Getting started 7: SEO: Google, Bing and the search engines

Chapter 7 of 15 of Getting Started with Trinity, by Brad Bussell, 2AData. Also on the web at www.2adata.com/getting-started.

Google sends more visitors than any other search engine on every indexed store, and on the stores that get no price comparison traffic it is the biggest referrer of all; where the price comparison sites are bringing visitors, they send more than Google does. Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo together send about one seventh as many on our own store, and on one store they send more than Google. All of it is free. None of it happens until the search engines know your store exists, and that takes weeks, so this is a day one job.

Google Search Console

Bing Webmaster Tools

Google Analytics

What Trinity already does

• Builds your sitemap every night: every in stock product, plus your category, brand, caliber, blog and store pages, at www.yourstore.com/sitemap.xml.
• Submits your new and changed products to IndexNow every night, and every brand, category and store page once a week. IndexNow feeds Bing, Yandex, Naver and Seznam.
• Writes the page titles, descriptions, product structured data and canonical links that search engines read.
• Shows your Search Console data on the SEO Gap Report page in your admin once you connect a Google service account key there, as described below.

Google Search Console

1. Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with the Google account you want to own your store's data.
2. Click Add property and choose Domain. Enter your domain without www.
3. Google shows a TXT record. Add it at wherever your domain's DNS is managed (GoDaddy, Hostinger, Cloudflare, your registrar). If we manage your DNS, send us the record and we add it. Click Verify. It can take an hour.
4. Open Sitemaps and submit https://www.yourstore.com/sitemap.xml.
5. Come back after a week. Pages shows how many are indexed, Performance shows the searches you appear in.
6. To see Search Console inside your admin, open SEO Gap Report and follow its three steps: create a service account in Google Cloud with the Search Console API turned on, give that account's address Full access to your property in Search Console, and paste its JSON key.

Bing Webmaster Tools

1. Go to bing.com/webmasters and sign in.
2. Choose Import from Google Search Console. One click verifies your site and imports the sitemap. If you skip that, add the site and verify it with the DNS record Bing gives you.
3. Submit the same sitemap address.

Bing powers DuckDuckGo and Yahoo as well, so this one step covers three engines.

Google Analytics

1. Go to analytics.google.com, create an account and a property for your store, and a web data stream for your domain.
2. Copy the Measurement ID. It starts with G.
3. In your admin open Settings, click the Company tab, find Google Tracking, paste it into GA4 Measurement ID(s) and click Save Google Tracking. Nothing is tracked until your own ID is entered.

Your admin's own Live Analytics page already shows visitors, page views, bounce rate, traffic sources, and orders and conversion rate by feed source, from the platform's data with the robots removed; the Conversion Funnel page adds how many visitors reached checkout. Google Analytics adds the demographic and campaign detail on top.

1. Paste your GA4 Measurement ID here (it starts with G)

What to expect

• Product pages start appearing in Google within one to three weeks. A full catalog takes months to index. Search Console's Pages report is the honest meter.
• Brand and category pages rank first. Your own pages (about, classes, services) rank for your town and your name.
• AI assistants read the same pages. ChatGPT sent our own store 119 visits in the last 30 days and 22 orders in the last 90 days, with no setup at all.

Previous: The price comparison sites: gun.deals, WikiArms, AmmoSeek and Gun Made. Next: Google Merchant Center.

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