2 minute check in Search Console to see if your Shopify store's SEO is healthy

One interesting technique I’ve used is to compare how many pages are indexed in Search Console vs Google Search.

For example, one site shows 612 pages indexed in Search Console.

But using the special site:DOMAIN search in Google Search I see 559 results.

Without knowing anything else about the site, this means that there are about 60 pages (10%) that aren’t showing up in the Google Search.

Google requires pages to have a specific level of quality before they are included. This quality is what you might have heard about in SEO, called on-page factors. It’s stuff like:

• is there enough text content on the page?
• do images have alt tags?
• does the HTML have a logical and structured organization?
• are there spammy links pointing to or from the page?
• is there another page from this site that is about the same thing and better?

For the site above, about 10% of the pages aren’t high quality enough.

Knowing the site, it’s probably small collection pages or old pages with very little content on them.

Which is okay since those aren’t key traffic pages.

But for another customer, they were key pages. Their Search Console showed about 13,000 pages indexed but Google Search only showed 7,600 results.

That means almost half of their site was either not found by Google’s crawler or the quality was too low to be listed in Google Search at all.

That means they have a problem. Their traffic is going to be a lot lower than it should.

Though I can’t promise any results with it, after seeing the additional traffic and sales some customers are getting, installing JSON-LD for SEO might be one of the highest ROI decisions you make today.

Install JSON-LD for SEO