Case study — Springbok Puzzles · Technical SEO on headless BigCommerce
Snapshot
Springbok Puzzles is one of the last U.S. jigsaw puzzle manufacturers — cut, printed, and packed in Kansas City, with a brand history reaching back to 1963. The storefront runs BigCommerce v3 behind a React/Gatsby headless frontend: fast, modern, and deep with catalog content. On paper, a technically healthy site.
Google couldn’t index a single page of it.
The problem
When we ran a full crawl, Screaming Frog classified zero of the site’s ~1,039 content pages as indexable. Not a handful — zero. This on a site with quarter-second median response times, healthy internal linking, and extensive structured data. Every fundamental you’d want, and none of it reaching search engines.
The site wasn’t slow, and it wasn’t thin. It was misconfigured at the template level, in four specific ways.
What we found
Four bugs, each living in a single shared component, each sabotaging every page at once.
A canonical loop. Every page declared its canonical URL as the non-www version — which then 301-redirected back to www. Google received a contradictory signal on all ~1,039 URLs. This alone produced the zero-indexable verdict.
A sitewide 404 with 1,039 inlinks. A dead URL was linked from a global footer element, which meant every page on the site pointed at the same broken link.
“FREE SHIPPING!*” marked up as the H1. On 60 category pages — including the four highest-value commercial pages on the site — the promotional banner was the primary heading. The page’s actual topic was demoted beneath it.
A pagination bug corrupting attribution. Paginated category pages generated malformed URLs that compounded on every click, wasting crawl budget and fragmenting analytics sessions. It was the hidden cause of a 98.6% “Direct traffic” anomaly that had made the site’s own reporting untrustworthy.
The through-line: a strong site, buried by configuration.
What we did
None of this required a content rewrite or a re-platform. The indexability fixes were low-effort, single-component changes:
- Corrected the canonical value so every page resolved to its live www URL.
- Restored the sitewide-linked destination, clearing the 1,039-inlink 404.
- Rewrote the header template so the page’s real topic became its H1 and the banner became plain text — one edit that corrected all 60 pages.
The July recrawl confirmed these holding: canonical now resolves correctly on 1,037 of 1,039 pages, the promotional H1 is gone, and the sitewide 404 is cleared. The pagination component was diagnosed to the line and specified for the client’s development team; the attribution cleanup is the next item in the queue.
The results
As Google recrawled and reconsolidated the site, rankings and revenue followed:
- Branded average position improved from 5.08 to 4.27; non-branded from 9.55 to 9.20.
- Non-branded clicks grew faster than branded (+12.3% vs. +3.3%) — category and content pages carrying their own weight rather than leaning on brand demand.
- Organic sessions up 10.5%; search click-through up 16.5%.
- Organic revenue up 167% year over year, with items purchased up 330%.
The honest part
Some surface metrics went down first — impressions off roughly a third, sessions off about a quarter in the quarter following the fixes. That isn’t a red flag; it’s the correction working. Google was clearing out the thin, duplicated paginated URLs it had been counting. Fewer, cleaner, correctly attributed pages replaced a larger pile of junk ones. We briefed the client on this in advance, so a measurement improvement wouldn’t read in the reports as a traffic decline.
That distinction — knowing the difference between a number going down and a business getting worse — is most of the job.
What’s next
With the site finally indexable, the work moves to answer engines. Springbok already earns citations across Google AI Overviews, SearchGPT, and Gemini — 129 pages cited and 520 detected model prompts, led by a single how-to article. Answer Engine Optimization is now a tracked discipline on the account.
The takeaway
A site can do everything right and still be invisible. Before you invest in new content or links, make sure search engines can see what’s already there. Sometimes the highest-leverage SEO work is a handful of one-line fixes.
Interested in a technical audit of your storefront? Get in touch with KDGS Works.
