Have you ever watched a spider?

Most of the time they stand still and just wait for things to happen.

But when they are working, they are crawling all over the place.

Fixing a web. Moving across the ground or wall. Getting their dinner prepped.

They clearly have periods of high and low activity.

Google’s web crawler (sometimes called a robot or spider) is aptly named.

Their crawlers will read the data on your website and then follow links to get more pages. This is how they see new pages (indexing) and update content as you make changes.

Some days Google's spider never shows up. It’s just sitting there.

Other days it’s grabbing every page in your Shopify store until it tires itself out.

This is why SEO timing is more art than science.

If you made a change right before Google’s crawler came by, there’s a strong chance Google will pick that up and you’ll get results faster.

But if it’s weeks or months before they come by again, it’ll look like your change isn’t working. In reality, your change hasn't been seen yet.

Since Google isn’t transparent about its crawlers, you never know exactly what it’s doing and seeing. There is no specific cadence for Google to crawl your site. Despite what many think, there is no magic button in Search Console to make it go any faster.

Your time is better spent doing the best you can in your store and with your SEO.

Just like you can’t make a real-life spider do exactly what you want, you can’t control Google's. And Google’s spider can bite much harder than the household spiders (unless you live in Australia, then avoid every single spider forever).

One SEO feature that works well with Google's crawlers is structured data.

Mostly because the data helps Google’s crawlers to better understand the page. This makes their job easier and you'll likely see the impact of your changes much faster. For many, SEO changes can take weeks or months to see any sort of impact. With structured data, we've seen stores begin to get Rich Results on average within 34 days!

Contact me for your free structured data audit. I'll tell you honestly if your structured data is up to snuff for Google's crawlers.

With a 7-day free trial, there's no better time to install JSON-LD for SEO. We'll make sure your structured data looks good so that when Google visits your site, they'll be more likely to award you with Rich Results.