It is free, and it shows you which pages people already find, and what they typed to get there. Right now nobody can see that from outside. Once it is switched on, everything else in this list gets easier to sort by what actually makes money.
Then work down Stage 1. Five jobs, about two and a half hours all in. None of them can break the shop.
0 of 15 done
First, the good news
The shop is in better shape than most. The basics are done right, the photos are labelled properly, and the writing has real character. Nothing here is broken and nothing is urgent.
What is missing is a handful of pages that do not exist yet — and every one of them can be built from stock the shop already has. That is a nice problem to have.
1,322pages on the site
23category pages, all sorted by type of thing
0pages for a brand or a movie
0products showing star ratings in Google
2blog posts, the newest from 2021
Stage 1 · Today
Five jobs, one afternoon, no help needed
All of these can be done from inside Squarespace by anyone who can edit the site. None of them can break anything.
Time: about 2 hrs 30 min · job 3 is most of it
Sign up for Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
10 minsearch.google.com/search-console · free
Do this one first. It is the only job that makes all the others smarter.
Right now this list is sorted by how much of the shop each thing affects, because that is all anyone can see from the outside. Once Search Console is on, you can sort it by what actually brings in sales instead.
Switch on customer reviews
5 minCommerce → Customer Accounts & Reviews
Squarespace has a reviews feature built in. Turning it on is what puts the little row of gold stars under your products in Google. It works across all 1,300 products at once.
Then email past customers and ask for a review on your ten best sellers. The stars only show up once there is something to show.
Two of the three shops we looked at have not done this either. Easy one to get ahead on.
Write a proper Google title and summary for 22 pages
2 hrs · about 6 min eachPage Settings → SEO, on each category page and the About page
This is the title and the little grey summary line people see in Google before they click.
Two of your category pages already have great ones — “Best Selling Latex Halloween Masks for 2026” is spot on. Somebody wrote that on purpose and it shows. The other 21 pages just say the category name and the shop name, which tells Google very little.
Copy the style you already used. Lead with what somebody would actually type. Keep the summary to about 155 characters, because Google cuts it off after that — four of yours run past 240 and get chopped mid-sentence. The About page has no summary at all and is titled just “Welcome”.
These are old work-in-progress pages that are still live and can show up in Google. Have a quick look to make sure none is being used, then set each to unpublished.
Set the picture that shows when a link is shared
5 minSettings → Social Sharing / Marketing
At the moment, sharing a link to the shop shows a small square thumbnail instead of a big banner image. Setting a proper sharing picture fixes that. Worth five minutes given how many people find the shop through Instagram.
Stage 2 · This month
Build the pages that do not exist yet
This is the part that really moves the needle. Everything here uses stock the shop already has — no new products, no new photos.
Time: about 2 working days, spread over the month
Make two brand pages first
3 hrsTrick or Treat Studios · Ghoulish Productions
A page for each maker you stock. Put the brand name as the headline, write 150 to 200 words about why you carry them and what makes their stuff good, and tag all the matching products into it.
Then link to those pages from the main menu, and from every product made by that brand. That linking is half of what makes it work.
See section 07 for why these two come first.
Make six movie pages
6 hrs · about 1 hr eachStart with Michael Myers — 15+ masks already in stock
Same idea, but for the films. Michael Myers first, because there are already fifteen or more of those masks on the site with no page pulling them together.
After that, go by what you stock most of — probably Terrifier, Chucky, Texas Chainsaw, Halloween and Killer Klowns. Pick by depth of stock, not by fame. A page with three things on it is not worth making.
Fix the maker name on licensed products
2–4 hrs for the best sellersProduct editor → brand / vendor field
Behind every product page is a hidden bit of info that tells Google who made the thing. At the moment it says Lord Grimley’s Manor on products that were actually made by Trick or Treat Studios.
It is an easy thing to miss and easy to correct. It matters because it is how Google decides whether the shop is a real seller of that brand — exactly the question being asked when somebody searches the brand by name. Start with your best sellers rather than trying to do all 1,300.
Bring back the DIY pumpkin guide
45 min/diy-pumpkin
There is already a finished pumpkin mask tutorial with stencils sitting on the site, and almost nobody can find it. It just needs a title, a summary, and links to it from the blog and from a few mask pages.
Push it in September while people are searching for exactly this. Only one of the three other shops has anything like it.
Tidy up the page headlines — try one page first
1 hr plus testingNeeds a small template change
Every page currently treats the shop name as its main headline, and every product tile in a grid counts as one too. On the masks page that adds up to roughly 195 main headlines. Google uses that headline to work out what a page is about, so when everything is one, none of them counts for much.
This is the one job on the list worth having a second person check before it goes live everywhere, because it touches every page. Worth doing — just test it on a single page first.
