Gossamer Gear makes some of the best ultralight backpacking gear on the market. What they didn't have: any SEO infrastructure, any AI search strategy, or anyone who'd ever looked at their site through that lens. That's where I came in.
Phase 1 Audit
4 weeks
Ultralight backpacking
Shopify
The situation
Gossamer Gear weren’t worried about SEO. The site was "ranking fine." But they had product launch season coming up and wanted to make sure nothing was being left on the table. So they hired me for a Phase 1 audit.
What we found wasn't a crisis or anything. It was a site with solid bones and a lot of untouched opportunity.
The work
Over ten structured sessions across four weeks. I executed:
- Technical crawl
- Shopify-specific audit
- GA4 + GSC performance review
- competitor gap analysis
- collection page audit
- PDP deep-dive
- full blog content inventory
- AI prompt testing across three platforms
- Shopify MetaObjects infrastructure audit
I used Screaming Frog, KeySearch, Python for data work, and manual testing in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Along with data from Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
99
technical issues tracked across 22 tabs
744
blog posts inventoried and tiered
22
AI queries tested across 3 platforms
148
high-impression, low-CTR pages surfaced
Nothing slips through
A Screaming Frog export tells you what's broken. It doesn't tell you what's being missed. Google Search Console and Google Analytics can tell you where to look.
But it takes an experienced human to connect the dots. I don’t just give you a bunch of problems and data to sort through. I find the opportunities that will actually move the needle, not just check a box for the sake of a robot. And I prioritize them so you know what to do first.
A few things I caught that would have slipped past a surface-level audit:
- One of the site's most-searched products had hundreds of thousands of impressions and a CTR well under 1%. The content wasn't doing its job and nobody had noticed because the product wasn't a "priority."
- Every single collection page H1 was outputting Shopify's default "Collection:" prefix — one theme-level fix, affects every page on the site and gets them showing up in search even more.
- Gossamer Gear has no About page. Both
/aboutand/pages/about-gossamer-gear404. AI tools can't find basic brand context when it doesn't exist anywhere on the site. That means they don’t trust your brand they way they might trust your competitors. - An active competitive naming threat was identified that required urgent action. That’s the kind of thing with a window that won't stay open forever.
- Two MetaObjects (FAQs that populate on multiple product pages) were fully built in the backend and referenced on zero live pages. Optimizing these MetaObject FAQs for the questions people are actually asking will do some major heavy lifting.
The AI search piece
Gossamer Gear had zero intentional AI search strategy going in. The traffic data told the story first: a February 2026 impression spike with near-zero CTR is a textbook AI Overview displacement pattern.
The site was losing clicks not because rankings were dropping (their impressions were stable) but because AI was answering the questions instead.
Manual prompt testing confirmed it. GG shows up strong when you search for Gossamer Gear directly.
But search for "best ultralight backpack," "frameless vs framed backpack," or anything related to AT thru-hiking gear, and they mostly disappear.
They were completely invisible for trekking pole queries and they were about to launch new trekking poles in a few weeks. We can fix that!
The structural reasons were all fixable: FAQ metafields empty across every top PDP, no crawlable brand statement on the homepage, collection pages with no body copy, no about page, blog posts that linked to zero products.
The site had a lot of the ingredients already. All it needs is a few extra snippets here and there to bring it up to speed.
The deliverables
I write every SEO Audit Report in clean language so that anyone on your team can read, implement, and understand what needs to be done.
Every finding in the report translates to plain language with a clear "here's what this means and here's what to do." The action plan is tiered (Start Here / Build On It / Keep Going) instead of a to-do list with dates that go stale the second your team closes their laptop.
Audit report (in Notion)
Not just a report: a tool.
What to do, when to do it, how to do it, and where you’ll need help from contractors/experts.
Technical findings tracker (in Google Sheets)
99 issues, 22 tabs, tagged by severity and owner — built to hand off to contractors.
Blog content audit
744 posts inventoried and tiered. 44 flagged as content library candidates. Hundreds tiered for updating/optimizing, consolidating, or redirecting.
AI prompt testing report
22 queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews — documented and analyzed.
Product Update SEO Checklist
Bonus deliverable. A reusable system and checklist for keeping copy and content aligned when products change.
Phase 2 proposal
Embedded in the report so they can easily re-engage me for executing next steps if their internal team doesn’t have the capacity.
The Delivery Experience: What Happens After the Report
Most SEO audits end with a file drop. You get a spreadsheet, maybe a PDF, and a wave goodbye. Figuring out what to do with it — and how to explain it to your team — is your problem.
That's not how this works.
After the audit report is delivered, every audit engagement includes a live walkthrough call that lasts up to a full hour. We go through the report together, page by page, at whatever depth makes sense for you.
If you want to understand every finding, we go through every finding. If you have questions about specific recommendations, we figure that out together in real time. If there's a technical term you've never heard before (there are so many! canonical tags, tech debt, crawl budget, domain ranking, AI displacement, etc.) we stop and I explain it until it makes sense to you.
No jargon left unexplained. No "just hand it to your developer and good luck." I am here to support you in understanding your report so you can actually use what you paid for!
The call is recorded. You get lifetime access to the recording. It becomes a reference document your whole team can use, not just the person who was on the call.
What this looked like with Gossamer Gear:
We did a full one hour Consultation call. Their Marketing Director came in with questions, and we walked through the entire Notion report together — every section, every recommendation, the reasoning behind the prioritization.
By the end of the call, he said he felt clear and supported. He knew what to take back to his team, what to hand to his dev partner, and what to start on immediately. He also knew exactly where I could step in if they didn't have the in-house capacity to implement everything themselves.
He also hadn't heard of Notion before receiving the report. His unsolicited feedback at the end of the call: he loved the format! The way the report was structured and the nature of Notion made it easy to navigate at his own pace and share with his team without overwhelming anyone.
That reaction is the whole point of the report and the consultation call. The report is designed to be read and understood by a non-technical business operator, not just handed off and forgotten. The walkthrough call is designed to make sure nothing gets lost in translation.
You shouldn't have to figure out SEO alone after paying for an audit. The call is how we make sure you don't.
Want to work together?
Set up a discovery call and we’ll figure out what support makes sense for your team.
