Getting your site listed on Search Engines is a necessary part of building a successful eCommerce business.
Overview of Search Engines
By far and away the most used Browser Worldwide is, at the time of writing, Chrome which is from Google. This is, of course, heavily skewed due to the amount of people in the USA using Chrome. If we deep-dive into the figures, we can see that for the UK, Chrome still comes in 1st but tops out at 47.7% with Safari (from Apple) coming in at 2nd place with 31.6%.
Inevitably each browser has their preferred choice of Search Engines. But, with both Chrome and Safari utilising Google Search, the proportion of people using Google Search is, quite frankly extensive. With a near monopoly on internet lookups, it makes sense to focus your time and effort to getting listed and in a favourable position on Google's Search.
How to Get Listed on Google:
There are multiple parts to getting listed on Google. From an eCommerce perspective you will need to: submit a sitemap to help Google find your site quicker, Add or Claim a Google ‘My Business Profile’ to show up in location-based searches e.g., "toy shops near me," and for Google Shopping and Offers to get your products listed.
Stor covers the majority of the technical aspects of getting listed on Google including producing an XML sitemap for you. This is accessible by entering https://_yourdomain_.co.uk/sitemap.xml
Or, this can be found by logging in to your Shop's admin area under Settings Feeds. You can also get your business seen if you have a physical presence or shop, by providing Contributors Information, Indoor Maps submissions and even virtual tours
The starting point for these and more can be found on the Google Webmaster page.
How to Get Listed on Bing:
Bing has a small market share of search engine traffic, less than 5% in the UK as of February 2019. However, Yahoo (https://uk.yahoo.com/), DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/) and MSN use Bing as their base. Getting listed on Bing means you will in fact be listed on 4 search engines covering 7.3% of search engine market share. The process is, as a bonus, is fairly simple and pretty quick.
- Claim your Listing (or create one if needed)
- Fill in your Business Details
- Verify your Listing As an additional bonus, Bing allows you to import information from your Google My Business Profile.
Speedy, convenient and no need to re-type everything again. You can get started here to create your Listing:
https://www.bingplaces.com/DashBoard/Home?from=HomePage
Once your listing is completed, you can then submit your sitemap to Bing to request a crawl:
https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/how-to-submit-sitemaps-82a15bd4
Search Engine Verification
As mentioned above, both Google and Bing need you to confirm that you are who you say you are and that you have the right to claim business profiles, websites, etc.
As such, they will ask you to add some HTML (meta) code to your site which they can then check. When you're all setup and have the Verification String ready open your Shop's Admin area in another tab and head to Settings
SEO/Tracking
https://stor.co/settings/seo
Simply paste the relevant string into the associated area and hit Save. Then head back to Google/Bing and Verify.
Points To Note:
Both Google and Bing 'crawl' or search the internet every hour of every day and it will take time for your site to be 'found'.
Some quick tips to help you get found quicker include:
- Link to your site from Social Media - Facebook, Twitter & Instagram have a high Domain Rank trusted so this helps and gives you your 1st backlink.
- Get some more quality backlinks: don't, I repeat don't pay for low quality links from spammers or alike. They won't help.
- Get some good, high quality links back to your site.
- Don't panic - these things take time, the internet is very, very large so Google and Bing may take some time to find you.
- Keep building unique, quality content.
If you have any queries about this feel free to get in touch with our Support team on Live Chat or via email.