Four typical SEO issues with Shopify and how to fix them

Four common SEO issues with Shopify and how to repair them

30-second summary:

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

Finest SEO practices typically apply to all CMS platforms, but Shopify has numerous in-built functions that can not be tailored, suggesting some items need more unique workarounds

Edward Coram-James goes over problems such as limited URL structure and replicate content, supplying advice on how to combat 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 user friendly CMS has actually made it particularly useful for smaller sized merchants during the pandemic, allowing them to claw back around 94% of what would have otherwise been lost sales.

Similar to any new site, a fresh Shopify store will require a great deal of effort on the part of its web designer to establish the essential exposure for users to discover the website, let alone transform into customers. And similar to any CMS, there are a couple of SEO obstacles that save owners will need to clear to ensure that their site finds its audience effectively. A few of these hurdles are more deep-rooted than others, so we've broken down four of the most typical SEO issues on Shopify and how you can fix them for your webstore.

1. Limited URL structure

In similar way that WordPress splits material between posts and pages, Shopify's CMS permits you to divide your product listings into 2 main classifications-- items and collections-- alongside more basic posts, pages, and blogs. Developing a new item on Shopify enables you to note the individual items you have for sale, while collections give you the opportunities to bring your disparate items together and arrange them into easily-searched classifications.

The issue most people have with this enforced system of arranging material is that Shopify also implements a fixed hierarchical structure with minimal customization choices. The subfolders/ item and/ collection needs to be included in the URL of every brand-new product or collection you upload.

Regardless of it being a huge bone of contention with its users, Shopify has yet to address this and there is no solution currently. As a result, you will need to be incredibly cautious with the URLs slug (the only part that can be personalized). Ensure you are utilizing the ideal keywords in the slug and categorize your posts sensibly to offer your products the very best opportunity of being discovered.

2. Automatically generated duplicate material

Another aggravating concern users have with classifying their content as a product or collection happens when they include a particular product into a collection. This is because, although there will currently be a URL in place for the product page, connecting a product to a collection Great site instantly develops an extra URL for it within that collection. Shopify immediately deals with the collection URL as the canonical one for internal links, instead of the product one, which can make things extremely tough when it concerns making sure that the right pages are indexed.

In this instance, nevertheless, Shopify has allowed for repairs, though it does involve editing code in the back end of your shop's theme. Following these guidelines will instruct your Shopify website's collections pages to internally link just to the canonical/ product/ URLs.

3. No tracking slash redirect

Another of Shopify's replicate content problems connects to the trailing slash, which is generally a '/' at the end of the URL used to mark a directory. Google deals with 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 tracking slash are available to both users and search engines. This can normally be prevented by implementing a site-wide routing slash redirect via the site's htaccess file, but Shopify does not enable access to the htaccess file

Shopify instead advises that webmasters use canonical tags to notify Google which version of each page is preferred for indexing. As the only repair available so far, it will need to do, however it's far from perfect 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 requiring users to create replicate variations of pages versus their will, Shopify also avoids web designers from having the ability to make manual edits to their shop's robots.txt file. Obviously, Shopify sees this as a perk, taking care of the pesky technical SEO problems on your behalf. When products go out of stock or collections get pulled, you can neither noindex nor nofollow the redundant pages left behind.

In this instance, you are able to edit the theme of your shop, incorporating meta robotics tags into the section of each relevant page. Shopify has actually developed a detailed guide on how to hide redundant pages from search here.