Tools to boost your online store and increase sales
These e-commerce tools can take a big chunk of the weight off your shoulders when it comes to management, design, marketing, and sales! Let us go t...
Optimizing Your Online Store with Google Search Console
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Google Search Console is an essential tool for any online store owner looking to improve their website’s visibility in search engine results.
By leveraging the powerful features of Google Search Console, you can monitor your site’s performance, identify and fix potential issues, and enhance your overall search presence.
In this support article, we will provide a step-by-step guide on how to make the most of this valuable tool.
Getting Started with Google Search Console
Sign up and verify your website: Visit the Google Search Console website and sign in using your Google account.
Add your online store’s domain or specific URL to start the verification process. Google provides several verification methods, such as uploading an HTML file or adding a meta tag to your website’s header.
You can follow our guide that explains this process in detail here
Note: If your site supports multiple protocols (http:// and https://), you must add each as a separate site. Similarly, if you support multiple domains (for example example.com, m.example.com, and www.example.com) you must add each one as a separate site.
Website Metrics
Once you’ve successfully verified your domain it will take usually 1-2 days until you start receiving data.
To begin exploring the information that is collected from your website, you can click on “Performance”.
Here, you can see the number of clicks, impressions, average CTR (percentage of impressions that resulted in a click) as well as the average position of your website in search results.
These graphics are useful to give you an overall picture of how your website is performing compared to previous months.
In the table below, you can start by checking the tab “Queries”, which shows you the top search queries used to reach your website.This can give some clues regarding which products to invest more or less in.
For example, if one of the top queries for your website is “organic clothing”, you should probably consider investing more in that type of product and less in fiber clothing, or rewrite the descriptions of your products to focus more on that characteristic.
You can also click on each query to filter the other tabs by it. If you click on “organic clothing” for example, you will be able to see the total number of clicks, impressions, average CTR, and position for it.
The second tab “Pages”, gives an overview of your top-clicked pages.
Based on this tab and the previous one, as well as the sales data from the Jumpseller admin panel, you can start getting a good picture of your most popular products as well as product pages that, although highly visited, aren’t bringing corresponding sales.
In that case, you can try to improve the copy, image, pricing, and more, to see if it improves the results for those pages.
The third tab “Countries” shows the countries with the most clicks to your website. With this information, you can try to adapt the structure of your website and information given inside each product page, based on those countries.
The fourth tab “Devices” shows the devices with the most clicks to your website. With this information, you can try to adapt the structure of your website to better suite a certain device, in case it’s quite predominant in comparison with others.
URL Inspection
Moving on to the inspection of specific pages. Click “URL inspection” in the left panel, type the page URL, and press “Enter” on your keyboard.
This page allows you to check if a certain URL from your website can appear on Google search results, and, if not, the reasons why.
Start by clicking “Test live URL” to do a live inspection of the page. Once it’s done, it will give an URL status.
Your URL can have one of 4 different statuses:
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URL is on Google (positive status) - The URL has been indexed, and can appear in Google Search results. Search for your URL on Google to make sure it is showing. In case it’s not, check Google’s conditions.
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URL is on Google, but has issues - The URL was crawled and indexed, but there are issues with its enhancements. Check the error message to learn more about the issue.
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URL is not on Google - The URL won’t appear in Google Search results. This is usually because there’s an indication from your website (through robots.txt) that this page shouldn’t be indexed.
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URL is an alternate version - The URL is an AMP that is an alternate version of a canonical non-AMP page. Check the value under “Page availability” to see if the canonical URL is the expected URL.
When changes are made to the contents of a page, the updated version might take a while to show on search results. Google usually takes more than 1 week to crawl your page again.
You can use the Google search console manual crawl option to speed up this process.
In order to do that, click on “request indexing” and wait a few days till it’s done.
Once it’s done, the content should be updated, and “Indexing requested” won’t be shown anymore.
