Shopify Clients Served
Average Revenue Increase
Years of Shopify Experience
SHOPIFY PROs
Site Speed
You never have to worry too much about the site speed if you are on Shopify. Most website resources such as JS, CSS and image files are well-optimised and cached. Shopify also has its own CDN to make sure everything is served instantly around the world. So if your eCommerce store requires quite a lot of functionalities and you don’t have the budget to hire a dedicated web developer to help optimise and monitor your web hosting server, Shopify can be a good choice.
However, don’t get me wrong, we are now talking about the actual loading speed of web pages of Shopify stores, not Core Web Vitals that SEO cares, which could be achievable by paid apps.
Some Technical SEO Items
Pagination
In short, Shopify's pagination setups are optimal. Normally, you won't need any actions on such technical SEO element if you are using traditional pagination links on collection pages.
However, if you are using "Load/Show More" buttons on collection pages or even using infinite scrolls to show more of your products, there could be a potential but also vital risk of Google not being able to crawl any of your products sitting on page two and beyond of your collections.
Canonical
Canonical tag is another important tech SEO element using to prevent potential duplication, crawling and indexing issues from variations of different types of pages.
Shopify is doing a good job here as they always canonicalise everything to the primary page, except for pagination URLs, which is great.
Robots.txt
Years ago, Shopify didn't allow webmasters to edit your website's robots.txt file because they thought they knew everything about SEO is the file was already optimal (and of course more likely a technical implementation they wouldn't want to spend much time on).
The news is that Shopify now allows the file to be editable, the steps of which can be seen here.
Most of the time, you don't have to worry about the rules to be set in such file since Shopify has set it up quite well unless you have some custom functionalities/apps and they are generating random URLs that you definitely don't want Google to know they exist.
SHOPIFY CONs
URL Structure
Nested Collections
Over 95% of eCommerce websites contain product categories AND sub-categories. However, this cannot be perfectly reflected in the URLs. With CMSs such as WooCommerce, it's easy to set up sub-categories structure such as www.example.com/books/childrens-books/ or something similar. However, on Shopify, it only can be www.example.com/collections/childrens-book without the 'books' parent collection in the URL, which is a drawback for SEO. Yeah, you could use collection tags to generate similar URLs, but it's impossible to add any content to the collection tag pages.
Product URLs
Every product would come with more than one version of URLs if it belongs to multiple collections. Although they will have canonical links set up but Google, from time to time, would still index theses different versions of product URLs, which is a game changer if you don't handle them properly.
It could also easily break your perfect breadcrumb structure if you fix it improperly.
URL Base
Your won't be able to remove the base/slug of any page types from the URLs. For example, collection pages would always come with /collections/ in the URL while your 'about us' page would always has /pages/ in the URL, and Shopify doesn't allow us to remove it.
Hard to Fully
Exclude a Page
It’s 202x now and Shopify still cannot provide an easy way to noindex a page and/or remove it from the XML sitemap without the help from paid apps. Luckily, if you have a developer, they are still achievable with some coding work.
MY SEO TIPS
FOR SHOPIFY SITES
Get unique content
No matter how many products you are selling on Shopify site, you should always have unique and originally rewritten content for all your products and collection pages as much as possible. This is especially important if it's a dropshipping store or your product descriptions are simply copied and pasted from your vendors. Google doesn't like duplicated content as you may already know and this is a game changer.
Be careful creating collections
There are so many Shopify websites that I've experienced which contains tons and tons of collection pages, which they shouldn't be indexed at all.
If your collections to be created are for any of the following purposes, make sure they are not index-able, otherwise, your overall quality of the site will drop because of these thin-content collection pages, leading to keyword ranking drops:
- for promotions/special sale events
- for helping customers narrow down products by pricing
- for testing
Don't rely too much on canonical links
As mentioned above, products can come with multiple versions of URLs if they belong to multiple collections. Although Shopify has canonical links set up correctly by default most of the time but based on my experience, they all still can be indexed, which will cause vital duplication issues. Get your dev to fix this. It's never too late.
Don't overuse schema mark-up apps
This mostly happens to product schema mark-ups. Don't install schema mark-up apps or enable such function from your SEO apps if your theme already has this set up. Having more than one set of product structured data could lead to zero rich snippets even if they are all set up correctly.
You may use this link to test and see if your structured data is set up correctly or not and if there's only one set of them.
Tell your SEO your updates to the site!
Updating your Shopify theme is easy, but your SEO might start to suffer even more easily. Updating your theme most of time means all your previous SEO work involved in changing your theme codes are gone - I mean completely gone. If you don't want your SEO budget spent wasted, discuss with your SEO guy before making any massive changes, especially prior to any theme upgrades and redesigns. Every changed piece matters for SEO.
FAQs
Is Shopify good for SEO?
Yes, it is.
At least 90% of the SEO tactics can be implemented on Shopify websites. I wouldn't recommend switching away if it's just for SEO purposes but not for something critical business-wise.
Is Shopify the best CMS for SEO though?
No, it's not.
Comparing to open-source CMS like WordPress/WooCommerce, it's not the best since there are still many limitation and things that you cannot do on Shopify even after years of development.
What's the best SEO app you recommend?
Personally, I don't have a preference. Just pick the ones got installed the most, it cannot be wrong. They all are doing pretty much the same thing, and wouldn't change the nature of Shopify anyway.
Can I do SEO for my Shopify site on my own?
Yes, you can but you shouldn't. If you are still asking such question, I might not be a right fit to your business. Go Google 'Shopify SEO DIY' or similar instead.
What's your SEO fee for a Shopify site?
It depends on your industry, current status and your expectations. I don't have a fixed rate or monthly fees for any websites.
I have multilingual/multi-regional Shopify sites. Can you help?
Of course, as long as the languages your site has are the ones I'm familiar with.
I will also provide recommendations on the best website/domain structure for your business.
I'm migrating my site to/from Shopify. Can you help?
Yes. SEO migration is another important topic, especially if your domain already has good amount of organic traffic and ranking. You definitely don't want to lose them.
How can we start?
Simply submit the enquiry form from the website, tell me about your business then I will be in touch and give you a full proposal.