Why Squarespace Won't Let You Delete a Site From Your Dashboard — Even After Billing Has Expired
Ritner Digital Ritner Digital

Why Squarespace Won't Let You Delete a Site From Your Dashboard — Even After Billing Has Expired

You canceled the subscription, the billing lapsed, and the site shows "Website Expired"—so why won't Squarespace let you delete it? The answer comes down to one rule the dashboard never explains: an expired website isn't the same as a deletable one. Here's exactly what's blocking the delete, why Squarespace designed it that way, and how to actually remove the site.

Read More
The GEO Audit: 7 Things to Check If You're Not Showing Up in AI-Generated Answers
Ritner Digital Ritner Digital

The GEO Audit: 7 Things to Check If You're Not Showing Up in AI-Generated Answers

You typed the question into ChatGPT yourself — "best company for [what you do]" — and your name wasn't in the answer. A competitor's was. That sting is one of the most common experiences in marketing right now, and one of the most fixable. Showing up in AI-generated answers isn't luck or a black box; it's the product of specific signals AI systems use to find, understand, trust, and cite your brand. This tactical GEO audit walks through the seven things to check — from crawler access and schema to entity clarity, citation-ready formatting, and third-party validation — in the order that actually matters.

Read More
What Your Old SEO Agency Should Give You Before They Leave
Ritner Digital Ritner Digital

What Your Old SEO Agency Should Give You Before They Leave

When an SEO agency relationship ends, most clients ask for their logins back and call it done. But there's a lot more that belongs to you — keyword strategies, link building records, technical documentation, content archives, and years of reporting data that your next agency needs to hit the ground running. Here's the complete list of what you're owed and how to make sure you get it.

Read More
The SEO Agency Handoff Checklist: Everything You Need Before You Switch
Ritner Digital Ritner Digital

The SEO Agency Handoff Checklist: Everything You Need Before You Switch

Switching SEO agencies goes wrong in predictable ways — lost access, missing documentation, and gaps in active work that quietly erode rankings you spent years building. This checklist covers every asset, account, and piece of documentation you need to secure before your current agency's last day, so your transition protects what you've built instead of undoing it.

Read More
SEO Migration Checklist for Enterprise Websites
Ritner Digital Ritner Digital

SEO Migration Checklist for Enterprise Websites

Enterprise website migrations are categorically different from small business migrations in ways that matter significantly for SEO execution. The URL count isn't just larger — it's large enough that manual processes break down and systematic automation becomes necessary. The backlink profile isn't just more valuable — it's distributed across thousands of referring domains in ways that require prioritization frameworks rather than comprehensive manual outreach. The stakeholder landscape isn't just more complex — it includes legal, compliance, IT security, and procurement functions whose requirements shape the migration timeline in ways that pure SEO planning can't account for.

Read More
Why Traffic Drops After a Redesign
Ritner Digital Ritner Digital

Why Traffic Drops After a Redesign

You launched the new site. It looks better. It loads on mobile. The stakeholders are happy. And then the traffic graph starts going in the wrong direction. Post-redesign traffic drops are one of the most common and most preventable problems in digital marketing — and one of the most frustrating, because the cause is almost never obvious from looking at the new site. The design looks fine. The pages load. Users can navigate. But Google is seeing something different from what the design team built, and the ranking signals it's evaluating have changed in ways that nobody planned.

Read More
What Happens to SEO During a Website Redesign?
Ritner Digital Ritner Digital

What Happens to SEO During a Website Redesign?

Website redesigns are one of the most reliably misunderstood SEO events in digital marketing. The conversation starts as a design conversation — new visual identity, improved user experience, modernized layout. And then somewhere in the execution, design decisions become technical decisions that become SEO decisions that nobody planned for. The result is a pattern that repeats across the industry with predictable frequency: a company launches a redesigned website, celebrates the improved aesthetics, and then watches organic traffic decline over the following weeks as rankings drop on pages that were performing well before the redesign.

Read More
Rebranding Without Losing Rankings
Ritner Digital Ritner Digital

Rebranding Without Losing Rankings

A rebrand is one of the highest-stakes events in a company's digital history. Done well, it's an opportunity — new positioning, new domain authority trajectory, new content strategy aligned with who the company actually is. Done poorly, it's a self-inflicted traffic wound that takes years to heal. The SEO risk isn't theoretical. Domain changes, brand name changes, and URL restructuring all trigger the same fundamental search engine recalculation that platform migrations trigger — except rebrands often happen alongside content changes and positioning changes that multiply the variables and make diagnosing post-rebrand ranking losses significantly more complex.

Read More
Squarespace to Shopify Migration SEO Checklist
Ritner Digital Ritner Digital

Squarespace to Shopify Migration SEO Checklist

Migrating an e-commerce site from Squarespace to Shopify is one of the most common platform moves in the DTC and small business space right now — and one of the most SEO-consequential. Unlike a brochure site migration where a handful of pages and a few hundred backlinks are at stake, an e-commerce migration involves product pages, collection pages, variant URLs, canonical handling for filtered results, and a revenue stream that is directly tied to search visibility. The stakes are higher and the complexity is greater than most merchants anticipate when they initiate the move.

