Rebuilding a 700+ Product Pro Audio Catalogue After a Messy Migration

The problem

Pro Audio Brands sells studio monitors, microphones, interfaces, mixers and DJ gear from dozens of manufacturers, and had moved to Shopify from an older site. Products ranked in positions 5 to 9 for brand and model searches and still earned almost no clicks.

What we found

76% of products had no SEO title, so Google wrote its own from whatever it found. The old site's brand pages returned 404 and nothing had replaced them. The theme cut every hand-written meta description off at 152 characters.

Every product page carried a strip claiming a 4.5 out of 5 rating from 650+ reviews, with three stock-photo faces. A real review app was already installed and showing genuine reviews underneath it.

The descriptions were not thin, they were dirty. 85% of products shipped styling code pasted in from a chat tool, most had empty paragraphs, and many still carried a leftover heading from the migration. 61% of products sat in Shopify's Uncategorized product category, which is what Google Shopping reads.

Some of the copy was simply wrong. A subwoofer was described as a power bank, a speaker's battery life was understated, and several titles gave the wrong driver size or number of ways. One product was active and in stock but published to no sales channel at all, so nobody could see it.

What we changed

Every active product got an SEO title, description and product type, and every product a correct Shopify category, with none left uncategorized. Brand collections and a Brands menu replaced the dead brand pages, and the old brand URLs now redirect.

The descriptions were cleaned across the whole catalogue while keeping the words: visible text changed by less than 1%. Then 264 product pages that could not rank on their own copy were rewritten from manufacturer sources, checking which generation of each product the store actually sells, because a maker's current page often describes a newer model.

Eight wrong titles were corrected against the manufacturer's own specs, and five stale URLs were renamed with redirects. The fake review strip came off every page, the theme stopped truncating descriptions, and the hidden product went back on sale. Buying guides followed, with topics picked from what people were already searching for in Search Console.

Where it stands

At the last check across the whole catalogue: no product uncategorized, no migration leftovers, no two products opening with the same words, and no product page under 600 characters. In Merchant Center, over 99% of offers were approved with no account issues, and the few disapprovals left were stale page errors waiting on Google to re-crawl.