Make Your Eshop More Visible

For a long time, record stores, labels, and distributors relied on physical discovery: flipping through the bins, getting a recommendation from the shop owner, or stumbling across a record by chance. Online, discovery follows a different path: search engines. Whether you manage a record collection, a label catalog, a distribution business, or a bookstore, the principle remains the same—your customers should be able to find what you sell just as easily as they would by walking through your front door.

When you import a release from Discogs, its title, artist, label, and release year are already in place—no retyping, no typos. Common Ground takes care of all of that for you. The time you no longer spend copying an artist’s name or a release date can now be spent elsewhere: on the things no automated import can write for you.

That «elsewhere» is an entire branch of your business: Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Today, we’d like to take a closer look at it with you, because it deserves just as much attention as everything else. SEO includes everything that helps your store appear when someone searches Google for «Pink Floyd The Wall vinyl» or «Blue Note jazz vinyl.» But before your store can be found, Google first needs to read it. The automated process through which Google’s bots browse your website—page by page, product by product—is called crawling. That initial scan allows Google to index your pages, meaning it can recognize them as potential answers to future searches.

A slow website loses visitors before it even has the chance to convince them—and Google knows it, which is why loading speed is one of its ranking signals. Once again, there’s nothing you need to do here: Common Ground Eshops are built to load quickly, even with large catalogs and audio previews on every release.

Finally, Google no longer uses a dedicated «keywords» field. Instead, it’s far more effective to naturally include the words your customers actually search for in your titles and descriptions, rather than placing them in a separate field.

SEO is built over time, one detail at a time: a well-written title, a description that genuinely says something, an image that’s carefully named. Each of these actions matters—and together, they add up.

Account Settings

On an e-commerce website, not every page carries the same weight in Google’s eyes. Your homepage almost always receives the most attention: it’s the page that earns the most external links, the one people remember best, and the first one both visitors and Google’s bots are likely to see. It does more than introduce your brand—it sets the tone for everything Google will understand about your store, while guiding the rest of its exploration toward your categories and products.

That exploration is the crawling process mentioned earlier. Before it can happen, it must be allowed: your Eshop needs to be open to indexing. You can even choose exactly which pages Google is invited to crawl—and which ones should remain out of sight, such as a shipping information page that has no value in search results.
• Learn how to enable indexing and manage which pages Google can crawl from our Guide.

Next comes what Google actually displays in its search results: a title and a short description. The title—commonly known as the meta title—is almost always the very first thing someone reads before they even visit your website. A title like «Music Store» says nothing about who you are: not your name, your specialty, or your location. By contrast, a title such as «Wax & Vinyl — Record Store in Lyon | New & Used Vinyl» clearly describes your business, includes your store’s name, and stays short enough to appear in full in search results. Ideally, it should be around 50 to 60 characters long.

Directly below the title appears the description, or meta description. While it doesn’t directly affect your rankings, it often determines whether someone clicks—or keeps scrolling. Think of it as an invitation rather than a formality. Where «Welcome to our website» gives visitors no reason to stop, a description like «More than 15,000 new and used vinyl records: rock, jazz, soul, metal, limited editions, shipped across Europe» quickly summarizes your business, highlights what makes it unique, and gives people a compelling reason to click. Aim for roughly 150 to 160 characters so the full description appears in search results.
• Learn how to edit your SEO title and meta description.

Finally, two small images complete the picture. The favicon—the small icon displayed in your browser tab—and your social sharing image, which appears whenever someone shares a link to your store on social media or in apps like WhatsApp. Neither one directly improves your rankings, but both strengthen instant brand recognition wherever your link appears.
• Learn how to add your favicon and social sharing image.

Fondations & URLs

On Common Ground, every product URL is generated automatically when a release is imported. As soon as a title is imported from Discogs, its URL is created using the release title, the artist, or the relevant collection. The same applies to your store’s main page types—your catalog, pre-orders, used records, and more—each with its own URL structure, generated automatically as soon as the page is created. Once again, there’s nothing you need to do: automation lays the groundwork so you can focus your attention elsewhere.

The only exception is your catalog as a whole, which is intentionally excluded from crawling and indexing—for a fairly obvious reason. It changes constantly as products come and go, and Google isn’t meant to index a page that simply lists your entire inventory. Individual product pages, however, are still crawled and indexed normally.

