reads well on its own. That is a fix to how they are generated rather than a rewrite.
What is genuinely working
How I would tackle it
On the blogs you asked about
I can absolutely write blogs for you, but I would rather explain how I want to do it than take the work and have it quietly do nothing.
A batch written today is a snapshot of today. What is worth ranking for keeps moving: competitors publish, search terms shift, and a gap that is wide open in August can be crowded by October. Posts written once to a guessed topic list tend to sit there, which is honestly what has happened with the current ones.
What I would do instead is run them off live research. Every week the engine looks at what your competitors are actually ranking for, what you are not, and where there is real search volume nobody has claimed. The posts then get written to fill those specific gaps rather than to a list I made up in advance.
The other half of it is structure, and it is the half that is usually missing. A post only earns anything if it is wired in properly: parent topics, child topics, and links through to the right products and collections. That is what makes content compound instead of just exist. Five standalone posts have nothing linking to them and nothing worth linking out to.
Every stone meaning section sitting in your product descriptions is the beginning of a proper content cluster. Lapis lazuli meaning is a real search that real people make, and at the moment it is spread thinly across a dozen product pages instead of you owning it with one strong page that feeds traffic down into all of them. That is the first cluster I would build, and it solves the duplicate content problem at the same time.
Done this way it takes six to twelve months to really build, but it keeps growing rather than fading, and it becomes the cheapest traffic the shop will ever get.
Where I think we could work together
You told me the real goal: to come away from the shop floor entirely, run everything through the website, and build a proper presence in the United States. I have kept the Foundations items above out of any package deliberately, because you have already started on several of them yourself and the rest are things you are genuinely capable of doing without paying anyone. Selling that back to you would not be honest.
Foothold
- Two blog posts a month, written from live weekly research into what your competitors rank for and what you do not
- Each post properly linked into a topic cluster, starting with the stone meaning cluster, which also pulls those repeated sections out of your descriptions
- One structural site fix each month, chosen by us from the audit list, worked through in priority order
- A short monthly report: real traffic with bots removed, what was published, what changed
Foothold does not cover one-off requests, urgent fixes, or general "can you just" tasks. Anything outside the scope above is quoted separately as it comes up, so the retainer stays predictable for both of us rather than turning into an open queue. If something urgent breaks, we would always tell you and quote it fast, but it would not silently come out of the monthly hours.
Momentum
- Everything in Foothold
- The full catalogue pipeline: photo in, distinct description, SKU, title and search summary out, all 943 products run through it
- A proper wholesale page built to rank on its own, replacing the block currently repeated on every product
- A US storefront pass: localised pricing and copy, a US product feed, and a Shopify Market set up properly
- Groundwork for US advertising, once the catalogue is clean enough to advertise honestly
Start with Foothold. It is deliberately small and deliberately bounded, so you can see how the research and the blog engine actually work before committing to anything bigger. Momentum, and the US push specifically, is where I would move you once Foothold is visibly working, backed by real numbers rather than a forecast.
Two small things from you
If you could possibly add chris@nimbledingo.com as an administrator on Google Analytics, and let me know which of your two properties you actually look at, that would be brilliant. If you are not sure, no problem at all, I will work it out from the data.
And if you have Google Search Console set up, the same email with full access please.
Any questions at all, or anything in here you disagree with, just say. I would far rather you challenged it.
Thank you again for the other day, Francesca. I really enjoyed the conversation and I am looking forward to getting stuck into this one.
Kind regards,
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