SEO

The SEO report shows you which pages of your store search engines will struggle with, and why. Use it to fix weak titles, missing descriptions and thin copy before they cost you visitors.

Litestore checks every product, collection, category, page and blog post that search engines can index. It tests each one against a fixed set of rules and lists the ones with problems, worst first.

Your storefront also publishes schema.org markup, sitemap.xml, robots.txt and RSS feeds. Litestore builds all of them from live data, so you never export or regenerate anything by hand.

When you rename a product, collection or page, Litestore keeps the old URL working as a permanent redirect.

You'll find the report here:

Insights → SEO
/admin/seo

You need the analytics:view permission to open it.

A checklist, not a crawl

The report checks the data Litestore already has. It doesn't crawl your storefront or call an outside service.

Because every finding comes from a record, you can fix every finding by editing that record. You'll never see a finding like "the crawler couldn't reach this page".

Litestore groups findings into seven sections:

• Missing metadata
• Title quality
• Duplicate titles
• Descriptions
• Page copy
• URL slugs
• Image previews

Each row links straight to the record you need to edit.

The thresholds

The rules are fixed and apply to every kind of page in the same way.

meta title         30–60 characters
meta description   70–160 characters
on-page copy       under 50 characters is flagged as thin

A title under 30 characters usually doesn't describe the page well. Search results cut off titles longer than 60. Descriptions follow the same logic. The 50-character minimum for page copy catches pages that went live with a placeholder sentence.

Litestore checks for duplicates across your whole store, not only within one kind of page. It flags three things:

• Duplicate titles
• Duplicate descriptions
• Duplicate body copy

If two products share a meta description, they compete with each other for the same search result. That's why Litestore compares the whole catalog instead of each list on its own.

How a page is scored

Every page starts with 100 points. Each finding takes points away, depending on how serious it is:

error     25 points
warning   10 points
info       3 points

These weights tell you where to start. Four errors bring a page to zero, while it would take more than thirty info findings to do the same. Fixing the most serious findings first is the fastest way to raise your score, and the report is already sorted that way.

Structured data

Your storefront adds schema.org markup to every page type where it's useful. Litestore builds it from live data.

A product page includes a Product node with these parts:

• Offers
• AggregateRating
• Up to ten Review nodes
• additionalProperty attribute pairs
• keywords from tags
• isRelatedTo links

Collection and category pages include a CollectionPage with an ItemList.

Blog posts include an Article.

You don't maintain any of this separately. Litestore generates it from the same records you edit in the admin. When you fill in a product's attributes and related links, its markup gets richer without any extra step.

Sitemap, robots and feeds

Litestore builds sitemap.xml from your published records and refreshes it every hour.

The sitemap follows the sitemaps.org limit:

50,000 URLs per entity type

robots.txt blocks search engines from three paths:

/admin/
/auth/
/dashboard/

The Discourage search indexing setting blocks search engines from the whole site. Turn it on for a staging copy of your store. Otherwise the staging site competes with your real store in search results.

Litestore also publishes your catalog as RSS:

/rss/products.xml
/rss/collections.xml

Renaming without breaking links

Litestore keeps a list of previous slugs on every product, collection and page. The field is called previousSlugs.

When you rename one, Litestore adds the old slug to that list in the same save. You don't have to remember a separate step, and the old URL never stops working, even for a moment.

When a visitor hits a missing page on your storefront, Litestore checks that history. If it finds the old slug, it sends the visitor to the current URL with a permanent redirect.

old URL requested
    ↓
404 lookup finds the slug in the record's history
    ↓
permanent redirect to the current URL

Categories don't get this. A category's URL is a path made of several slugs rather than a single slug, and Litestore doesn't keep old category URLs. If you rename a category, its existing links break.

What you set, and where

For each record, you edit metaTitle and metaDescription directly on its form.

For the whole store, you set four things:

• A title template
• A default social image
• A Twitter handle
• A Google Search Console verification token

Litestore falls back to these store-wide values when a record has nothing filled in. Even a record you haven't touched still gets a sensible title and social card.

What AI can do here

On this page, AI can only write the meta title and meta description.

It fills in the fields of the form you're editing. Nothing is saved until you press save. You read the draft, fix it if it's wrong and save it yourself. Generated text never reaches your storefront without your approval.

The same page also has the Google Merchant panel. It shows whether your product feed is connected and when it last synced.

Working through the checklist

1. Open the report and start at the top. The most serious findings come first, and they cost the most points.
2. Fill in the meta fields on each record as you go. You can also generate them and correct the result.
3. Publish. The sitemap, the RSS feeds and the structured data all read live data, so they pick up the change on their own.
4. Check the Google Merchant panel on the same page to see the feed's connection and its last sync.

For each row, don't just ask whether the rule passes. Ask this instead:

Would someone reading this in a search result know what the page is, and how it differs from the other twelve pages I sell?

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