Have you ever watched a spider?

Have you ever sat and watched a spider?

Most of the time they stand still and just wait for things to happen.

But when they are working, they are running all over the place.

Fixing a web.

Moving across the ground or wall.

Getting their dinner prepped.

They clearly have periods of high and low activity.

Google’s web spider is aptly named.

That’s their program that will read the data on your website and then click links to get more pages.

Some days the spider never shows up. It’s just sitting there.

Other days it’s grabbing every page in your Shopify store until it tires itself out.

This is why SEO timing is more art than science.

If you made a change right before Google’s spider came by, there’s a strong chance Google will pick that up and you’ll get results faster.

But if it’s weeks or months before they come by again, it’ll look like your change isn’t working. The fact is the change hasn’t been seen yet.

Since Google isn’t transparent about their spider, you never know exactly what’s it’s doing and seeing. You can dig deep into Search Console but you’re going to spend hours each day just trying to Sherlock a trail of clues for the day, only to start over tomorrow.

Your time is better spent doing the best work you can in your store and with your SEO. Give up trying to control Google’s spider.

Just like you can’t make a real life spider do exactly what you want, you can’t control Google’s. And Google’s spider can bite much harder than the household spiders (unless you live in Australia, then avoid every single spider forever).

One SEO feature that actually works well is structured data.

Mostly because the data helps Google’s spider which makes their job easier.

You can either audit, code, and test your store’s structured data by hand or install JSON-LD for SEO and have the structured data you need for several types of Rich Results.

It’s already helped a few thousand Shopify stores with their structured data and it could help you too.