Set up your storefront SEO

SEO for a store is mostly: clean URLs, good titles, structured data, and patience. Here's the SellStein-specific bit.

Settings → SEO

The SEO panel covers everything that's not on a per-product or per-page basis: site title template, default meta description, canonical domain, robots.txt overrides, structured data toggles, and Search Console / Bing Webmaster verification.

Per-product titles

Each product page has its own meta title and description. Defaults to "{product name} | {store name}" but you should edit the top 20 by traffic. That's where the wins are. Keep titles under 60 characters, descriptions under 155.

The pattern that ranks: `<keyword> | <brand> . <benefit>`. Example: "Leather Wallet for Men | Roman Leather. Hand-stitched, lifetime guarantee".

Sitemap

Auto-generated and updated nightly at /sitemap.xml. Includes every product, collection, page, and blog post. Submit it once to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster. They'll re-crawl on their own schedule afterwards.

If you have 5000+ products the sitemap is split into chunks (one index file pointing at multiple sitemap files). Both Google and Bing handle this fine; you just submit the index URL.

Structured data

Settings → SEO → Structured Data → toggle on. We emit:

• Product schema (price, availability, ratings). Gets you rich snippets in Google with stars and price
• Organization schema (logo, social links, contact)
• BreadcrumbList on every category and product
• FAQPage on storefront FAQs you write
• Article on blog posts

Don't disable any of these without a reason. Rich snippets typically lift CTR by 8-15% on the same ranking position.

Robots.txt

Default robots blocks /cart, /account, /checkout from being indexed (correct. You don't want a customer's cart in Google). Edit at Settings → SEO → robots.txt only if you know what you're doing. The most common mistake is blocking /products by accident, which deindexes your entire catalogue overnight.

Search Console

Add your domain at search.google.com/search-console. Verify via the meta tag we generate at Settings → SEO → Search Console. Once verified, you'll see queries, click-through rates, indexing status, and crawl errors.

Check it weekly. If pages are dropping out of the index, you'll see it here first. Not in your traffic dashboard, where the impact lags by ~30 days.

What not to chase

• Keyword stuffing in product titles (Google penalises it)
• Doorway pages (one page per city for the same product)
• Buying backlinks (manual penalty risk; not worth it)
• "100% on Lighthouse". Get to 90+, that's enough. The last 10 points cost more than they pay back

Solid product pages with clean titles, schema, and a working sitemap will rank better than 95% of stores in your niche.