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Being found by search engines

Every page and every product carries an SEO tab. What you type there does not appear on the page: it is what Google and the social networks read, and it decides whether someone clicks your link rather than the next one.

The three fields

  • Title — the title shown in search results, around sixty characters. Do not repeat the site name in it: it is appended automatically.
  • Description — the two lines of text under the title, about 150 characters. That is your pitch: describe what is on the page, not what you sell in general.
  • Image — the thumbnail shown when the link is shared. Failing that, the social sharing image from your settings is used.

A preview shows, under the fields, what the result page will look like. If AI is enabled on your studio, a button generates the title and the description from the page content, following best practices: a 50–60 character title without the site name, a 100–150 character description summarizing the offer. Generation happens in the language being edited only: switch to the other language to fill it in too. The result is a draft, to be re-read.

These fields are translated: a page in two languages has two titles and two descriptions. Left empty, the page title and the site description (General tab of the settings) take over.

Being indexed or not

A site on a trial period is never indexed by search engines: not on Google, not in the sitemap, not in robots.txt. This is automatic and deliberate — it keeps a site that is still being built from turning up in a search. As soon as the studio moves to a paid subscription, indexing starts on its own, with nothing for you to do.

Once eligible, you can still choose to stay out of search results — while you finish the content, for instance. The "Hide from search engines" checkbox in the General tab of the settings does exactly what a trial period does: the whole site stops being indexed, and the sitemap and robots.txt exclude it. Uncheck it when you are ready to be found.

What is automatic

  • The sitemap (sitemap.xml) lists your published pages and products, in both languages, and updates itself. Search engines find it without you having to declare it.
  • A draft is never indexed: only published content is visible to search engines.
  • The two language versions of a page are declared as such, so the right result is served according to the visitor’s language.

Search ranking is finally decided elsewhere than in this tab: on the alternative text of your images, on pages that genuinely answer a question, and on a fast site — which the platform takes care of by compressing your images.