4 common SEO problems with Shopify and how to fix them

Four common SEO problems with Shopify and how to fix them

30-second summary:

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

Best SEO practices usually use to all CMS platforms, however Shopify has a number of inbuilt features that can not be tailored, implying some items need more unique workarounds

Edward Coram-James talks about issues such as restricted URL structure and duplicate content, providing advice on how to combat Shopify's shortcomings in these locations

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

Similar to any brand-new site, a fresh Shopify store will require a good deal of effort on the part of its webmaster to establish the needed presence for users to find the site, let alone convert into consumers. And similar to any CMS, there are a few SEO obstacles that save owners will need to clear to make sure that their website finds its audience effectively. A few of these obstacles are more deep-rooted than others, so we've broken down four of the most typical SEO problems on Shopify and how you can repair them for your webstore.

1. Limited URL structure

In similar way that WordPress divides content in between posts and pages, Shopify's CMS enables you to divide your item listings into two main classifications-- products and collections-- along with more general posts, pages, and blog sites. Producing a new product on Shopify permits you to list the private products you have for sale, while collections provide you the chances to bring your diverse items together and arrange them into easily-searched categories.

The issue many people have actually with this imposed system of organizing content is that Shopify likewise imposes a fixed hierarchical structure with minimal customization choices. The subfolders/ product and/ collection must be included in the URL of every brand-new item or collection you upload.

In spite of it being a substantial bone of contention with its users, Shopify has yet to resolve this and there is no service presently. As a result, you will need to be very careful with the URLs slug (the only part that can be tailored). Guarantee you are using the best keywords in the slug and classify your posts sensibly to provide your products the best opportunity of being discovered.

2. Instantly generated duplicate content

Another aggravating issue users have with categorizing their content as a product or collection takes place when they add a specific product into a collection. This is because, although there will already be a URL in location for the item page, connecting a product to a collection instantly produces an additional URL for it within that collection. Shopify immediately treats the collection URL as the canonical one for internal links, rather than the item one, which can make things extremely difficult when it comes to making sure that the right pages are indexed.

In this instance, nevertheless, Shopify has actually enabled repairs, though it does include editing code in the back end of your shop's style. Following these instructions will instruct your Shopify site's collections pages to internally link just to the canonical/ product/ URLs.

3. No routing slash redirect

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

Shopify rather suggests that web designers use canonical tags to notify Google which version of each page is preferred for indexing. As the only repair available up until now, it will have to do, but it's far from ideal and often results in data attribution problems in Google Analytics and other tracking software application.

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

Beyond the CMS forcing users to develop replicate variations of pages against their will, Shopify also prevents web designers from being able to Gold Coast SEO Expert make manual edits to their shop's robots.txt file. Obviously, Shopify sees this as a perk, taking care of the pesky technical SEO concerns in your place. When items go out of stock or collections get pulled, you can neither noindex nor nofollow the redundant pages left behind.

In this instance, you have the ability to modify the theme of your shop, including meta robots tags into the section of each relevant page. Shopify has produced a detailed guide on how to conceal redundant pages from search here.