Site map / fasthost

[BarryFox]

Hi

I have a shopify site and domain name through fasthost

Do I need to inform Google of my site map?

Plus any seo tips for a newbie would be appreciated 

Www.barryfox.co.uk 

Thanks

[Moira]

Hey, @BarryFox!

This is Moira from the Social Care team at Shopify. Thanks for posting, and a very warm welcome to the Community! It’s great to hear you are wanting to implement some tools to help drive traffic to your store as this is a very important part of running an online business.

You should certainly look into submitting your sitemap to Google as having XML sitemaps allows search engines to crawl and index your website sufficiently. All Shopify stores automatically generate a sitemap.xml file that contains links to all your products, product images, pages, collections, and blog posts. This file is used by search engines like Google and Bing to index your site so that your store's pages appear in search results. Submitting your sitemap files to Google Search Console helps Google find and index pages on your site thus boosting the SEO efforts!

• You can find your sitemap at the root directory of your Shopify store's domains, such as barryfox.co.uk /sitemap.xml

Verifying & submitting your sitemap with Google

Before you submit your sitemap, you need to verify your domain with Google Search Console to confirm that you're the owner of your Shopify store. We have a fantastic instructional video that walks you through this entire process below:

• How to verify your site with Google and submit a sitemap || Shopify Help Center - YouTube

After you submit your sitemap files, Google uses these files to crawl and index your store. Your store needs to be accessible for the crawler to work, so ensure your store doesn't have a password active. The process can take time and Google doesn't guarantee how long it takes for your store to be crawled. To learn more or to troubleshoot, visit Google Search Console Help.

SEO Tips

What steps have you taken to improve your search engine ranking so far? SEO is a really great path to take because the upside of getting unpaid (free) traffic is certainly great. It can help keep your advertising costs down and increase your sales.

Here are some steps that will definitely help you improve your store search engine ranking:

• Rename the image - When uploading an image to your store, make sure to rename the image with a descriptive file name that will relate to the product in the image. By doing this, the search engine can understand what the image is related to.

• Use keywords - Search engine filter searches using keywords and so make sure these keywords appear in your page titles, image ALT text (good for people who have visual impairment), meta descriptions, and page's content. Here is a guide on how to add keywords to your store.

• Search | Wordtracker - Use this Keyword Tool to help you find the most popular keyword searches for your products 

• Meta descriptions - Products, Collections, and Pages all have meta descriptions that you’re able to customize yourself, in the Edit website SEO section at the bottom of their admin pages.

• SEO description - There are a couple of things that you should keep in mind in order to have an SEO description that ranks well. You want to write the description as if you’re writing it to a potential customer, touching on descriptive words about the product and its use. A lot of the time merchants list keywords without any structure, thinking the more keywords the better - but this is not the case. We have a great blog post with further detail on this.

Shopify Resources

Have you had the chance to explore the free resources we offer to help you up-level your business? Shopify Compass is my favorite resource for video courses, tutorials, and live workshops. There is always new content added, and you can learn many important subjects, from marketing to goal setting.

If you're interested in listening to something while you're on the go, we also have our podcasts that you may be interested in.

Here are a couple of additional resources that can help you out after you work through the list above:

• The Beginner’s Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization

• Increase Website Traffic: 20 Low-Cost Ideas [Ranked] (2021)

I do hope this helps! Let me know how you get on with the suggestions above and feel free to let me know if I can clarify anything further.

Cheers