The Growth ProjectQuiet SEO Leaks: Empty Pages, Missing Descriptions, Cut-Off Titles
- 1 in 9brand pages had no meta description
- 19blog titles cut off in search results
- ~12×sales from free Google search, July to October
- 19 → 669keywords the site ranks for, January to September
One ecommerce store. The growth figures also reflect new product ranges, more product content and the season, not these fixes alone.
Field note from an ecommerce store. Nothing was broken. Rankings were steady, and the SEO plugin showed green ticks. A page-by-page audit against live data still turned up a list of small leaks.
What we saw
- Empty category pages were in Google. Categories with no products anywhere beneath them were indexable, so people could land on a page with nothing to buy.
- Some brand pages had no meta description at all. Google wrote its own snippet from whatever text it found first.
- A custom title on the main shop page was being ignored because of how the store rewrites that URL, so the default title showed instead.
- Blog titles ran well past 60 characters once the site name was added, and were cut off in results.
- One product had been copied and kept another product’s title and description, so two different pages competed for the same search.
- Checkout, cart and account pages were indexable, which is thin content Google has no reason to show.
What we did
- Set empty categories to be excluded from search automatically, so the rule keeps working as the catalogue changes.
- Added a fallback description for any category or brand without one.
- Fixed the shop-page title override, shortened the long titles and rewrote the duplicated product.
- Excluded transactional pages from search.
Why it matters
None of these would show up as an error, and most SEO tools score them as minor. Together they decide whether Google shows your best page or a weak one, and whether the result is worth clicking. Finding them takes your real data, which is how our SEO audit works.