The Challenge
Songs of Siren is a WooCommerce store for a designer label that sells hand-beaded dresses, sets and pyramid bags. When we started in March 2025, the store was invisible in search. Our April 2025 report showed 0 clicks and 11 impressions in Google Search Console for the previous four weeks.
The audit explained part of that. The site had been hacked. Attackers had uploaded their own sitemap, added Spanish-language casino posts and categories, listed them in the post and category sitemaps and linked to them from the blog. On top of that, 1,073 junk URLs were returning errors, most of them auto-generated prize pages, plus a few casino posts in other languages.
The technical base had its own problems. The same pages opened at URLs with extra trailing slashes, canonicals needed fixing, and the menu and footer were marked up as sixth-level headings on every page. Main headings were missing, some pages had no meta description, and almost every product title carried only the product name. There was no Product, BlogPosting or breadcrumb markup and no tag manager. Competing beaded-dress labels had hundreds or thousands of referring domains, while this store had only a handful.
The Strategy
- Hack cleanup - removed the attackers' pages and the links to them, replaced their sitemap with a clean one and sent 1,073 junk and spam URLs to Google for removal
- Technical fixes - rewrote robots.txt, set permanent redirects for duplicate URLs with extra trailing slashes, fixed canonicals and moved the menu and footer out of sixth-level headings
- Structured data and tracking - added Product, BlogPosting, Breadcrumbs and Open Graph markup, and installed Google Tag Manager to track the site
- Commercial pages - mapped keywords such as hand beaded dress, pyramid bag and luxury evening bags to the home page, shop and product pages, and wrote new titles and descriptions for 37 of 46 products
- Content - published 97 articles between March 2025 and January 2026 around the collection: pyramid bags, hand-beaded dresses, evening looks and dress codes
- Link building - placed 15 links on lifestyle and news sites, pointing to the home page, the shop, the dresses, bags and skirts categories and the Zodiac Dress, and reviewed 78 referring domains for disavow
The Results
Why this matters
A small fashion label can do everything right on the product side and still get nothing from search, because Google judges the whole domain, not the collection. If the sitemap lists casino pages, that is part of what the site says about itself. Before any on-page SEO or content work, it is worth checking what the sitemap, the index and the blog actually contain.
A store cannot grow in search while its sitemap still points Google at someone else's casino pages.
The second lesson is about what links and articles point at. The audit fixes were done in the first two months, and from then on the blog and the outreach worked for the shop: articles built around the pieces the label actually sells, links aimed at the shop, categories and a single dress rather than only the home page. For a designer store with a small catalogue, content marketing built around specific products gives search engines a reason to show those products.
