Four common SEO issues with Shopify and how to fix them

Four typical SEO problems with Shopify and how to fix them

30-second summary:

While Shopify is among the most popular platforms for ecommerce companies, the CMS has a number of concerns that can be problematic for SEO

Best SEO practices typically apply to all CMS platforms, but Shopify has a number of inbuilt features that can not be customized, indicating some items need more special workarounds

Edward Coram-James discusses issues such as restricted URL structure and replicate content, supplying recommendations on how to combat Shopify's drawbacks in these locations

Shopify is the most widely-used ecommerce platform, making it easier than ever prior to for organizations to sell their stock online. Its easy-to-use CMS has actually made it especially useful for smaller sized retailers throughout the pandemic, enabling them to claw back around 94% of what would have otherwise been lost sales.

As with any brand-new site, a fresh Shopify shop will need a great deal of effort on the part of its webmaster to establish the needed visibility for users to find the site, not to mention convert into clients. And similar to any CMS, there are a couple of SEO difficulties that save owners will need to clear to guarantee that their site discovers its audience effectively. A few of these hurdles are more deep-rooted than others, so we have actually broken down four of the most common SEO issues on Shopify and how you can fix them for your webstore.

1. Restricted URL structure

In much the same manner in which WordPress divides material in between posts and pages, Shopify's CMS permits you to divide your item listings into 2 main categories-- products and collections-- together with more general posts, pages, and blogs. Developing a new item on Shopify allows you to list the specific products you have for sale, while collections give you the opportunities to bring your disparate products together and sort them into easily-searched classifications.

The issue many people have with this enforced system of organizing content is that Shopify also imposes a fixed hierarchical structure with minimal modification options. The subfolders/ item and/ collection must be included in the URL of every new item or collection you upload.

In spite of it being a huge bone of contention with its users, Shopify has yet to address this and there is no service presently. As a result, you will need to be very mindful with the URLs slug (the only part that can be personalized). Guarantee you are using the best keywords in the slug and classify your posts sensibly to give your products the best chance of being found.

2. Instantly created replicate material

Another aggravating issue users have with classifying their material as an item or collection happens when they include a particular item into a collection. This is because, although there will already be a URL in location for the item page, connecting a product to a collection immediately produces an additional URL for it within that collection. Shopify automatically treats the collection URL as the canonical one for internal links, rather than the item one, which can make things exceptionally tough when it pertains to ensuring that the best pages are indexed.

In this instance, nevertheless, Shopify has enabled repairs, though it does include modifying code in the back end of your store's theme. Following these directions will advise your Shopify site's collections pages to internally connect only to the canonical/ product/ URLs.

3. No routing slash redirect

Another of Shopify's duplicate content concerns connects to the routing slash, which is basically a '/' at the end of the URL used to mark a directory. Google deals with URLs with and without a routing slash as unique pages. By default, Shopify automatically ends URLs without a routing slash, but variations of the exact same URL with a trailing slash are accessible to both users and online search engine. This can usually be avoided by enforcing a site-wide routing slash redirect by means of the website's htaccess file, however Shopify does not enable access to the htaccess file

Shopify rather suggests that webmasters use canonical tags to notify Google which version of each page is chosen for indexing. As the only fix available up until now, it will have to do, however it's far from ideal and frequently causes information attribution issues in Google Analytics and other tracking software application.

4. No control over the site's robots.txt file.

Beyond the CMS forcing users to produce replicate versions of pages against their will, Shopify also avoids webmasters from being able to make manual edits to https://cruzyqdw.bloggersdelight.dk/2024/02/19/what-is-link-building-2/ their store's robots.txt file. Apparently, Shopify sees this as a perk, taking care of the pesky technical SEO concerns in your place. When products go out of stock or collections get pulled, you can neither noindex nor nofollow the redundant pages left behind.

In this circumstances, you have the ability to modify the theme of your shop, incorporating meta robots tags into the area of each appropriate page. Shopify has developed a step-by-step guide on how to hide redundant pages from search here.