4 typical SEO issues with Shopify and how to fix them

4 typical SEO issues with Shopify and how to repair them

30-second summary:

While Shopify is one of the most popular platforms for ecommerce businesses, the CMS has a number of concerns that can be troublesome for SEO

Finest SEO practices typically use to all CMS platforms, but Shopify has several in-built features that can not be tailored, implying some items need more unique workarounds

Edward Coram-James discusses issues such as limited URL structure and replicate content, offering suggestions on how to fight Shopify's drawbacks in these locations

Shopify is the most widely-used ecommerce platform, making it much easier than ever prior to for businesses to offer their stock online. Its easy-to-use CMS has actually made it especially advantageous for smaller merchants throughout the pandemic, permitting them to claw back around 94% of what would have otherwise been lost sales.

Similar to any new site, a fresh Shopify shop will need a great deal of effort on the part of its webmaster to develop the needed visibility for users to find the website, let alone transform into clients. And just like any CMS, there are a few SEO hurdles that save owners will require to clear to ensure that their site finds its audience efficiently. Some of these difficulties are more deep-rooted than others, so we have actually broken down 4 of the most common SEO problems on Shopify and how you can repair them for your webstore.

1. Restricted URL structure

In similar way that WordPress divides material in between posts and pages, Shopify's CMS allows you to divide your product listings into 2 primary classifications-- products and collections-- alongside more basic posts, pages, and blog sites. Developing a new item on Shopify allows you to list the specific items you have for sale, while collections offer you the opportunities to bring your disparate items together and sort them into easily-searched classifications.

The problem many people have actually with this enforced system of arranging material is that Shopify also enforces a fixed hierarchical structure with limited customization alternatives. The subfolders/ item and/ collection needs to be consisted of in the URL of every brand-new product or collection you submit.

Despite it being a big bone of contention with its users, Shopify has yet to resolve this and there is no service presently. As an outcome, you will need to be extremely mindful with the URLs slug (the only part that can be personalized). Guarantee you are using the best keywords in the slug and categorize your posts sensibly to give your products the best possibility of being found.

2. Automatically created replicate material

Another aggravating issue users have with classifying their content as a product or collection happens when they add a particular product into a collection. This is because, although there will currently be a URL in place for the item page, linking an item to a collection immediately creates an additional URL for it within that collection. Shopify automatically deals with the collection URL as the canonical one for internal links, rather than the product one, which can make things very tough when it comes to making sure that the ideal pages are indexed.

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

3. No tracking slash redirect

Another of Shopify's duplicate content issues connects to the routing slash, which is generally a '/' at the end of the URL used to mark a directory site. Google treats URLs with and without a trailing slash as special pages. By default, Shopify immediately ends URLs without a routing slash, however variations of the same URL with a trailing slash are accessible to both users and online search engine. This can typically be prevented by enforcing a site-wide routing slash redirect through the site's htaccess file, but Shopify does not allow access to the htaccess file

Shopify instead recommends that webmasters utilize canonical tags to notify Google which version of each page is preferred for indexing. As the only repair offered so far, it will have to do, however it's far from perfect and typically causes data attribution concerns seo company gold coast in Google Analytics and other tracking software.

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

Beyond the CMS forcing users to produce replicate variations of pages versus their will, Shopify also avoids webmasters from being able to make manual edits to their shop's robots.txt file. Apparently, Shopify sees this as a perk, taking care of the pesky technical SEO issues on your behalf. However, when items go out of stock or collections get pulled, you can neither noindex nor nofollow the redundant pages left.

In this instance, you have the ability to modify the style of your store, including meta robotics tags into the area of each relevant page. Shopify has developed a step-by-step guide on how to hide redundant pages from search here.