How to verify your site with Google and submit a sitemap || Shopify Help Center

Want to expand the reach of your online store so it's easier for your customers to find and buy your products? Consider submitting a sitemap to Google and verifying your site. Sitemaps and verifications are two ways you can improve your store's search engine optimization, also known as SEO. SEO helps customers find your store on search engines like Google. My name is Casey and I'll show you how to do both in this video. The first step is to verify your store's website with Google. When you verify your store's website, you prove to Google that you own the site. This lets Google provide their services to you. Let's get started by verifying your site. It's a good idea to keep two tabs open while you're doing this, one for Google Search Console and one with your Shopify admin. First, open Google Search Console using the link in the description and log in or create an account. You'll need an account to verify your site. If the website of your online store is live and open to customers, then stay on this page. If you still have a password page protecting your store so it's unavailable to the public, then you need to disable the password. This is because Google can only verify live, public websites. You can turn the password back on after your site is verified if you aren't ready for it to be public. To disable your password from the Shopify admin, click Online Store. Then click Preferences and then click Disable Password on the banner. This takes you to the Password Protection section. Uncheck the Enable Password box, then click Save. Open Google Search Console. Here you choose between two property types. Use the Domain option if you're verifying with DNS records. You can use this option if you have a third-party domain that hasn't been transferred to Shopify. Your online store web address is your domain, which is also the same as your URL. For more information about third-party domains, click the link in our description. If you have a domain that you purchased through Shopify or the myshopify.com domain, then use the URL Prefix option. When you enter the web address for your domain, enter the full URL, also known as a web address. Include the www's and the SSL certificate, which is HTTPS. I'm typing in our custom domain, which is aliathletics.com, then click Continue. After checking verification, you see several methods for verifying your site. I'll show you the HTML tag method. Click the arrow to open the HTML tag section. Here you see a line of code that shows the meta tag. Click Copy. This copies the entire code for you. Back on your Shopify admin, you need to paste the meta tag into your current theme's code. To start, click Online Store. Find the theme that you want to edit. Click Actions, then Edit Code. In the Layout section, click Theme.liquid to open the file in the Online Code Editor. Find the tag head near the top of the page. Click Return to create a new line. Then paste the meta tag you copied directly underneath the head tag. Click Save to finish. Back on the Google Search Console screen, click Verify underneath the HTML tag method. If your site was verified successfully, then you see a pop-up that says Ownership Verified. Next, click Go to Property to see an overview of your Google Search Console dashboard. You'll need this dashboard to submit your sitemap later, so keep it open. Now that your site is verified, remember not to remove the meta tag or delete the theme that you pasted it in. If you ever lose site verification, change themes, or buy a custom domain, then you can repeat these steps. Your site verification is now complete. It's time to submit your sitemap. Submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console helps Google crawl and index valuable pages on your store. This helps customers find your store more easily. From the main Google Search Console page, click Sitemaps. Under the section Add a new sitemap, enter sitemap.xml. Anything other than sitemap.xml causes an error, so make sure your punctuation is in the right place. Click Submit. Next, you see a pop-up telling you that your sitemap was successfully submitted. If you see any errors under Status, then click to find more details on the error. Click the status line to see more details about this error. Use the link in the description to visit Google Search Console Help and troubleshoot any errors. This error occurred because the sitemap was submitted while the online store was still password protected. After you fix the error, you can delete the sitemap and start again. To delete a sitemap, click the three dots in the top right-hand corner and click Remove Sitemap. Next, submit your sitemap again using the previous steps. If the status of your sitemap displays Success in green, then it was submitted without errors. After you submit your sitemap, Google uses it to crawl your site. Google looks over the code and content for each URL they find. Google also uses your sitemap to index your site. That's when they store and organize the content found during the crawling process. After a page is indexed, it can be displayed as a search result. Don't be concerned if every page of your online store is not crawled or indexed. Hidden pages on your store are not indexed and don't show up in search results. Remember, if you aren't ready for your site to be live, then enable the password protection on your Shopify admin after completing the steps above. Now you're all done and your customers can find your store more easily. If you still have questions, visit help.shopify.com for more information.