Stage 3 · After Halloween
Bigger jobs, best left until November
None of this should happen in September or October. Changing the shape of a Halloween shop in its busiest month is asking for trouble. It will all still be here in November.
Time: from November · job 11 is ongoing, not a one-off
Start the blog again — and write what nobody else does
2–3 hrs a post · 2 posts a monthOngoing from November
Here is a genuine gap. None of the three other shops writes about actually owning a mask: how to look after latex, how to store a collector piece so it does not crack, the real difference between latex, vacuform and silicone, and what you get for your money at each price.
That is the sort of thing somebody about to spend real money goes looking for. It is also exactly what this shop knows better than anyone — the artist piece from 2021 proves the writing voice is already there.
Two posts a month, steadily, beats a huge pile of old posts nobody has touched in years.
Split the big category pages across several pages
1 hr, once measuredMasks · Lord Grimley masks · Props
The masks page loads all 194 products at once. That is a lot for a phone on a patchy signal.
Check the numbers in Search Console first, though. I could not measure how much this actually costs, and it is not worth changing on a hunch.
Add the little “you are here” trail
2–3 hrsWhole site
The small line of links near the top of a page — Home → Masks → this mask. It helps people hop back to the category, and it makes Google results show a tidy path instead of a raw web address. Two of the three other shops have it.
Send the products to Google Shopping
Half a dayDo jobs 2 and 8 first
Order matters here. If you send the products over while the maker names are still wrong and there are no reviews, Google gets the bad version. Fix those two first, then this puts the whole catalogue in front of shoppers who are ready to buy.
Have a proper think about the Squarespace version
1 day to look intoJanuary or later
The shop runs on the older version of Squarespace. It still works fine and is still supported, but it limits how much control you have over category pages — which is the very thing Stage 2 depends on. All three other shops run on Shopify, which is why their category pages are tidier. That is the platform, not anything anyone did wrong.
This is not me saying move. It is me saying decide on purpose rather than by accident, in January, with a full year of real numbers to look at. A move done in a rush would cost far more than staying put.
Why: the four biggest wins
The reasoning behind the jobs above. These four affect the whole shop, so they are worth understanding.
There are no pages for brands or for films
Big win
The shop is sorted by what a thing is — masks, props, pins, ornaments. That makes perfect sense to a person walking round a shop. But people searching Google do not type “props”. They type Michael Myers mask, or Terrifier Art the Clown, or Trick or Treat Studios.
There are already fifteen or more different Michael Myers masks on the site. There is just no single page bringing them together, so there is nothing for Google to show somebody searching that name.
The other shops have built these: Nightmare Toys has 25 film pages, Post Mortem has 23, and JP’s Horror has 13 on a catalogue about half the size of yours.
→ Jobs 6 and 7
No products show star ratings in Google
Big win
The product pages already give Google the name, the price and whether something is in stock, which is good. What is missing is ratings, so listings turn up without the row of gold stars that other shops have.
This is mostly about getting the click rather than the ranking, and it affects all 1,300 products at once. Of the three shops we looked at, only JP’s Horror has done it. The other two have the same gap, so this is a cheap way to get in front of both.
→ Job 2
Licensed products list the wrong maker
Big win
Behind each product page there is a hidden summary that search engines read. On a Trick or Treat Studios prop, it currently names Lord Grimley’s Manor as the maker. Here is the real one from the Texas Chainsaw meat hook page:
product name: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - Meat Hook Prop — Lord Grimley’s Manor
made by:Lord Grimley’s Manor ← should say Trick or Treat Studios
picture link:http://static1.squarespace.com/… ← not a secure link
price: $19.99, in stock
Three small things in one place. The maker is wrong on most licensed items, the shop name is repeated inside the product name where it does not belong, and the picture link is not secure.
This is the sort of thing Squarespace fills in automatically and almost nobody notices. It is worth correcting because it is how Google decides whether you are a genuine seller of that brand.
→ Job 8
The blog has two posts, the newest from 2021
Big win
There are sixteen blog web addresses, but only two are real articles — an artist piece from February 2021 and one from 2015. The rest are empty tag pages.
For comparison, Nightmare Toys has 365 blog pages, most recently April 2025, aimed at people about to buy: Best Gifts For Horror Lovers (That Aren’t Just For Halloween), How To Carve A Pumpkin Like A Pro.
The good news is the writing on this site is genuinely enjoyable, so this is a gap that plays to a strength rather than against one. There is also a finished pumpkin tutorial sitting unused at /diy-pumpkin.
→ Jobs 9 and 11
Why: six smaller fixes
All real, all worth doing eventually, none of them urgent.
Category pages have about 195 main headlines each
Worth doing
The shop name counts as a main headline on every page, and so does every product tile in a grid. Google leans on that headline to work out what a page is about, so when there are 195 of them the signal gets lost.
