Shopify SEO: 10 Step Guide To Fix Common Shopify SEO Issues

Whilst there are many popular CMS platforms (such as WordPress and Magento), none have seen the recent rise in popularity that Shopify has. With this in mind, we thought it would be the ideal time to put together a Shopify SEO checklist of common SEO issues you might come across with your website and how to fix them.

Shopify by default is setup in a way which could cause some serious issues for your SEO if not fixed. You might ask: if it’s not built with SEO in mind, then what’s the point in using Shopify?

Well, what’s drawing a lot of customers to Shopify is the simplicity and speed of setting up an ecommerce store, compared to the likes of WordPress or Magento.

Below you will find some common problems with how Shopify is setup that are usually straightforward to fix with other platforms, and how to resolve them.

When you first setup a Shopify website you will get a default MyShopify domain, which will look something like:

https://your-store-name.myshopify.com

It’s fine to use this, however it’s best to use a custom domain which better represents your website. To do so, Shopify have a useful guide here on how to add a custom domain.

One thing you want to make sure of is that your new custom domain is set as the primary domain and that the default your-store-name.myshopify.com domain is set to redirect to the primary domain. This again can be done in: Settings -> Domains

To check if you have any pages indexed on the default domain, head to Google and type in:

site:your-store-name.myshopify.com

As you can see below, there are a lot of webmasters who have not don’t this and meant their myshopify.com domain is indexed:

By default, Shopify has a strange setup for product URLs, whilst the standard structure is:

/products/product-name

If you access a product from a category page (Shopify calls them collections) the product URL structure looks something like this:

/collections/category-name/products/product-name

The collection version of the product URL does have a canonical tag back to the /products/product-name version, but this is bad for two reasons:

1. Canonicals are only a recommendation as to what search engines should index, so Google could still decide to index the collection versions or even both.
2. All internal links to products are canonicalised URLs which could be a waste of crawl budget.

So, how do we fix it?

You need to edit a specific theme file, located here:

Online Store -> Themes -> Live Theme -> Actions -> Edit Code -> Snippets -> product-grid-item.liquid

If you can’t find this theme file, have a search through the other files related to products within the snippets folder.

Find this bit of code:

href="{{ product.url | within: collection }}"

And update it to:

href="{{ product.url }}"

That’s it! Have a quick scan to make sure there aren’t any other mentions of the same code, but this should do the trick.

This could cause some issues with the breadcrumbs, so make sure that all links within the breadcrumbs are working after this change.

To add a canonical tag to a Shopify page, you first need to access the code for your theme. To do this, log in to your Shopify account and go to the “Themes” section of your admin panel. From there, click on the “Actions” drop-down menu for the theme you want to edit and select “Edit code.”

Once you’re in the code editor, look for the file that corresponds to the page you want to add the canonical tag to. This is usually the “page.liquid” file, but it could also be a specific template file for a particular page, such as “collection.liquid” or “product.liquid”.

In the code for the page, find the section where thetag is located. This is where you will add the canonical tag. The tag should look something like this: . Be sure to replace https://www.example.com/page-name with the actual URL of the page you want to add the canonical tag to.

Once you’ve added the canonical tag, save your changes and refresh the page to see the tag in action. This will help search engines understand which page is the “canonical” or primary version of the page, and will prevent them from indexing duplicate content.

Another potential issue with thin content is blog tag pages. These are very similar to the product tag functionality and usually have a URL structure of:

/blogs/news/tagged/tag-name

Again, these might have already been indexed so to check, head back to Google and type the following:

site:websitename.co.uk inurl:tagged

Following the same fix as the product tag pages, add the following bit of code to the liquid file:

{% if current_tags %}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">
{% endif %}

Shopify also creates some other default pages within the collections section which you have no control over.

/collections – This is a list of all the collections on your website
/collections/all – This is a list of all the products on your website
/collections/new – This is a list of all new products added to your website

These pages have little to no value to users or search engines, so again we can add a bit of code to the theme.liquid file to add a noindex,follow meta robots tag and remove those from Google’s index:

{% if (template contains "collection" and collection.handle == "all") or (template contains "collection" and collection.handle == "new") or (canonical_url == "https://websitename.co.uk/collections") %}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">
{% endif %}

Another common issue with Shopify sites is that Shopify decides to wrap the logo within a H1 tag. This isn’t ideal as you would then have multiple H1 tags on each page.

In most cases, it might just be the homepage that has a H1 around the logo, but it’s worth fixing anyway.

To find the code, you’ll want to go to:

Online Store -> Themes -> Live Theme -> Actions -> Edit Code -> Sections -> header.liquid

And find the following code:

{% if request.page_type == 'index' %}
<h1 class="h2 site-header__logo">
{% else %}
<div class="h2 site-header__logo">
{% endif %}

And also:

{% if request.page_type == 'index' %}
</h1>
{% else %}
</div>
{% endif %}

For both bits of code, replace the h1 with div and finally click save.

It’s important to make sure that your website loads fast, for both usability and ranking purposes. Some things Shopify does well regarding speed are fast hosting (you don’t have to host your own Shopify store), browser caching and using a CDN. These three things are done by default. So, what can you improve?

Up until June 2021 you couldn’t edit the robots.txt file, which for other platforms like WordPress and Magento, is something you have full control over.

You can now add to the default robots.txt file that Shopify uses by going to:

Online Store -> Themes -> Live Theme -> Actions -> Edit Code -> Templates -> Add a new template

Select robots.txt from the dropdown list and click Done:

This will generate a file which looks like:

If for example, you wanted to block search engines from crawling the /collections/all page we discussed previously, you would want to update the code so it looked something like this:

{% for rule in group.rules %}
{{- rule -}}
{% endfor %}
{%- if group.user_agent.value == '*' -%}
{{ 'Disallow: /collections/all*' }}
{%- endif -%}
{%- if group.sitemap != blank -%}
{{ group.sitemap }}
{%- endif -%}

Redirecting broken pages to a more suitable page is great for usability. For other platforms this is easy to do by using a plugin or editing the .htaccess file. Shopify have also made it simple to add redirects. To do so, go to:

Online Store -> Navigation -> View URL redirects

From here you can either add redirects one by one, clicking the Create URL redirect button, or if you have quite a lot to implement, you can import a redirect file using the Import URL redirects button.

If you’re doing a single redirect, simply add the URL you want to redirect and where you want to redirect to:

If you’re importing them in bulk, make sure to download Shopify’s CSV template so that your redirects are in the correct format:

Server logs are a great way of finding out what bots are crawling on your website. This is useful to find pages that aren’t being crawled that often or pages that no longer exist which are being crawled repeatedly. This gives you options for looking at adding redirects or blocks in the robots.txt file.

The bad news, because Shopify hosts everything, there is no way of accessing the server logs for your website.

The good news, you can view a limited amount of how Google crawls your website through Google Search Console.

Once you have Search Console setup and data has been running for a few weeks, you’ll want to navigate to:

Settings -> Crawling -> Crawl Stats

Here you will get access to data for the last 3 months:

You can then look at crawls by response code, file type or even by which Googlebot.

Hopefully this checklist helps you resolve some of the most common Shopify issues, however, there’s much more to Shopify SEO in order to rank highly in search results. If you need help with your businesses Shopify store then get in touch!