4 typical SEO problems with Shopify and how to fix them

4 typical SEO problems with Shopify and how to fix them

30-second summary:

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

Best SEO practices normally use to all CMS platforms, but Shopify has numerous in-built functions that can not be personalized, implying some items need more unique workarounds

Edward Coram-James talks about concerns such as restricted URL structure and replicate material, offering guidance on how to combat Shopify's drawbacks in these areas

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

Similar to any brand-new website, a fresh Shopify store will need a lot of effort on the part of its webmaster to develop the essential exposure for users to discover the website, let alone convert into customers. And similar to any CMS, there are a couple of SEO difficulties that save owners will need to clear to ensure that their site finds its audience efficiently. Some of these obstacles are more deep-rooted than others, so we've broken down 4 of the most common SEO problems on Shopify and how you can fix them for your webstore.

1. Restricted URL structure

In similar manner in which WordPress splits content between posts and pages, Shopify's CMS enables you to divide your item listings into two main classifications-- products and collections-- together with more general posts, pages, and blog sites. Creating a brand-new product on Shopify enables you to list the specific items you have for sale, while collections give you the chances to bring your disparate products together and arrange them into easily-searched classifications.

The issue the majority of people have with this imposed system of organizing content is that Shopify likewise implements a fixed hierarchical structure with restricted customization choices. The subfolders/ item and/ collection must be included in the URL of every new product or collection you publish.

Despite it being a big bone of contention with its users, Shopify has yet to address this and there is no service presently. As a result, you will require to be extremely cautious with the URLs slug (the only part that can be tailored). Ensure you are utilizing the ideal keywords in the slug and categorize your posts sensibly to offer your items the best opportunity of being discovered.

2. Automatically produced duplicate material

Another frustrating issue users gold coast seo company have with classifying their content as an item or collection occurs when they add a particular item into a collection. This is because, although there will currently be a URL in place for the item page, connecting a product to a collection automatically develops an additional URL for it within that collection. Shopify automatically treats the collection URL as the canonical one for internal links, rather than the product one, which can make things incredibly difficult when it pertains to making sure that the best pages are indexed.

In this instance, however, Shopify has actually allowed for fixes, 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 just to the canonical/ item/ URLs.

3. No trailing slash redirect

Another of Shopify's duplicate 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 distinct pages. By default, Shopify instantly ends URLs without a trailing slash, however variations of the very same URL with a trailing slash are available to both users and online search engine. This can normally be avoided by imposing a site-wide routing slash redirect by means of the site's htaccess file, however Shopify does not enable access to the htaccess file

Shopify rather suggests that web designers utilize canonical tags to notify Google which variation of each page is chosen for indexing. As the only fix readily available so far, it will have to do, but it's far from perfect and typically results in information attribution concerns in Google Analytics and other tracking software.

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

Beyond the CMS forcing users to create duplicate versions of pages against their will, Shopify also avoids webmasters from being able 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 items 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 style of your store, incorporating meta robots tags into the area of each appropriate page. Shopify has actually produced a detailed guide on how to conceal redundant pages from search here.