Lesson 5 of 6 5 min
Get found on Google
What Google actually needs from a small site — a clear title, a page per service, real text with your city in it, a sitemap — and why patience is part of the job.
Nobody can promise you a Google ranking; anyone who does is selling something. What it can tell you is what Google needs from a small site to show it at all, and most new sites do not give it that. Six things, then patience.
1. A title that says what you are
Google's headline for your site is built from your site's name. On a website that is Site Name under General Settings in the editor and, on a portfolio template, the name and role in your hero. Priya Sharma — Wedding Cakes, Pune is a search result; Priya's Site is not. A store has its own fields under Settings → SEO & sharing, covered in SEO & social sharing.
2. One page per thing you offer
Google ranks pages, not businesses. Someone searching brand design Bengaluru wants a page about brand design, not a home page that mentions it in passing. The editor's Pages panel adds pages; give each service people search for its own, with a headline, a price and a contact button. An empty page is left out of search on purpose, so only add pages you will fill.
3. Real words, not only pictures
Google reads text. It cannot read the prices on a photo of your menu, and a site that is mostly images with a few words is kept out of search until it has real content. The writing from lesson two is also your SEO.
4. Your city or area, in the text
People search cake shop Kothrud, CA in Jaipur, wedding photographer Bengaluru. If your area is only in your head, Google cannot match it. Put it in the headline, the about and the contact section — the locality, not the house address.
5. Tell Google it exists
Publishing already tells Google about your site, and every SitesPlaced site serves a sitemap — a list of its pages — at your address followed by /sitemap.xml. Google Search Console is Google's free tool for this. How you verify depends on what you have:
- Your own domain. Add a Domain property in Search Console and verify with the record it gives you at your registrar, as in the last lesson. Then paste your sitemap address under Sitemaps.
- A store on the free address. Add a URL prefix property for
https://yourname.sitesplaced.comand paste Google's HTML tag into Settings → SEO & sharing; steps in SEO & social sharing. - A website on the free address. The website editor has no verification field yet. Do not get stuck here; Google finds the site through the sitemap and shared links. Verify once you have a domain.
The .site link your dashboard shows is kept out of search on purpose; the .com address or your own domain is what Google indexes.
6. Patience, and a blog only if you will write
A new site takes days to weeks to appear in results, and months to settle. A store on SitesPlaced has a built-in blog; one genuinely useful post — how to keep a fondant cake in Pune humidity — can bring visitors for years, and one abandoned post from last Diwali looks worse than none. Start one only if you will write monthly. See Add a blog to your store.
The free plan and your title
Free-plan page titles end with a short | SitesPlaced suffix, like the badge; Starter's branding removal drops it. It does not stop you being found.
Write down
The search a customer would type to find me: ______. Rewrite your Site Name and headline so those words appear. Last lesson: The Importer shortcut.
Stuck on this lesson? Ask an AI assistant — it reads our guides and answers with the exact steps.