SEO settings - How do I make my products appear in Google search results?
In this article:
SEO settings in your Store Customizer
Best SEO practices to use with Sellfy
How can I submit my sitemap to Google?
Other ways to increase your ranking in search results
Why is my store not showing in search results?
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which relates to the process of optimizing your website content to generate traffic.
Optimizing your Store Pages can help more potential customers find your store. How? Essentially, this optimization relays key information to the search engine. So, when your customer uses a search engine to find something, the search engine can suggest your store and provide it to the customer in the search results.
The best part about search engine optimization is that you can potentially get more traffic, customers, and sales without spending money on marketing!
To learn about these settings for each of your Store Pages, please read the next section.
SEO settings in your Store Customizer
You'll find that each Page in your store has SEO settings. These SEO settings are made up of three parts, the Search results preview, the Title tag, and the Meta description.
Search result preview
The Search result preview will show you how the page will display in search results. If a customer were to search for your products or store, this preview is the intro text that they'd see on the search results page.
In the Search results preview, you'll see the Title tag and the Meta description. We provide recommendations for character counts with each. Too few or too many characters can have a negative effect.
Title tag
The Title tag is the header or title that shows in the search results. You can see it in the blue text, in the image above. 30-60 characters are recommended.
Meta description
The meta description will be longer than the Title tag and serve as a summary of the content of the page. 70-130 characters are recommended.
Best SEO practices to use with Sellfy
Store pages - use the Store Customizer to add modules that allow you to add text and keywords to your store pages. For instance, you may want to add keywords to your About page, Landing page, or any other pages.
Sitemaps
All Sellfy stores have sitemaps that they can access by using their store URL with the URL ending or "slug" /sitemap.xml.
If this URL is pulled up in Google directly, you'll see something like the image below. But no worries, Google will still be able to use it!
What is a sitemap?
A sitemap is exactly what it sounds like, a map of your website. Though, it's not always a kind of map that humans can read. Sometimes these maps are only readable to search engines, like Google.
Sitemaps are useful for entities like Google because they can offer the search engine a directory of your website pages. Typically Google can "crawl" your website and make its own sitemap by seeing what pages you linked. But, sometimes you have a website page or content that isn't linked like this.
In order to make sure that Google is providing all of your store content to customers searching online, you can submit or provide Google with a copy of a sitemap containing all of the store's pages.
How can I submit my sitemap to Google?
First, go to the Google Search Console. If you've never visited this site before, Google will ask you to verify which domain is yours. After you're done with this, you'll go to the Index and select Sitemaps from the sidebar menu.
From there, you can add your Sellfy store sitemap!
Other ways to increase your ranking in search results
To start, we send your store and product links to Google. But, Google decides how to rank these links in the results, so it's important to do all that you can to increase the rankings.
To increase the chances of your products appearing higher in search results, you can add a link to your product to other sites on the browser. For example, you can add that link to another website of yours, a forum, a blog, or your social media accounts. Share, share, and share links to your store and products!
For more info on SEO practices, please read this blog article "7 Actionable Product Page SEO Tips for Indie Creators" we've written for you.
Why is my store not showing in search results?
Though we provide your store links to Google, the search engine will rank this information differently. It can mean that your store and product links aren't showing in the first few pages of search results. In order to improve this, you'll need to learn a bit about SEO, use your SEO settings, share links to your store and consider other marketing tactics.