Your domain’s security follows the same principle. The SSL certificate—represented by the padlock displayed in your browser’s address bar—is both a trust signal that Google takes into account when ranking websites and a security guarantee for your customers when they make a purchase. Common Ground installs and renews it automatically as soon as your domain is connected, with no action required on your part.
• Learn how to customize your page settings and URLs, and how to connect your domain.

External Traffic

Your shop doesn’t live alone on the web. Google also watches what happens around it — the links that lead to it, the mentions that talk about it, the places where it appears outside its own pages.

The oldest signal, and still one of the most powerful, is links pointing to you from other sites — backlinks. An article that talks about your shop, a label that links back to your catalog, a mention on a specialized site: each of these links tells Google that you’re trusted elsewhere, not just on your own site. None of this can be configured from a setting — it’s built through the relationships you maintain with your ecosystem.

Your social networks extend this logic, but can go much further than a simple shared link. Once connected to eBay or Meta Business, your catalog can appear directly as identifiable products in your posts, stories, or Instagram Shop — with price, availability, and a direct purchase link. This is no longer just a vitality signal for Google: it’s a sales channel in its own right, where someone can discover a record while scrolling and buy it without ever running a search. Once the catalog is connected, every new item added to your Eshop can automatically feed your Instagram Shop and drive traffic from Discogs or Maps — another place where work done once benefits every product added afterward.
• Learn how to connect your catalog to Meta Business.

Seeing where your visitors click matters just as much as being seen by them. Connecting a tool like Google Analytics to your Eshop lets you see, page by page, where your traffic comes from — a Google search, an Instagram link, a partner site — and what each visitor does once they arrive.

This visibility doesn’t change your SEO by itself, but it changes how you steer it: it reveals which pages attract visitors without converting, which listings would benefit most from being enriched, and which channels deserve more attention than others. Without this visibility, there’s no way to know what’s actually working — and what deserves to be adjusted.
• Learn how to connect analytics tools to your Eshop.

Products

Automatic import lays a solid foundation: title, artist, label, year all arrive already in place. What follows is what turns that foundation into a page that makes people want to stop — a collector wanting to linger, and Google wanting to feature it.

A listing relies on two descriptions, each built for its own audience. The long description is the one a buyer sees on the product page: it can grow richer over time — the context behind the album’s release, its importance in the artist’s career, the musicians involved, the standout tracks, the differences from other editions, details about the pressing. Someone is sometimes searching for a specific track, not just an album — your titles, descriptions, and tracklists are often exactly what your customers search for most precisely. A description grows over time, as you learn more about a listing.

The short description, on the other hand, stays invisible on your Eshop — but plays a decisive role elsewhere: it feeds the meta description shown in Google search results, and the preview that appears when a link to that listing is shared on WhatsApp or elsewhere. Two descriptions, then, for two different moments: one to convince a buyer already on your page, the other to make them want to click before they’ve even arrived.

Images matter just as much: several photos are better than one — a front cover doesn’t tell the whole story of a record, when a back cover, a disc out of its sleeve, or a close-up of its condition can reassure a buyer. Every image deserves a clear file name, a caption when it’s useful, and alt text that describes what it shows — for Google, as well as for anyone using a screen reader to navigate your shop. A listing that brings all of this together becomes a page that Google understands, and that a buyer finds useful.
• Learn how to add descriptions, images, and categories to your product pages in our Guide.

Alt Text

A photo imported from your computer often carries a default name, something like IMG_4821.jpg — a name that tells Google nothing. Renamed to pink-floyd-the-wall-vinyl-1979.jpg, that same image becomes information in its own right: the same photo, but now readable by a search engine that doesn’t «see» an image — it reads what it’s told about it. This principle applies just as much to an image on a product page as to one in your media library.

This logic extends to two other elements: the caption, which appears visually beneath the photo, and the alt text, invisible on screen.
This alt text deserves particular attention, because it isn’t just for Google. A visually impaired person doesn’t browse your shop the way you do — they use a screen reader, software that reads a page’s content aloud. Faced with an image, that software has nothing to read if there’s no alt text: the cover stays silent, the information disappears. Writing «Original cover of The Wall, 1979 edition, Pink Floyd» instead of leaving the field blank makes your shop readable to more people — and, in the process, it also helps Google.

