Why Google displays a different version than your Shopify store SEO description

Often I’m asked why someone’s store is showing up in Google with different text from what they set up in Shopify for the product.

Google doesn’t actually show exactly what your page or product description is in their search results.

Rather, Google is showing what they think is the best representation of the page.

This means that if you have a page all about dogs but you call your product a cat hairbrush, Google will probably classify that page as about dogs and show it when someone searches for dog brushes. Even though it’s called a cat hairbrush, the majority of the page is talking about dogs.

How this works and how Google understands that a page is really about dogs is a closely guarded secret. Google’s algorithm.

Over the years people have figured out parts of it, at least as far as knowing certain things will influence how Google sees your page.

Product title “cat hairbrush”? This page is probably about cats.

Product description all about dogs? Seems it’s about dogs now too.

Product reviews mentioning dogs? More dogs.

Images named dogs with alt text about dogs? More dogs.

Add it all together and Google thinks this page is about dogs and a dog brush.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what you think the page is about. What matters is what Google sees on your page and how they classify your page.

One way to help ensure that both you and Google are seeing the page the same way is to be very clear about the page’s content. The structured data from JSON-LD for SEO can help with that by providing Google a machine-readable description of every page in your Shopify store.