Read More
Moving from WordPress to Webflow Without Losing SEO
Ritner Digital Ritner Digital

Moving from WordPress to Webflow Without Losing SEO

Platform migrations are one of the highest-risk events in a website's SEO history. Done well, a WordPress to Webflow migration is nearly invisible to search engines — rankings hold, traffic continues, and the new platform's advantages start compounding immediately. Done poorly, it's a traffic cliff that takes six to twelve months to recover from, with ranking losses that often don't fully resolve even after the technical errors are corrected. The difference between those two outcomes is almost entirely in the pre-migration preparation and the precision of execution.

Read More
Can ChatGPT Crawl Your Website?
Ritner Digital Ritner Digital

Can ChatGPT Crawl Your Website?

One of the most practical questions in AI search optimization right now is also one of the least clearly answered: does ChatGPT actually crawl your website, and if so, how does that affect whether your content gets cited in AI-generated answers? The short answer is yes — OpenAI operates a web crawler that can access your site. But the longer answer involves understanding what that crawler is actually doing, how it differs from what Google's crawler does, and why the distinction matters significantly for how you think about AI search visibility.

Read More
You Don't Have to Start Over: Why a Strong Domain Is Your Most Valuable Asset When You Pivot
Ritner Digital Ritner Digital

You Don't Have to Start Over: Why a Strong Domain Is Your Most Valuable Asset When You Pivot

When a business pivots, the instinct is often to start clean — new brand, new domain, new everything. But if your existing domain has age, backlinks, and a track record with search engines, abandoning it could cost you years of organic traffic. Here's what domain authority actually is, why it survives a pivot, and how to protect it when your company changes direction.

Read More
The AI Visibility Audit Scam Is Targeting Businesses — Here's How to Spot It
Ritner Digital Ritner Digital

The AI Visibility Audit Scam Is Targeting Businesses — Here's How to Spot It

If a stranger reached out through your contact form claiming they already audited your AI search visibility — complete with a score, a list of technical gaps, and a PayPal link — you weren't alone, and it wasn't legitimate. Here's exactly how this new wave of AI-powered spam works, why the technical language sounds so convincing, and what genuine AI visibility work actually involves.

Read More
Which SEO Marketing Services Should You Use? A Straight Answer for Every Business Situation.
Ritner Digital Ritner Digital

Which SEO Marketing Services Should You Use? A Straight Answer for Every Business Situation.

"Which SEO services should I use?" is one of the most common questions we hear — and one of the most frequently answered wrong. The right answer isn't a package someone else built. It depends on what's actually holding your visibility back. In this post we break down all six core SEO service categories, explain what each one does and when it matters most, and give you a practical framework for deciding which combination makes sense for your specific business situation — including the AI search optimization layer most agencies still aren't handling well.

Read More
My Website Isn't Showing Up on Google. How Do I Fix It — and How Do I Hire the Right SEO Agency to Help?
Ritner Digital Ritner Digital

My Website Isn't Showing Up on Google. How Do I Fix It — and How Do I Hire the Right SEO Agency to Help?

If you've searched for your own business on Google and come up empty, you're not alone — and the problem is almost always fixable once you know what's actually causing it. Most businesses struggling with visibility have a combination of technical issues Google can't see past, content that doesn't match what buyers search for, and not enough third-party authority to compete. In this post we break down the four most common reasons websites don't rank, what to do about each one, and how to hire an SEO agency that will build real visibility — not traffic reports that look good and leave your pipeline empty.

Read More
Crawl Budget Isn't Dead. It's Just Misunderstood. Here's What Enterprise Teams Get Wrong.
Ritner Digital Ritner Digital

Crawl Budget Isn't Dead. It's Just Misunderstood. Here's What Enterprise Teams Get Wrong.

Every few years someone declares crawl budget dead. The argument usually goes: Google's infrastructure has scaled, Googlebot is smarter, just publish good content and it'll figure it out. This argument was always wrong. In 2026 it's wrong in several new directions simultaneously. The number of bots competing for your server resources has multiplied. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot fetch static HTML only — meaning JavaScript-dependent content is invisible to them regardless of how well you've optimized everything else. And the enterprise teams still treating crawl optimization as optional technical cleanup are paying for it in indexation lag, AI search invisibility, and ranking performance that no amount of content investment can fix while the crawl problem persists.

Read More
That Little "Google Search Update" Banner in Your Search Console? Here's What It Actually Means — And What to Do Next
Ritner Digital Ritner Digital

That Little "Google Search Update" Banner in Your Search Console? Here's What It Actually Means — And What to Do Next

You opened Google Search Console and saw it — a small banner that said "An event has occurred in Google Search that might affect your site's data." No explanation. No action items. Just a date and a vague warning that something happened. Here's the thing: that annotation is not a penalty notice, and it didn't arrive in a vacuum. It landed in the middle of a core update rollout, an eleven-month impression reporting bug, and one of the most data-chaotic stretches Google Search has had in years. This post explains exactly what it means and what to do with it.

Read More
Domain vs. URL Prefix in Google Search Console: Which Should You Choose?
Ritner Digital Ritner Digital

Domain vs. URL Prefix in Google Search Console: Which Should You Choose?

When you set up Google Search Console, the very first decision you make determines how much search data you'll actually see. Domain or URL Prefix — the choice sounds simple, but get it wrong and you could be flying blind on a significant chunk of your site's traffic. Here's everything you need to know to set it up right the first time.

Read More