Google Search Console

Shopify SEO Course ↗️ > Unit 3 > Lesson 5 > Google Search Console

Another valuable tool for SEO is Google Search Console, also known as Google Webmaster Tools. This free tool from Google helps website owners track information such as the number of indexed pages on Google search, view information about the top pages and search terms, offer on-page optimization help, and much more.

 

To use this tool, you will need to setup up Google Search Console using your Google account – preferably the one you use for Google AdWords and Google Analytics. If it’s your first time using Google Search Console, you will simply enter your Shopify store’s URL to begin.

 

 

Once you have entered your store’s URL, you will be asked to verify ownership of the store. Since you have installed Google Analytics on your store, you can go to the Alternate Methods and select Google Analytics for verification. If that option is not available, you can verify your site by adding a meta tag to your Shopify store’s code.

 

 

This code will be added to your store’s theme.liquid file, which can be found in your Shopify admin dashboard under Online Store > Themes > Actions > Edit HTML / CSS.

 

 

You will then copy and paste the meta tag from Google Search Console into your theme.liquid file, which can be found under the Layout folder.

 

 

Once you save this file, you can go to Google Search Console and verify your site. If it doesn’t work immediately, give it a few minutes and try again until you get a success message.

 

From here, you will want to go to your Crawl menu and select Sitemaps. On the following screen, click on the red Add/Test Sitemap button to add sitemap.xml to your Google Search Console. This will direct Google search crawlers to current and future pages on your Shopify store.

 

 

We’ll discuss more ways you can use this tool to help you with your website’s SEO in upcoming modules.