Store SEO: help customers find you on Google

What Mawg3 does for you

Every published store gets a sitemap at your store address followed by /sitemap_index.xml. It lists your pages, products and categories, and your robots.txt file points search engines to it.

Product links use Latin words built from the product name, so a product called Oud Perfume lives at /product/oud-perfume. If you sell in Arabic, the link uses the English name when you have added one, or the Arabic name spelled in Latin letters. Category links work the same way.

When you rename a product or page and its link changes, Mawg3 adds a 301 redirect from the old link automatically. Your pages also carry structured data about your business, and stores in Arabic and English tell Google which version is which.

Set your site title and description

The SEO Score at the top of the page checks four things: site title, site description, share image and keywords.

1. In the sidebar, open Website, then SEO.
2. Click the Site SEO card.
3. Fill in Site title. This is your store name as it should appear on Google.
4. Check the Title format. %s is your site name, %p the page name and %i the product name.
5. Write a Site description. Aim for 50 to 300 characters that say what you sell and where.
6. If your store has a second language, fill in the search result fields for it too.
7. Add Keywords, the words people type to find stores like yours.
8. Upload a Share image for social media. 1200 × 630 works best.
9. Optionally fill in Business details for Google. Only enter shipping and return terms your business really offers.

Improve store SEO for each product

Have many products? On the SEO page, Auto-optimize all products with Barq AI writes an SEO title, description and keywords for each product. It never overwrites entries you edited yourself.

1. Open a product in Products.
2. Scroll to Search engine listing and click Edit SEO.
3. Write a Page title of up to 70 characters. Lead with what the product is, then a key detail.
4. Write a Meta description of up to 160 characters that would make a shopper click.
5. Leave URL handle empty to use the link built from the name, or type your own. It is cleaned to Latin letters, numbers and hyphens.
6. Click Save changes.

Connect Google Search Console

The Status list on the same card shows whether your site is published, indexing is allowed and verification codes are saved. If you connect your own domain later, add it as a new property in Search Console.

1. On the SEO page, open the Search Console card.
2. In Google Search Console, add your store address as a URL-prefix property.
3. Choose the HTML tag method and copy only the content value from the tag.
4. Paste it into the Google Search Console field in Mawg3. Do the same for Bing Webmaster Tools if you use it.
5. Make sure your site is published, then click Verify in Google.
6. Submit your sitemap: your store address followed by /sitemap_index.xml.

Redirect old links

Moving from an old website? Open the 301 Redirects card and click Add redirect. Enter the Old path and the New path, both starting with /. Redirects take effect when your site is published. Redirects Mawg3 created for you are marked Auto.

Go further with the Yoast SEO add-on

Go to Addons, choose Yoast SEO and click Install. A Yoast SEO menu appears with SEO Analysis, Readability, Bulk Editor, XML Sitemaps and Structured Data.

SEO Analysis scores any page or product against a focus keyphrase and shows Google and social previews. You can also hide a single page from search engines. Bulk Editor lets you edit titles and descriptions for every product and page in one table, with CSV import and export. A Yoast SEO panel also appears inside each product.

Common mistakes

Leaving Hide this site from search results switched on. It adds noindex to every page, so Google will not list your store.

Forgetting to publish. Google cannot read a site that is not live.

Giving many products the same title, or stuffing in the same keyword again and again. Write for people first.

Expecting instant results. Google decides when to crawl and how to rank pages, and nobody can promise a position.