If your orders drop to zero the moment you pause your ads, you don’t own your store’s traffic. You’re renting it. Ads are good and bring quick results, and nobody’s telling you to stop them. The problem is when they’re your only door. Cost per click goes up, your ad account gets suspended, or a season comes when competitors raise their budgets, and your store goes quiet. At that very moment, a customer is typing “original Cambodian oud” or “black abaya for work” into Google. That customer is ready to buy, so the question is: whose store shows up for them? Try these three steps tonight. They take less than 15 minutes: Search Google for your best-selling product, but the way a customer would type it, not the name you gave it. See where your store ranks. In the search box, type site: followed by your store link. The number you see is roughly how many of your store’s pages Google knows about. Compare it with how many products you have. Look at the title of any of your product pages in Google results (the blue line). If it’s just the product name with no description, Google has nothing to understand what you sell from. I’m not saying stop your ads. I’m saying have a second source that you don’t pay for per click, one that works while you sleep. Try the second step and tell me in the comments how many pages showed up and how many products you have. I’ll reply to everyone and explain what the gap between the two numbers means for their store. Hani | Zeina Host, SEO and store management