Three simple habits, then, rather than a field to fill in: naming your files before importing them, writing a caption when it’s useful, and taking the time to add alt text. Repeated for every image, these small details add up to build a shop that Google understands better — and that more people can actually browse.

Inventory

A collection is never just a list of listings stacked on top of each other. Think of it instead as a section in your shop: one that’s carefully organized so a customer can find their way at a glance, without having to ask for help. A short introduction with a few well-chosen words, the main artists featured, the genres covered, the new arrivals highlighted — these are the details that turn a simple list into a section people actually want to browse.

This logic extends to playlists — static collections designed to recreate online what you already build in store: the wall of records behind the counter, the current selection, the favorites you highlight without them necessarily belonging to a single category.
Organizing your inventory this way isn’t just for Google — that may even be where it matters least. A clear menu and a well-planned structure first and foremost change your customer’s experience: they find what they’re looking for faster, discover listings they wouldn’t have thought to search for, and stay longer browsing your shop instead of leaving for lack of direction. This is also what gives full meaning to features like wantlists: a customer who navigates easily between sections is a customer who saves items, comes back, and eventually buys — good navigation doesn’t just help people find things, it helps convert them.

This same logic also makes your own day-to-day work easier: a clear structure simplifies adding a new listing, and helps a new team member find their way around the catalog without getting lost.
Unlike a physical section, nothing here is set in stone once it’s in place: thanks to inventory filters, standard or custom, you can reorganize all or part of your catalog in just a few clicks — by date, category, or supplier — without ever having to move listings one by one. A structure can therefore evolve along with your catalog, without ever becoming a major undertaking.
• Learn how to create collections, playlists, and bulk-reorganize your inventory in our Guide.

Day to Day

Just created a new product page, but it’s not showing up in Google results yet? That’s rarely a sign of a technical problem. Google needs time to crawl a new page, understand it, and then decide where to show it — a delay often measured in days, sometimes weeks. SEO rewards consistency more than speed: being well-ranked never depends on a single action, but on the accumulation of many small details — a title, a description, photos, a category, an update — which together gradually help Google better understand your shop and recommend it to the right people.

Rather than guessing where your indexing stands, there’s a free tool that tells you precisely: Google Search Console. Once your domain is connected, it lets you see how Google perceives your site, which pages are indexed, and lets you submit your sitemap — a kind of map of your shop that helps Google discover your pages faster, rather than waiting to find them on its own.
• Learn how to connect your Eshop to Google Search Console.

An accessible shop is one that a visually impaired person can genuinely browse with a screen reader, that someone navigating by keyboard rather than mouse can move through without obstacles, that someone with a slow connection can load without an endless wait. Every one of these details, right down to the color contrast choices for your text, serves your SEO and makes your shop a little more open to everyone who visits it. It’s never a wasted effort — it always pays off twice.

Not every page needs the same immediate attention. It makes sense to start with what matters most: your best sellers, your new arrivals, your limited editions, seasonal products, merch, or pages that already get a lot of visits but few sales — often a sign of a listing that needs enriching rather than abandoning.

Conclusion

SEO doesn’t come down to a single formula, and no single action guarantees a first-place spot on Google. It’s more of an accumulation: a well-chosen title, a description that actually says something, a carefully named image, a category designed so people can find their way. None of these actions changes everything on its own — but together, repeated page after page, they build a shop that Google understands, and that your customers find easily.

Common Ground already handles part of the work for you: imports from Discogs, URL generation, the technical foundations that don’t need your attention. What’s left — descriptions, images, organizing your catalog, your shop’s accessibility — is precisely what sets you apart: your knowledge of records, your instinct for a cover that deserves to be told, your way of organizing a section so people feel at home.

Every enriched page, every clarified category, every well-named image adds its own building block to the whole. SEO, then, isn’t a project you finish one day — it’s ongoing work that accompanies your shop’s life for as long as it exists.

All the actions covered in this document — indexing, descriptions, images, collections — are detailed step by step in our Guide: guide.common-ground.io.

Download the PDF Here
Discover More Reviews Documents & Resources Here

©Common Ground Studio