This comes from the site template rather than anything anyone typed. Nightmare Toys has a milder version of the same thing.
→ Job 10
Most category pages have thin or missing Google summaries
Worth doing
Two category pages have really good hand-written titles. The rest just say the category name and the shop name — the Props page title is 28 characters, Enamel Pins is 34. Enamel Pins and the About page have no summary at all.
There is an opposite problem too: four summaries run between 247 and 388 characters, and Google cuts them off around 155. The rest was written but never gets seen.
→ Job 3
194 products load on a single page
Worth doing
The main masks page sends 194 products and 198 pictures in one go, with no “next page” link. On a phone away from wifi that is a lot to ask.
Not measured. I could not get the page speed scores — the free daily allowance ran out while I was checking. Worth confirming before changing anything.
Harmless on their own. Together they take up a bit of the attention Google gives the shop, and a page called “under construction” turning up in search results is not the look you want.
→ Job 4
Shared links show a small thumbnail
Small fix
When somebody shares a link to the shop, the preview picture comes through as a small square rather than a big banner, and the link to it is not secure. The list of social accounts on the site also has an email address in it where a profile link should be.
→ Job 5
The site runs on the older Squarespace
Small fix
Version 7.0 rather than 7.1. Still supported and still working, but it limits how much you can control category pages — which is what Stage 2 needs. All three other shops run Shopify, which is the main reason their category pages are tidier. A platform difference, nothing more.
→ Job 15
The three shops to watch
Picked from who actually turns up in Google for the things this shop sells, rather than who I assumed. Amazon, eBay, Etsy and Walmart were left out — they dominate these searches and no independent shop beats them, so they are not a useful comparison. Manufacturer sites were left out for the same reason.
Across ten searches covering masks, props, pins, ornaments, decor and collectibles, five independent shops kept coming up. These three are the closest match. The Horror Dome and Halloween Express were close but sell mainly to haunted-house operators and the big costume market — a different customer and a much bigger operation.
All checked on 7 September 2026 by looking at each site directly.
Lord Grimley
Nightmare Toys
Post Mortem
JP’s Horror
Platform
Squarespace 7.0
Shopify
Shopify
Shopify
Size of catalogue
~1,322 pages
1,166 products
1,370 products
767 products
Category pages
23
232
224
57
Film pages
0
25
23
13
Brand pages
0
0
0
0
Star ratings
None
None
None
Yes, 4.00 average
Delivery & returns info
No
No
No
Yes
“You are here” trail
No
Yes
No
Yes
Blog posts
2 (2021)
365 (Apr 2025)
11 (May 2022)
0
Filters
None
Full
Basic
Minimal
Hand-written category text
2 of 23
Yes
Some
Yes
Nightmare Toys
nightmaretoys.com
The closest match of the three. It was the only independent shop to turn up for four different things this shop sells — latex masks, enamel pins, ornaments and home decor. That is almost exactly your product range. It even stocks the same unusual corners, including air fresheners and vacuform masks.
Its advantage is not size. It is that 232 category pages do work that 23 cannot.
Writing
Every category page has a hand-written headline and summary. Its latex masks page is simply headed “Latex Masks” — the words people type.
Blog
365 pages. Gift guides, seasonal pieces, how-to posts. The last real one was April 2025, so it has stalled — but the old ones keep working.
Film pages
25, including Michael Myers, Jason, Purge, Saw and Leatherface.
Weak spot
No reviews or star ratings at all.
Post Mortem Horror Bootique
shopmortem.com
An Orlando shop with a real storefront as well as a website. It sells the same licensed vacuform masks that fill your vacuform section, so the overlap on actual stock is the closest of the three.
The clever thing it does, which you could copy tomorrow: pages for its own exclusive collaborations. You have 89 products under “Lord Grimley Exclusives” with no page like that — and those are the only things in the shop that no competitor can ever stock. Probably the most undersold thing here.
Local
It mentions the Orlando shop right in its Google summary. You have a real Lafayette address on the site and do not use it this way.
Film pages
23 — Scream, Terrifier, Hellraiser and others.
Weak spot
Its own masks page has no Google summary at all. Blog stopped in May 2022. No ratings.
JP’s Horror
jpshorror.com
The most useful one to look at, because it is the smallest. 767 products against your 1,322, and 57 category pages against 23 — and it still turns up for pins, masks and collectibles. It is not winning on stock.
Good news: this shop does not need more products. It needs better pages.
It is the only one of the three giving Google the full set — ratings, delivery details and a returns policy. Its pages are written by hand right down to each product: its Jason mask page mentions the material, the size, the adjustable straps and whether it is for wearing or displaying.
