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Case study | Technical SEO, feed management and measurement
How We Untangled a 21,000-Product Catalog's URLs, Feeds, and Tracking, and Gave the Team Data They Could Trust
A U.S. institutional foodservice equipment distributor needed its site structure, product feed, and reporting to agree with each other. Corelead found the silent failures, fixed what we controlled, and rebuilt reporting around a source of truth.
At a glance
- Industry
- Institutional foodservice equipment (B2B ecommerce, custom platform)
- Channels
- Organic search, Google Shopping, Google Ads
- Services
- Technical SEO, product feed management, conversion tracking, content, reporting
Results
~20,300
products affected by a feed-wide error, roughly half the catalog, diagnosed and resolved
2 of 8
purchases recorded by Analytics in a four-day check, so conversion reporting was moved to a reliable source
76
category URLs migrated, and category traffic held steady through the cutover
12
articles, plus a weekly keyword tracker built on Search Console data
The challenge
The distributor sells about 21,000 products on a custom ecommerce platform, mostly shipped direct from manufacturers. Category URLs were inconsistent, and a product feed that should have refreshed regularly had silent problems nobody had caught.
About 40 percent of products carried short descriptions, and stray placeholder text had leaked into roughly 70 live descriptions. Analytics fired twice per pageview, and reporting from several tools disagreed.
The team needed to know what was actually working before spending more.
Our approach
- 1
A category migration that protected rankings
We moved 76 category pages to consistent URLs with 301 redirects and verified each in Search Console. We then rewrote titles and descriptions in tiers (do not disturb, caution, safe to optimize) based on how each page was ranking, and extended the approach to 26 brand pages.
- 2
Feed diagnosis and monitoring
Reading the raw feed, we found that product links and images pointed to a placeholder domain, which blocked about half the catalog from Google Shopping. We audited descriptions and kept dated exports to show how often the feed refreshed.
- 3
Merchandising control
We built lookup tables for custom labels so the team could steer Shopping and Performance Max toward its top sellers, and added overrides for 42 color-variant products.
- 4
Tracking audit and conversion cleanup
We found that the consent banner did not change how tags fired and that Analytics was loading twice. In a four-day check, Analytics recorded 2 purchases while Tag Manager recorded all 8, so we made Tag Manager the primary conversion signal for Google Ads.
- 5
Content built around buying decisions
We produced four content clusters, 12 articles in all, organized around how buyers decide (capacity, handling, power, hold time). When the client's expert noted that facility-type distinctions were not always accurate, we reframed the articles around operational factors.
- 6
Reporting on a source of truth
Where third-party estimates and Search Console disagreed, we rebuilt reporting around Search Console. The client now has a weekly tracker of 64 non-brand queries, with 16 months of history and a client login.
The results
The distributor now has a catalog Google can read, conversion data its team can trust, and a weekly view of search performance.
The work ran through two major Google core updates in 2026. Because reporting rests on Search Console, the team sees real movement week by week and can judge changes over a month or more, not react to day-to-day noise.
Key takeaways
- 1
Check the raw feed
A template error can hide half a catalog while dashboards look normal.
- 2
Verify freshness
A feed that does not refresh on schedule leaves prices and new products stale.
- 3
Pick a source of truth
Estimates are not outcomes. Anchor reporting to the data Google itself reports.
- 4
Measure weekly, decide monthly
Short-term movement is noise until it holds.
Is your catalog, feed, or tracking telling you the whole story?
Free preliminary audit of your product feed and tracking. It needs read-only (view) access to your ad and analytics accounts, which you can revoke anytime.