Want to expand the reach of your online store so it's easier for customers to find and buy
your products?
Consider submitting a sitemap to Google, and verifying your site.
Sitemaps and verification are two ways you can improve your store's Search Engine Optimization
also known as SEO.
SEO helps customers find your store on search engines like Google.
My name is Casey, and I’ll show you how to do both in this video.
The first step is to verify your store’s website, with Google.
When you verify your store’s website, you prove to Google that you own the site.
This lets Google provide their services to you.
Let’s get started by verifying your site.
It’s a good idea to keep two tabs open while your doing this.
One tab for Google Search Console, and one with your Shopify admin.
First, open Google Search Console using the link in the description, and login or create
an account.
You need an account to verify your site.
If the website of your online store is live and open to customers, then stay on this page.
If you still have a password page protecting your store so it's unavailable to the public,
then you need to disable the password.
This is because Google can only verify live, public websites.
You can turn the password back on after your site is verified if you aren’t ready for
it to be public.
To disable your password from the Shopify admin, click “Online Store”.
Then, click “Preferences”, and then click “Disable password” on the banner.
This takes you to the “Password protection” section.
Uncheck the “Enable password” box, then click “Save”.
Open Google Search Console.
Here you choose between two property types.
Use the “Domain” option if you are verifying with DNS records.
You can use this option if you have a third-party domain that hasn’t been transferred to Shopify.
Your online store web address is your domain, which is also the same as your URL.
For more information about third-party domains, click the link in our description.
If you use a domain that you purchased through Shopify, or the myshopify.com domain, then
use the URL prefix option.
When you enter the web address for your domain, enter the full URL, also known as a web address.
Include the wwws and the SSL certificate, which is https.
I’m typing in our custom domain which is alyalthetics.com.
Then, click “Continue”.
After checking verification, you see several methods for verifying your site.
I’ll show you the HTML tag method.
Click the arrow to open the HTML tag section.
Here you see a line of code that shows the “meta tag”.
Click “Copy”.
This copies the entire code for you.
Back on your Shopify admin, you need to paste the meta tag into your current theme’s code.
To start, click “Online store”.
Find the theme that you want to edit, click “Actions”, and then “Edit code”.
In the “Layout” section, click “theme.liquid” to open the file in the online code editor.
Find the tag, “head”, near the top of the page.
Click return to create a new line.
Then, paste the meta tag you copied directly underneath the head tag.
Click “Save” to finish.
Back on the Google Search Console screen, click “Verify” underneath the HTML tag
method.
If your site was verified successfully, then you see a pop-up that says “Ownership verified”.
Next, click “Go to property” to see an overview of your Google Search Console dashboard.
You’ll need this dashboard to submit your sitemap later, so keep it open.
Now that your site is verified, remember not to remove the meta tag or delete the theme
that you pasted it in.
If you ever lose site verification, change themes, or buy a custom domain, then you can
repeat these steps.
Your site verification is complete!
Now it’s time to submit your sitemap.
Submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console helps Google crawl and index valuable pages
on your store.
This helps customers find your store more easily.
From the main Google Search Console page, click “Sitemaps”.
Under the section “Add a new sitemap” enter “sitemap.xml”.
Anything other than sitemap.xml causes an error so make sure your punctuation is in
the right place.
Click “Submit”.
Next, you see a pop-up telling you that your sitemap was successfully submitted.
If you see any errors under “Status”, then click to find more details on the error.
Click the status line to see more details about this error.
Use the link in the description to visit Google Search Console Help and troubleshoot any errors.
This error occured because the sitemap was submitted while the online store was still
password protected.
After you fix the error, you can delete the sitemap and start again.
To delete a sitemap, click the three dots in the top-right corner, and click “Remove
sitemap”.
Next, submit your sitemap again using the previous steps.
If the status of your sitemap displays “Success” in green, then it was submitted without errors.
After you submit your sitemap, Google uses it to crawl your site.
Google looks over the code and content for each URL they find.
Google also uses your sitemap to index your site.
That’s when they store and organize the content found during the crawling process.
After a page is indexed, it can be displayed as a search result.
Don’t be concerned if every page of your online store is not crawled or indexed.
Hidden pages on your store are not indexed and don’t show up in search results.
Remember, if you aren’t ready for your site to be live, then enable the password protection
on your Shopify admin after completing the steps above.
Now you’re all done, and your customers can find your store more easily.
If you still have questions, visit help.shopify.com for more information.