Shopify SEO: Everything You Need to Know
Shopify is one of the world’s largest ecommerce platforms, powering over one million stores in 175 countries. It stands to reason that the Canada-based company has invested heavily in positioning its users with the very best tools, including SEO. For Shopify sites, visibility equals profitability; even if you’re not an SEO expert, Shopify has the tools to elevate your brand.
Is Shopify Good for SEO?
Shopify is widely considered to be rock solid when it comes to SEO. The platform offers a range of built-in tools to help brands of any size meet technical SEO best practices. SEO on Shopify is made a bit easier thanks to a slew of automated features, including:
- Automatic XML sitemaps
- Customizable URL structure*
- Automated canonical tags
- Structured data support
- Automatic and customizable 301 redirects
- Automated and customizable robots.txt file
*This is a bit of a grey area. While users can edit some elements of their page’s URL, there are some limitations. We’ll get into that shortly.
These features can help your brand improve its position on the search engine results page (SERP) and increase organic site traffic.
Related: Shopify vs. WordPress: Which is Better?
Shopify SEO Problems
SEO for Shopify sites does have a few weaknesses. While some of these issues can be proactively addressed, it can take a little SEO expertise to overcome the platform’s SEO shortcomings. With so much to gain (and lose!) from SEO, it’s worth tagging in the professionals to get you on track.
Not-So-Custom URLs
Shopify restricts some aspects of your site’s URL structure. The biggest impact is how users can organize their /collections/ subfolder or, more accurately, how they can’t. The /collection/ subfolder is home to all of your product categories, such as:
- hotairguitars.com/collections/acoustic
- hotairguitars.com/collections/electric
- hotairguitars.com/collections/t-shirts
Other platforms allow for increased customization of these categories, which makes it easier for search engines to more accurately organize and for users to understand. Platforms like WooCommerce might manage the same products this way:
- hotairguitars.com/guitars/acoustic
- hotairguitars.com/guitars/electric
- hotairguitars.com/apparel/t-shirts
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumb URLs can improve the user experience by organizing product categories and characteristics, making it easier to find what they need. Incorrect breadcrumb URLs, which is a carry-on issue related to non-custom URLs, can also confuse search engines. In some cases, it may prompt Google and Bing to serve inaccurate results on the SERP, lowering your clickthrough rate and negatively impacting brand authority.
Dive Deeper: Shopify Migration: Read the Case Study
The Best Shopify SEO Apps
The benefits of Shopify’s many features outweigh a few drawbacks for most brands. Plus, Shopify and third-party developers have created hundreds of SEO applications for Shopify to automate many small SEO tweaks that make a big difference in performance.
SEO Booster
$39/month after a 7-day trial
If you’re new to SEO, this app is a great tool to quickly pick up the basics. It offers a dedicated interface that makes tweaking Shopify on-page SEO settings easy. SEO Booster also provides Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console integration to improve reporting accuracy.
Crush.pics – $4.99/month
(Free plan available)
Speed thrills. Applications like Crush.pics can optimize existing photo file size to maintain fast page speeds and automatically shrink future uploads, too. It also creates new photo titles and even populates your photo’s alt text to reflect the product on the page; that’s a quick win for any ecommerce brand!
Smart SEO
$9.99/month after a 7-day free trial
Going global? Smart SEO offers many of the same features as SEO Booster, with considerable overlap on many metadata optimizations. Smart SEO’s multilanguage support sets it apart; it will automatically translate and populate metadata in any language you need.
Is Shopify Good for Blogging?
Yes and no. Unless you invest in some additional development time, Shopify blogs are relatively limited when displaying a diverse mix of content within a blog index. Shopify blogging is easy to use and effective for SEO; it’s a solid option if your main goal is to capture sessions. Some brands use a subdomain and another site, such as WordPress, to serve more robust content. Our development team can help you decide which is the best route for you to take.
We Know SEO (and Shopify, Too)
Need some Shopify SEO help to raise your organic game? Our fully integrated teams leverage specialized expertise to solve your most pressing marketing challenges. We’ve built SEO-rich Shopify sites, optimized existing content and supported long-term growth with a data-driven content marketing strategy for a mix of ecommerce and service-based clients. See what more than 25 years of experience can do for you; get in touch or call 231-922-9977 to get started.
