Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool from Google. It shows you which of your store pages Google has indexed, which keywords bring you visitors, and any issues Google has found with your store.
Your FreshStore account connects to it for you and brings the data back into your store, so most of the time you do not need to open Google Search Console at all.
Complete these steps in your FreshStore account area at my.freshstore.com. Store > Settings > Traffic inside your store dashboard controls your robots.txt file only.
Connecting your store
In your account, go to Stores, open your store, and go to Traffic > Google > Setup. Work through the three steps: Connect, Add property, Verify. FreshStore handles the verification for you.
🔗 How to add your store to Google
What you see in your account
Once your store is verified, four tabs appear under Traffic > Google.
Performance
Your search traffic from Google.
- Top queries. The keywords people searched for, with the clicks you got and your average position.
- Top pages. Your best performing pages, with their clicks and index status.
It can take a few days after verifying before Google has any data to show. If you see No query data yet, your store is still too new.
Indexing
Which of your pages Google has actually added to its results. You get four totals:
- Pages. How many of your pages we are tracking.
- Indexed. Live in Google's results.
- Not indexed yet. Google knows about the page but has not added it. This is normal and is not a problem to fix.
- Errors. Pages Google could not process. These are worth a look.
Each page also shows a coverage status (Crawled, Discovered, Redirected, Not discovered, Indexed) and when Google last crawled it. You can filter the list by All, Indexed, Not indexed yet, or Errors.
This updates automatically. You do not need to request anything.
Sitemap
Your XML sitemap, whether it has been submitted, and any issues Google reported with it. Click Submit sitemap to send it.
🔗 How to submit your XML sitemap to Google
Setup
The connect, add and verify steps. Once your store is verified this tab moves to the end, and you only come back to it if the connection needs attention.
Using Google Search Console directly
Everything above comes from your Google Search Console account, so you can always open it yourself for the full set of Google's own reports:
You need a Google account. All of your stores can go under the same one.
If you add a store to Google Search Console by hand, enter the URL exactly as your store uses it. If your store runs on https://mystore.com and you enter https://www.mystore.com, verification and your sitemap will fail.
Emails from Google
Once your store is in Google Search Console, Google will email you about anything it finds. Most of these are minor and nothing to worry about.
🔗 I received an email from Google about issues... what do I do?