4 typical SEO problems with Shopify and how to repair them

4 common SEO problems with Shopify and how to fix them

30-second summary:

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

Best SEO practices typically apply to all CMS platforms, however Shopify has several inbuilt functions that can not be customized, indicating some products need more unique workarounds

Edward Coram-James talks about issues such as restricted URL structure and duplicate material, offering 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 companies to sell their stock online. Its easy-to-use CMS has made it especially beneficial for smaller sized retailers during the pandemic, permitting them to claw back around 94% of what would have otherwise been lost sales.

Just like any brand-new website, a fresh Shopify shop will need a great deal of effort on the part of its webmaster to develop the required visibility for users to discover the website, let alone transform into customers. And just like any CMS, there are a couple of SEO obstacles that save owners will require to clear to make sure that their website discovers its audience effectively. A few of these obstacles are more deep-rooted than others, so we've broken down four 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 splits material between posts and pages, Shopify's CMS allows you to divide your item listings into 2 primary classifications-- items and collections-- along with more basic posts, pages, and blogs. Developing a brand-new product on Shopify permits you to note the individual items you have for sale, while collections give you the chances to bring your disparate products together and sort them into easily-searched classifications.

The issue the majority of people have actually with this enforced system of arranging content is that Shopify likewise imposes a fixed hierarchical structure with restricted modification alternatives. The subfolders/ product and/ collection should be included in the URL of every brand-new product or collection you submit.

Despite it being a big bone of contention with gold coast seo company its users, Shopify has yet to resolve this and there is no service currently. As an outcome, you will need to be very cautious with the URLs slug (the only part that can be customized). Ensure you are utilizing the ideal keywords in the slug and categorize your posts smartly to give your products the best opportunity of being found.

2. Automatically produced replicate content

Another frustrating problem users have with categorizing their material as an item or collection occurs when they add a specific item into a collection. This is because, although there will already be a URL in place for the item page, linking an item to a collection instantly produces an additional URL for it within that collection. Shopify immediately deals with the collection URL as the canonical one for internal links, rather than the product one, which can make things very difficult when it pertains to ensuring that the best pages are indexed.

In this instance, however, Shopify has actually enabled fixes, though it does involve editing code in the back end of your store's theme. Following these instructions will advise your Shopify site's collections pages to internally connect just to the canonical/ item/ URLs.

3. No tracking slash redirect

Another of Shopify's duplicate content issues relates to the trailing 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 distinct pages. By default, Shopify immediately ends URLs without a trailing slash, but variations of the very same URL with a tracking slash are available to both users and search engines. This can typically be prevented by enforcing 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 inform Google which variation of each page is chosen for indexing. As the only repair available up until now, it will need to do, but it's far from perfect and often causes data attribution problems in Google Analytics and other tracking software.

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

Beyond the CMS requiring users to develop replicate versions of pages against their will, Shopify likewise prevents web designers from being able to make manual edits to their store's robots.txt file. Apparently, Shopify sees this as a perk, looking after the pesky technical SEO issues 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 are able to modify the style of your shop, including meta robotics tags into the area of each appropriate page. Shopify has actually created a detailed guide on how to hide redundant pages from search here.