My shop does not appear on Google: where to start looking

Your shop has been open for three months. You have uploaded four hundred products, written the descriptions and paid for the nice theme. Then you open your stats and Google has sent you nine visits. Nine.

Before hiring anyone or paying for «guaranteed rankings», there are five checks you can do yourself in half an hour. On most of the shops that come to us, the explanation is in one of them.

1. First things first: does Google know you exist?

It sounds obvious and it is the most common failure of all. Type site:yourdomain.com into Google and see how many results come back.

• If none come back, Google does not have your shop. Not one page.
• If four or five come back and you have four hundred products, it found the door but never came in.

The number one cause is a leftover from the building work: while a shop is being built you ask Google not to look at it, and on launch day somebody forgets to remove that instruction. Months later the shop is selling through social media and word of mouth, and nobody understands why nothing arrives from Google.

You check it in two places: in the shop settings (not in maintenance mode, not flagged as «do not index») and in Google Search Console, which is free and tells you exactly which pages it has and which it has discarded. If you have not set it up, start there before anything else.

2. You have 400 products and Google sees 40,000 pages

This is the trap specific to shops, and the one that eats the most traffic without anyone noticing.

Every time a visitor filters by size, by colour, by price, or changes the order of a listing, your shop generates a new web address. Multiply filters by colours by sizes by sort orders and you get thousands of addresses showing almost the same thing.

Google does not have infinite time for your shop. Spend it on forty thousand repeated listings and there is none left for your products.

The symptom is easy to recognise: Search Console shows a huge number of pages «discovered but not indexed», and your good products are not among the ones it did keep. The fix is not changing the theme: it is telling Google which of those addresses count and which are noise. Done once, and it shows within weeks.

3. Your product pages say exactly what your competitors' say

If you sell branded goods, you have most likely pasted in the description the supplier gave you. Just like the other thirty shops selling that same product.

Put yourself in the search engine's shoes: it has thirty identical pages and has to pick one. It will pick the one it already knows, the one with more traffic and more history. Not yours.

You do not need to write an essay per product. Four lines of your own on the products you actually want to sell already changes things, and what you should be writing is whatever people ask you on the phone:

• Who it is for and who it is not for.
• What exactly is in the box.
• The measurements, the consumption, the compatibility — the specific figure people look for.
• The two questions you always get before somebody buys it.

Those same sentences are what make a visitor stay and buy. SEO and selling point in the same direction more often than people think.

4. Your page title is the advert

The title that appears in Google is not the product's name: it is the line you compete with for the click against nine other results. And on most shops it is auto-generated and reads «Product — Category — Shop name».

A title that has been thought about says what it is, what it is for and what makes it different, in about sixty characters. Rewriting them on the twenty pages that matter most is an afternoon's work and usually moves the needle more than rebuilding the whole site.

5. Nobody links to you, and you do not link to yourself either

Links from other websites are the slow, difficult part, and the one everybody tries to buy. But before that comes the free part: the links inside your own shop.

A product page linked only from its category is a page that half exists. Linking from categories to the products that matter, from one product to others bought alongside it, and from your blog articles to the products they talk about, tells Google what is important to you. Literally tells it.

And yes, speed counts

It counts, but not in the order it usually gets talked about. If your shop is not indexed, takes four seconds and carries the manufacturer's description, speed is the third problem, not the first.

That said, once the rest is in place, the difference between loading in one second or four shows up in visits and shows up in sales. And there it is rarely a matter of removing modules: it usually sits further down, in the machine serving the shop.

Where we would start

If you recognised yourself in two or more of the five, the good news is that these are problems with a fix and a running order: first let Google in, then stop it getting lost, then make what it finds worth keeping.

Write to us and we will take a look at your shop. We will tell you which of the five you are at and what to touch first, specifically, even if you then do it yourself.

Take a look at my shop