How do I make sure my site looks trustworthy in search? I’m new…
Thank you!
Hey, @ChristineM777 !
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 optimize your website’s security, this adds a level of trust and sends a strong signal that you’re an established business to your customers.
The message that is appearing on your google search seems to be routed through a malware program you are using called Webroot. If your website is fairly new this could be triggering the filters to detect the website as “suspicious”. I have a few suggestions that should help improve these results below!
SSL Certificate
Firstly, ensure that your website has an active SSL certificate. An SSL certificate is a digital certificate that authenticates the identity of a website and enables an encrypted connection. In short, SSL keeps internet connections secure and prevents criminals from reading or modifying information transferred between two systems. When you see a padlock icon next to the URL in the address bar, that means SSL protects the website you are visiting.
You can check this by clicking on the lock icon next to the URL search bar in Google Chrome as shown below. A green secure connection message appears if the website has a valid SSL certificate in place.
Webroot
Secondly, I have done some digging on the Webroot community pages and can see a developer has mentioned that it is common for websites to be flagged as false positive due to the site being relatively new. To check out what their reputation is in terms of Webroot please go to this page on which you can enter the URL of each site in turn and view a complete threat, content, and reputation analysis, as determined by BrightCloud.
If you then feel that one or more ratings are inaccurate, etc. you can go to this site and request a change to the reputation of a URL, by simply filling out and submitting the online form. If you have any further questions about using Webroot, you can reach their support team directly by clicking here.
SEO Optimization
Whilst we are on the topic of search engines, what steps have you taken to improve your search engine ranking so far? People who find your online store in Google are probably looking for products like yours, so they are more likely to buy something. One area of your store that can really help drive organic traffic is adding unique 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.
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 with further detail on this right here.
Let us know how you get on with the steps above, I’m happy to answer any questions you think of as you work on your business.