Western Trading Post
SEO & Growth Audit

A complete review of organic search, technical health, content strategy, the competitive landscape, AI-search visibility, and the path from traffic to consignments and sales — built on live Ahrefs data and a fresh crawl.

Six weeks later: 49 → 67

We re-ran this audit on August 1. The score moved from 49 to 67 out of 100 against a target of 82, using the same seven components and the same weights — so it is a like-for-like comparison, not a re-graded curve.

What actually shipped. The two defects capping everything are gone. The robots file had been blocking 40+ AI, image and social crawlers — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, facebookexternalhit. All 72 crawler rules now check clean, and the site is cited by all seven AI engines we track. /sitemap.xml went from a 404 to serving 4,516 URLs. Structured data went from zero sitewide to Organization, LocalBusiness and Product/Offer markup.

Counted strictly, that is two of the five baseline issues fully fixed, one mostly, two partly. We do not call an issue closed while a defect remains — and the schema deployment shipped with a malformed duplicate breadcrumb block that Google discards, on all 4,516 pages.

The lesson worth stealing: auction inventory is perishable, authority should not be

Here is the finding that reframed the whole engagement, and it applies to any auction house, gallery or dealer selling one-of-a-kind items.

Across the top 100 pages, which carry 92% of the site’s organic traffic, 54% of that traffic sits on pages for individual items that have already sold or soon will. Every successful sale deletes a ranking asset. You win the sale and lose the page that won it.

The sharpest example: Billy Klapper, the legendary Texas bit and spur maker, died in September 2024 and appeared posthumously in the final season of Yellowstone. He made 682 spur patterns. Searches for his work run 4,419 a month today. Western Trading Post ranks #1 for “billy klapper spurs for sale” — on a page about one pair of spurs that already sold. Three Klapper item pages carry 29% of the site’s top traffic, and each decays as its lot ages out.

The fix is not more lot pages. It is a permanent maker hub — the story, a pattern reference, past results, current lots, and a standing path for owners who want to consign. One page that captures the demand permanently, serves both sides of the business, and outlives every auction. Then you repeat it for the next maker.

One attribution note, because it matters: we are not claiming credit for the referring-domain growth. That climb began in early May, before this engagement, and no link building was done — it is the client’s own reputation earning links. What the work did was make that authority legible: the site was blocking AI crawlers outright and serving Google a broken sitemap, so a growing reputation had nowhere to land. The score movement is ours; the links are theirs. Methodology note: a +46% jump in referring domains is exactly the shape of a measurement artifact, so we pulled the 13-week history before reporting it as growth — 389 on June 1, 595 on July 27, a steady climb. And the first crawl showed all five child sitemaps returning 404, which would have been a dramatic finding; it was our own un-decoded & in the URLs. Both checks are now standing steps in the monthly run.

1. Stop blocking AI, image & social crawlers. The robots.txt blocks 40+ crawlers (Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Images, Facebook previews) while those answers already appear on your terms.
2. Make the sitemap discoverable + add structured data. /sitemap.xml 404s and the site has zero schema markup — no rich results, nothing for AI to cite.
3. Strengthen the category & home pages. The homepage H1 is empty and category pages have no on-page content — why they rank #7 instead of #1 on zero-difficulty terms.