Ratings
Uses a reviews add-on, and the ratings show through to Google.
Film pages
13, across Friday the 13th, Elm Street, Hellraiser, The Shining, Beetlejuice and Terrifier.
Weak spot
No blog at all — one empty page, untouched since 2022.
The gap nobody has filled
I checked all three shops for pages about the makers they stock — Trick or Treat Studios, Ghoulish Productions and so on. None of them has a single one. Between them they have 61 film pages and zero brand pages.
Meanwhile, if you search something like “Trick or Treat Studios masks”, the results are Amazon, eBay, Walmart, the maker’s own site, and just two specialty shops — neither of them a close rival to this one.
You stock both brands. You already have forty Trick or Treat Studios figures in their own section. The brand names are sitting in your product descriptions right now. There is simply no page gathering them up.
Why this is the best idea in here
Film pages are catching up — the three rivals have built 61 of them, so you would be joining a crowd. Brand pages are wide open, the stock already exists, and somebody searching for a maker by name is usually much closer to buying than somebody browsing “halloween masks”.
Do both if you can. If there is only time for one before October, do this one.
What the shop already does well
Worth saying properly. A list of things to fix can read like a list of things done wrong, and that is not the case here.
The technical basics are right. There is a setting that stops Google seeing two copies of the same page and getting confused. It is the single most common way a Squarespace shop quietly damages itself, and it is correct on every page I checked.
Every photo is labelled, and labelled well. Not one missing label across 198 pictures on the masks page. The file names are genuinely descriptive too — things like Trick-Texas-Chainsaw-Meat-Hook-Lord-Grimley-001.jpg. That is better than any of the three shops we looked at, and somebody clearly took care over it.
The site is fast. It starts responding in about a sixth of a second.
Where somebody wrote proper page titles, they are excellent.
great → Best Selling Latex Halloween Masks for 2026 — Lord Grimley’s Manor
great → New High Quality Latex Halloween Masks for 2026 — Lord Grimley’s Manor
thin →Props — Lord Grimley’s Manor
thin →Enamel Pins — Lord Grimley’s Manor
The first two are exactly right. That is the good news hiding inside job 3 — the standard already exists in-house, it just needs applying to the other 21 pages. Nobody needs to learn anything new.
One thing you may have been told that is not true
You might have heard that Squarespace blocks AI from reading your site, and that this is costing you visibility in ChatGPT and Google’s AI answers. It is not happening here. I checked. ChatGPT, Claude and Google can all read the shop perfectly normally, and the Squarespace setting that would block them is switched off. Nothing to do.
Related: you may get pitched on adding a special AI file to the site. Google has said plainly it ignores those completely and they make no difference either way. If somebody is selling that, it is a sign to be careful.
What I could not check
Worth being straight about, so you know how much weight to put on all this.
No visitor numbers or sales figures. I did this from the outside, without access to the shop’s Google or Squarespace accounts. So nothing here is ranked by what actually earns money — only by how much of the shop each thing affects. Some of these may matter less than they look, and something I have not mentioned could turn out to be the biggest opportunity. That is exactly why Search Console is job 1.
Page speed scores. The free daily allowance for Google’s speed test ran out while I was checking. The 194-products-on-one-page thing is flagged on common sense rather than measurement.
How much traffic the other shops get. I can tell you what they have built, because I looked at their pages. I cannot tell you how well it works for them — that needs paid tools.
Search results move around. The competitor list is a snapshot of 7 September 2026. It is a reliable picture of who is in this space, but worth a fresh look before making a big decision on it three months from now.
Tools, and what they are for
Corey asked what is worth using for this kind of work.
Google’s own guidance on AI search
Google publishes exactly how pages show up in its AI answers. Worth reading mostly because it deflates most of what gets sold as “AI SEO”. Google says plainly there is nothing special to do, and that the extra files people try to sell you are ignored. Ordinary good practice is the whole thing.
Automatic site checking
Every technical point in here came from reading the live pages of the site. It is dull, repetitive work that a computer does well and a person does slowly. Useful once a month, not every day.
Competitor checking
The competitor section came from an automated check told to look at every page itself and to say “I could not find this” rather than guess. That rule is the difference between something useful and something that sounds confident and is wrong.
Seeing what fans are talking about
Not used here, but handy for job 11. There are tools that read what horror and mask collectors are discussing week to week, which is a good way to pick blog topics — you get the questions in people’s own words.
Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
Not clever technology at all, and the most valuable things on this list. Free, and they hold the numbers that would make the next version of this far more useful.
The honest version: the computer was genuinely good at the boring parts — reading 1,300 pages, checking three shops against the same list of questions. The judgement calls are still judgement calls, and every fact in here was checked against a live page rather than remembered. Anything I could not confirm is in section 09.