Search engine work,
completed and verified
Everything below is already live on imprimetoi.ca. It was done on a running store, so the first job was proving that nothing a customer sees would change. It did not. The second job was making the store legible to Google, to Google Maps, and to the AI assistants people now ask for a local supplier.
Proof that nothing changed for a customer
Before touching anything, all 71 live pages were downloaded and fingerprinted. Every page was hashed twice: once whole, and once with the head, the scripts and the styles stripped out and every tag removed, leaving only the words a person can actually read on screen.
pages have byte-for-byte identical customer-visible text before and after the work. Not similar. Identical. The same test can be re-run at any time.
Two files hold the evidence: fingerprints-before.json and
fingerprints-after.json. Every setting that was changed is written down with its
original value, so any single item can be put back on its own without undoing the rest.
56.13, -106.35, which is
the geographic centre of Canada, roughly 1,500 km from the store, with an empty place name. It was
turned back off within minutes and replaced with the store's real coordinates.Six changes, all invisible to customers
1. The site now says it is in French
67 of the 71 pages declared no language at all. Every competitor measured declares one. The site
now serves lang="fr-CA", which tells Google this is Canadian French, not France French
— the difference that decides whether you surface for a searcher in Québec.
2. The store exists as a place, not just a website
This is the single most important change for walk-in traffic. Every page now carries a
Store and ClothingStore record containing the real street address, the real
phone number, the real coordinates of 850 boulevard Pierre-Bertrand, the full seven-day opening hours
exactly as published on the site, the areas served, the languages spoken, and the services offered.
Before this, a search engine had no machine-readable way of knowing there was a physical shop at all.
3. Products can now show a price in search results
Product pages emit a proper product record: name, description, image, SKU, brand, price in CAD and
availability. That is the difference between a plain blue link and a listing that shows a price.
Verified live at 5.93 $ CAD on a sample product.
4. Duplicate category pages stopped competing with each other
Seven pairs of category pages existed at the same address with a different id on the end — Camisoles, Hoodies, T-Shirts, Manches courtes, Polars, Fabric Type and Mediumweight Cotton. Each pair was splitting its own ranking signal in half. They now consolidate to a single preferred address each.
5. The search description was rewritten for this city
| Text | Length | |
|---|---|---|
| Before | Créez vos vêtements personnalisés en ligne avec ImprimeToi. T-shirts, cotons ouatés, casquettes, sacs et accessoires imprimés... | 174 |
| After | Impression et broderie sur vêtements personnalisés à Québec. T-shirts, hoodies, casquettes. Commandez en ligne ou passez en boutique, 850 boul. Pierre-Bertrand. | 160 |
The old one was over the 170-character limit, so it was being cut off. More importantly it never named the city and never mentioned the shop. The new one does both, and it applies to the 43 pages that inherit the site default.
6. Mobile: pinch-zoom restored, connections warmed up
The site was serving maximum-scale=1.0, which blocks a visitor from pinch-zooming.
Google's mobile audit penalises that and it is a genuine problem for older customers. It is gone, and
nothing about the layout changed. Two connection hints were also added so the browser opens its
connections to the two outside services the page already uses before it needs them.
Before and after
| Signal | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Pages declaring a language | 4 of 71 | 71 of 71 |
| Pages carrying structured data | 4 of 71 | 71 of 71 |
| Structured-data records site-wide | 4 | 161 |
| Pages with a preferred address declared | 4 | 71 |
| Machine-readable street address | none | published |
| Machine-readable opening hours | none | all 7 days |
| Price visible to Google on product pages | no | yes |
| Pinch-zoom on mobile | blocked | allowed |
| Customer-visible text changed | 0 of 71 pages | |
How a shop in Québec actually gets found
Imprime-Toi is unusual: it sells online and it has a counter people can walk up to. Those are two different searches and they are won in two different ways.
Someone searching "t-shirt personnalisé Québec" on a phone
Google answers this with a map pack before it shows a single website. To appear there, a business has to be understood as a place: a name, a street address, coordinates, a phone number and opening hours, all consistent between the website and the Google Business Profile. Until today the site published none of that in a form a machine could read. Now it publishes all of it, and it matches the address in the footer exactly. Consistency is the whole game — a mismatched address is worse than a missing one.