Note: Keep in mind that there’s a quota for submitting individual URLs and requesting a recrawl multiple times for the same URL won’t get it crawled any faster.
To find more details about the URL you are inspecting, you can also click on “Page availability” and “Mobile Usability” to see information about the crawl that was done and if the page is easy to use on a mobile device or not.
Page indexing
One of the most important sections of Google Search Console is the indexing status of your pages. A page that isn’t indexed is a page that doesn’t show in search results, which usually results in a very low amount of traffic going to it.
To get an overview of the number of pages indexed and non-indexed, click on “Indexing” > “Pages” in the left navigation bar.
Some of these pages aren’t meant to be indexed, like the shopping cart or thank you pages. What is most important here is the reasons that Google gives as to why pages aren’t indexed.
In this case, there are 9 reasons total why over 1220 pages aren’t indexed.
On this same page, you can see those reasons listed, as well as how many pages are affected by them.
You can click on any of them to see examples of the pages that are impacted as well as a “Learn more” button to check Google’s documentation regarding it.
Once you are done fixing the issue, click “Validate fix” to request Google to check again and evaluate if the pages can be indexed.
Most common Google Search Issues
Some of the most common issues Google may identify in your website are:
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Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt - This is usually related to pages that Jumseller has set as non-indexed, like the customer login page (eg. www.store.com/customer/login), the checkout page, as well as versions of the category page that are ordered or filtered (eg. www.store.com/clothing/price/asc#body) - in this case, it’s the category page but ordered by ascending price), which aren’t meant to appear in Google Search results.
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Soft 404 - A Soft 404 error occurs when a web page appears to be returning a “404 Not Found” status code, which means that the page cannot be found, but is actually displaying content that suggests the page exists. This can confuse search engines and cause indexing and positioning problems in search results. Click on the issue to see all the pages affected by it, and check if any pages were excluded or moved. In that case, redirect the page to the new location using a 301 redirection. If the page still exists, but is returning a “404 Not found” error make sure it doesn’t have any broken links or that the content that was causing the error was removed. After making all the changes, click on “Validate fix” on the issue page, to make sure the issue was solved on all pages.
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Alternative page with appropriate canonical tag - An online store usually has page subcategories inside a main page category (eg. The main page is “Men’s clothing”, and the subpages are “Belts”, “Pants”, “Socks”). Only the main page is being indexed, as otherwise it would be competing with your subcategory pages and lower your ranking on search results. Page with redirect - Usually are pages for a variant of a product, similarly to the above issue, it makes sense to not be indexed as it would compete with the main product page.
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Duplicate, Google Chose Different Canonical than Use - This can happen when you have similar product pages, usually variants of the same product. To fix this issue, you can try providing more information on each variant page regarding what makes each variant distinct, as well as unique images. After improving a page, click “Live url test” and request to index again to check if it was solved.
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Crawled - currently not indexed - This issue appears after you make a request to index an URL through Google Search Console and Google decides not to index it (this means your URL won’t appear on search results). This doesn’t mean there are errors on your page, only that Google decided not to index it. Click “Live url test” and check if any error comes up, if not, try improving your page’s content and requesting to index again.
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No global identifier provided (e.g gtin, mpn, isbn) - This usually means that you didn’t add a brand and/or global product identifiers like GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) specified for your product. These fields can be optional for some products, but you can always add them to your products by going, on your admin panel, to Products > All Products and selecting the product where it is missing.
If you need further help, please feel free to contact us anytime.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should I do if my store isn’t showing on search results?
Search engines crawl and index your store periodically, so it can sometimes take several weeks or months before it appears in search results or improves its position towards the top of the search results page.
In case your pages aren’t showing on Google search results, you can try inspecting them through the “URL Inspection” tool, requesting indexing, and see if any issues arise.
This doesn’t guarantee that the pages will appear as the top results right away, since in the beginning, you will need to grow your reputation, SEO (search engine optimization) as well as try to get backlinks from other websites.