The email arrives, on average, twice a week, and always in the same tone of quiet despair. I have built my shop. I have added my products. I have waited. When I search Google for what I sell, I am nowhere. I am not on page one. I am not on page ten. I appear to not exist.
The Goblin understands the despair, and would like to replace it with a diagnosis, because despair is rarely actionable and a diagnosis usually is. There are, in his experience, six reasons a shop fails to appear on Google. Yours is almost certainly one of them, and possibly two.
First, a test you can run in ten seconds.
Open Google. Type site:yourshop.com — your actual domain, with no space after the colon. Press enter.
What you see now is every page of your shop that Google has in its index. If you see a healthy list of pages, Google knows you exist; your problem is ranking, which is causes four through six below. If you see nothing, or a near-empty list, Google does not have your shop indexed at all, and your problem is one of the first three. This single test divides the despair into two much smaller, much more solvable despairs.
Cause I. The shop is simply too new.
Google does not index the internet instantly. A brand-new shop, with a brand-new domain, may take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to be crawled, assessed, and added to the index. If your shop went live ten days ago, the honest answer is: wait, and read the rest of this article so the wait is productive.
You can hurry it along. Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console — every Shopify shop has a sitemap at /sitemap.xml, and Search Console is free. This does not guarantee speed, but it is the difference between Google stumbling upon you and Google being handed a map.
Cause II. You have, without realising, told Google to stay away.
This one is more common than it ought to be, and it produces the most dramatic version of the problem: a shop that is complete, handsome, fully stocked, and entirely invisible.
The usual culprit on Shopify is the password page. If your shop is still password-protected — a setting from the build phase that was never switched off — Google cannot see it, because nobody can see it. Check Online Store, then Preferences, and confirm the password page is disabled.
The subtler culprit is a stray noindex instruction, sometimes left behind by a theme, an app, or a developer who has since departed. The site: test will reveal this: a shop that is live to humans but absent from the index has, somewhere, a noindex the Goblin will find for you.
Cause III. The shop is on a platform subdomain, not a real domain.
If your shop’s address is still your-shop.myshopify.com rather than a domain you bought, you are building authority on rented land, and Google treats it accordingly. Buy the domain. Connect it. Do this early; the longer you wait, the more history you are eventually going to migrate.
Cause IV. You rank for your name, but not for what you sell.
Here the despair is usually misdiagnosed. The shop owner searches for their own shop name, finds themselves at the top, and is briefly relieved — then searches for the product category and finds nothing. They conclude they are invisible. They are not invisible. They are simply not yet competitive.
Ranking for your own name is easy; nobody else is called that. Ranking for “leather notebook” means competing with every other leather notebook on the internet, and that is earned slowly, through the things the rest of this Journal is about: title tags, descriptions, collection pages, internal links, and time.
Cause V. The content is too thin for Google to rank.
A product page with a one-line description copied from the supplier, a title that is just the product name, and no surrounding text gives Google almost nothing to work with. It is not that Google dislikes you; it is that Google cannot tell what you are about. Thin shops do not get penalised so much as overlooked.
The Goblin has written at length about descriptions, and will not repeat himself here, except to say: the cure for thinness is substance, written in your own words, on the pages that matter most.
Cause VI. Nobody else on the internet has mentioned you.
Google’s estimate of your trustworthiness is built, in large part, from who links to you. A shop that no other website has ever mentioned looks, to Google, like a shop that no other website has ever found worth mentioning. This is the slowest cause to fix and the Goblin will not pretend otherwise. It is fixed through being genuinely worth mentioning — press, suppliers, makers’ directories, the occasional well-placed guest article — and never through buying links, which is a path that ends in a different and worse kind of invisibility.
If you have run the site: test and worked through these six, you have either found your cause or narrowed it to two. That is the entire purpose of a diagnosis. The despair, the Goblin hopes, has been replaced by a short list of specific things to do.
If it has not — if the test was ambiguous, or the cause is hiding — that is precisely the knot an audit exists to untangle. The Goblin will tell you, in plain English, which of the six is yours.
— The Goblin, who finds despair untidy.