Someone asking an AI assistant "where can I get hoodies printed in Quebec City?"
AI answer engines read the same structured records and prefer sources that state facts plainly and
machine-readably. A page that declares its language, its city, its hours, its services and its prices
is far more likely to be quoted than one that leaves all of it as pictures and prose. The site's
robots.txt already allows AI crawlers, so nothing is blocking this.
Someone comparing three suppliers on a Tuesday afternoon
The two who show a price get shortlisted. Product pages now expose price and availability to Google, which is what allows a price to appear under the link.
The ten things that will move the needle next
These are outside the website's code, so they are yours to own. They are ordered by how much each one is worth relative to the effort. The tags say who pays and who does it.
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Claim and finish the Google Business Profile Free
This is the highest-value action on the list, by a wide margin. For "near me" and map searches it matters more than the website. Use the exact same name, address, phone and hours now published on the site. Add the real categories (screen printing, embroidery, promotional apparel), photos of the shop and the presses, and the service area. Then post to it monthly — an active profile outranks a dormant one.
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Collect Google reviews, deliberately and continuously Free
Reviews are the strongest ranking factor in the map pack and the strongest trust signal for a first-time buyer. One competitor in this market already shows 4.7 stars from 162 reviews. Ask every customer who picks up an order, with a short link or a QR code at the counter. Reply to all of them.
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Turn on ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics Free
Analytics is installed but only counts visits. It does not record add-to-cart, checkout starts, or completed orders, so nobody can say which pages produce revenue. Until this exists, every decision about the site is a guess and no advertising can be judged.
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Connect Google Search Console Free
It is free and it is the only source of the real words people type before they land on the site. It will also confirm that the structured data added today is being read correctly, and flag anything Google cannot crawl. Do this within the week so the "before" data starts accumulating now.
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Make the phone number tappable and put it in the header We can do it
The number on the contact page is plain text. On a phone it cannot be tapped to call, and nothing counts the calls it produces. For a business with a counter, the phone is a primary conversion and it is currently invisible.
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Write one real page per service and per city you serve We can do it
The site has 71 pages. The two competitors pulling real traffic have 454 and 2,938. Pages are the raw material of search traffic. A genuine page on screen printing, one on embroidery, one on DTF, one on team and school orders, one on corporate uniforms — each naming the region honestly — is the cheapest traffic you can build.
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Give Imprime-Toi its own social accounts Free
Both social links currently point at the Gestock accounts. The brand the whole home page is built around has nowhere to be followed. It also weakens the entity signal: the structured data now says Imprime-Toi is a real business, and matching profiles confirm it.
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Add alt text to product and page images We can do it
549 of 1,148 images have no alt text. For decorated apparel, image search is real traffic, and alt text is also what a screen reader depends on. This has to be done image by image in the page editor.
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Put a starting price on the category pages We can do it
Nothing on the home page or the category pages carries a price. A buyer has to commit to several clicks before learning anything about cost, and many will not. A simple "à partir de" figure removes the biggest hesitation in the funnel.
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Only then, buy ads Paid
Two competitors run 11 and 10 live Google ads; three run none. Paid search in this market is not settled and it is still open. But there is no advertising pixel of any kind installed today, so a campaign started now could not be measured or optimised, and no audience would be building. Do items 3 and 4 first, then advertise.
Three things deliberately left alone
- The category pages show no products. The Vetements menu and all thirteen category tiles on the home page lead to pages that display nothing, even though the products are present in the page. This is the single biggest problem on the store and it is a display fault, not missing data. Fixing it makes products appear, which is a visible change, so it was held back for a decision.
- The translation script that runs on every page load. It walks up to twenty thousand pieces of text on each page. It is the strongest suspect for both the blocking time and the empty category grid. Rewriting it risks visibly mangling French wording, so it needs its own tested pass rather than being bundled in here.
- Per-page descriptions. 43 pages still share one description. DecoNetwork supports writing a unique one per page, but its visual page editor froze the browser twice during this session and it is not worth fighting on a live store. Nothing was modified in it.