Step 26: Submit Sitemap to Google
In order to have your site show up in Google's search results, you're going to want to add your sitemap to be indexed.
Start by signing into Google's Webmaster Tools (using your Google account).
Once you're signed in, click the red "add property" button in the upper right-hand corner. Add your domain, with "https://" before it (ex. "https://stephensworld.ca").
It will prompt you to verify the domain name. Click the "alternate methods" tab, and select "HTML tag." Copy the coding snippet it gives you.
Go to your Shopify admin > Online Store > Themes > Click the "Actions" button next to the theme you're using (the published one) > Select the "Edit code" option.
From here, click into "theme.liquid" under the "Layout" folder, in the left-hand menu. Near the top of the file there should be a "<head>" code. The coding snippet you copied from Google needs to go on the first line under the "<head>" code in your theme.liquid file.
If there isn't a free line to paste it in (like my screenshot above) just click at the end the "<head>" code, and press enter to create a new line below it. In my example screenshot above, we would want to make a new line, between lines 8 and 9. Paste the code on the new line, and then save your changes.
After you've added the code, go back to Google (where it gave you the code) and click the red "verify" button at the bottom of the page.
If everything was done correctly, it should accept the domain name, and the page should reload to the search console dashboard for that specific domain. It should look something like this:
There will be three horizontal bars: "Crawl Errors", "Search Analytics", and "Sitemaps. Click on the grey "Sitemaps" bar.
On the right-hand side, click the red "Add/test sitemap" button. Put in "sitemap.xml" as the value, and then click the submit.
Once this has been done, your sitemap is submitted and you should be good to go. I highly recommend repeating all of the above steps for each domain name you're using (ie. all the domains listed in your Shopify admin under Online Store > Domains). For example: "https://stephens.world", "https://www.stephens.world", "https://stephensworld.ca", "https://www.stephensworld.ca", and "https://stephensworld.myshopify.com".
Need more help with this step? Check out Shopify's help docs for sitemap submission by clicking here.