Riverbend Outfitters
Technical SEO Audit Plan | April 2026
Technical SEO Audit Plan | Sample Deliverable

Technical SEO Audit Plan

Full-site crawl, nine-category scorecard, severity-rated findings, and a 90-day remediation roadmap your dev team can plan against. Prepared by WE-DO for Riverbend Outfitters, a Bozeman-based fly fishing DTC brand.

Site
riverbendoutfitters.com
Crawl date
April 15, 2026
Pages crawled
418 of 500
Strategist
Mike McKearin

Executive summary

Overall technical SEO score: 67/100. The foundation is stable — HTTPS is enforced sitewide, sitemap and robots.txt are configured, no homepage indexability issues. Top three priorities: (1) 22 product pages have duplicate titles caused by the templated "Riverbend Outfitters | Product Name" format collapsing to identical strings when product names share words, (2) zero JSON-LD on any crawled page leaves rich-result eligibility on the table, (3) 14 pages return 404 from internal nav links, leaking link equity. If shipped on the 90-day plan, we estimate the overall score lifts to 86/100 with measurable downstream effects on indexed page count and CTR.

This audit at a glance

Overall score
67/100
Fair — actionable lift available
Critical findings
2
Both addressable in Phase 1
High findings
4
~28 hours total dev effort
Expected lift if shipped
+19
to 86/100 over 90 days

Category scorecard

CategoryScoreWeightTop issue
Crawlability62/10015%14 internal links return 404
Indexability58/10015%22 product pages share duplicate titles
On-Page Technical71/10015%36 pages exceed 60 chars in title (truncated in SERPs)
Sitemap & Robots90/10010%Sitemap omits 8 active product pages
Security & HTTPS95/10010%Missing HSTS header (low priority)
Structured Data35/10015%Zero JSON-LD on any crawled page
Page Speed / CWV68/10010%11 pages have LCP > 4s (mobile)
Mobile & UX80/1005%Proxy-measured; full audit not in scope
Site Architecture75/1005%Average click-depth 3.4 from home

Findings by severity

Critical (2)

CRITICAL 14 internal links point to 4xx URLs Crawlability · 14 URLs · ~6h effort

Pages including /collections/sale-discontinued, /collections/2024-archive, and 5 product pages return 404 but are still linked from the primary nav and footer. Discovered via the crawl follow-up of every internal href. Wastes crawl budget and frustrates returning users who bookmarked these URLs.

Fix: Update primary nav and footer to remove links to discontinued URLs. For pages with live equivalents (e.g., /collections/sale instead of /collections/sale-discontinued), set up 301 redirects in your e-commerce platform's redirect manager.

CRITICAL 2 high-traffic product pages return 5xx errors intermittently Crawlability · 2 URLs · ~4h effort

/products/yellowstone-pro-wading-boots and /products/madison-spring-creek-rod-9ft returned 503 errors on three of nine crawl attempts. Both pages drive significant impressions in GSC. Cause likely a CDN cache miss timing out against the backend.

Fix: Diagnose with hosting provider; increase upstream timeout, pre-warm CDN cache for these two URLs, or move to a static product detail template.

High (4)

HIGH 22 product pages have duplicate <title> tags Indexability · 22 URLs · ~8h effort

The product page title template {Product Name} | Riverbend Outfitters collapses to identical strings on 11 pairs of products (e.g., "Madison Rod 9ft 5wt" vs "Madison Rod 9ft 6wt" both render as "Madison Rod 9ft | Riverbend Outfitters" because the rod-weight variant is in URL but not page title).

Fix: Update product page title template to include line and weight: {Product Name} {Line} {Weight} | Riverbend Outfitters. Differentiates all 22 affected pairs without manual edits.

HIGH Zero JSON-LD structured data on any crawled page Structured Data · 418 URLs · ~6h effort (template-based)

No <script type="application/ld+json"> blocks detected on home, collection, product, or article pages. Eligible rich results currently forfeit: Product (price, rating, availability), Article (author, dateModified), Breadcrumb, Organization, WebSite (sitelink search box).

Fix: Add JSON-LD via your SEO plugin or template injection. Start with Organization + WebSite on every page, Product on PDPs, Article on blog, Breadcrumb on collections. Validate with the schema-generator service before deploy.

HIGH 11 pages have Largest Contentful Paint > 4 seconds (mobile) Page Speed / CWV · 11 URLs · ~10h effort

Mobile LCP measured at 4.2-6.8s on 11 collection pages, all driven by a hero image weighing 1.4-2.1 MB. PSI rating: poor (above 4s threshold). Affects Mobile-first indexing and Page Experience signals.

Fix: Compress hero images to under 200 KB (target WebP/AVIF format), add explicit width/height attributes to prevent CLS, lazy-load below-the-fold images, preload the LCP image.

HIGH 8 active product pages omitted from sitemap.xml Sitemap & Robots · 8 URLs · ~3h effort

Sitemap contains 410 URLs but crawl found 418 indexable pages. The 8 missing URLs are recent product additions (Q1 2026 launches) that appear to have not been included when the sitemap was regenerated. All 8 return 200, have internal links, and are crawlable — just not signaled to Google.

Fix: Trigger sitemap regeneration in the CMS, validate URL count matches indexable page count, resubmit in Google Search Console.

Medium (5) and Low (3)

Detailed in full audit. Highlights: 36 titles exceed 60 chars (truncated in SERPs), 19 pages have no meta description, missing HSTS header, breadcrumb markup absent on collections, average click-depth 3.4 from home (target 2-3).

90-day remediation roadmap

Findings grouped by phase. Each phase has a defined window, effort estimate, and expected score lift.

Phase 1
Quick wins
Days 0-30
  • Fix 14 internal links to 4xx URLs (Critical)
  • Resolve 5xx on 2 high-traffic product pages (Critical)
  • Update product title template to fix 22 duplicates (High)
  • Add missing 8 product URLs to sitemap (High)
  • Add HSTS response header (Low — 1h effort)
~21 hours · Expected lift: +11 points
Phase 2
Foundation fixes
Days 30-60
  • Add JSON-LD across all page templates (High)
  • Compress hero images on 11 slow-LCP pages (High)
  • Truncate 36 over-length titles (Medium)
  • Write 19 missing meta descriptions (Medium)
  • Add Breadcrumb schema to collections (Medium)
~22 hours · Expected lift: +6 points
Phase 3
Polish & architecture
Days 60-90
  • Flatten click-depth on 12 deep product pages (Low)
  • Add author + dateModified to article schema (Low)
  • Inline critical CSS for above-the-fold content (Low)
  • Set up monitoring alerts for 4xx/5xx regressions
~8 hours · Expected lift: +2 points

Total estimated effort: ~51 hours over 90 days. Expected overall score lift: 67 → 86/100 (+19 points). We recommend the follow-up Technical SEO Report 90 days after the Phase 3 sprint completes to measure actual delta and isolate any regressions.

Methodology