4 common SEO problems with Shopify and how to fix them

4 common SEO problems with Shopify and how to repair them

30-second summary:

While Shopify is one of the most popular platforms for ecommerce businesses, the CMS has a variety of concerns that can be bothersome for SEO

Finest SEO practices typically use to all CMS platforms, but Shopify has a number of inbuilt functions that can not be customized, implying some products need more distinct workarounds

Edward Coram-James goes over issues such as limited URL structure and duplicate material, providing suggestions on how to combat Shopify's imperfections in these locations

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

Just like any new website, a fresh Shopify shop will require a great deal of effort on the part of its webmaster to establish the required presence for users to find the website, let alone convert into customers. And just like any CMS, there are a couple of SEO difficulties that save owners will need to clear to ensure that their site finds its audience effectively. Some 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. Restricted URL structure

In much the same way that WordPress divides material between posts and pages, Shopify's CMS enables you to divide your product listings into 2 primary classifications-- products and collections-- alongside more general posts, pages, and blog sites. Developing a brand-new product on Shopify permits you to list the specific products you have for sale, while collections provide you the chances to bring your diverse products together and sort them into easily-searched classifications.

The issue most people have actually with this imposed system of organizing content is that Shopify likewise enforces an established hierarchical structure with restricted modification alternatives. The subfolders/ product and/ collection needs to be consisted of in the URL of every brand-new item or collection you submit.

Regardless of it being a huge bone of contention with its users, Shopify has yet to address this and there is no option presently. As a result, you will need to be extremely careful with the URLs slug (the only part that can be tailored). Guarantee you are using the right keywords in the slug and categorize your posts sensibly to offer your items the best opportunity of being discovered.

2. Automatically created replicate content

Another aggravating concern users have with categorizing their material as an item or collection occurs when they add a specific 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 automatically creates an additional URL for it within that collection. Shopify instantly deals with gold coast business websites the collection URL as the canonical one for internal links, instead of the product one, which can make things extremely difficult when it concerns ensuring that the right pages are indexed.

In this circumstances, however, Shopify has permitted fixes, though it does include modifying code in the back end of your shop's style. Following these instructions will advise your Shopify site's collections pages to internally link just to the canonical/ product/ URLs.

3. No tracking slash redirect

Another of Shopify's replicate content problems relates to the tracking slash, which is essentially a '/' at the end of the URL utilized to mark a directory site. Google treats URLs with and without a tracking slash as distinct pages. By default, Shopify immediately ends URLs without a trailing slash, however variations of the exact same URL with a tracking slash are accessible to both users and search engines. This can usually be avoided by imposing a site-wide trailing slash redirect by means of the website's htaccess file, however Shopify does not enable access to the htaccess file

Shopify instead recommends that webmasters utilize canonical tags to notify Google which version of each page is chosen for indexing. As the only fix offered so far, it will have to do, but it's far from ideal and often leads to data 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 develop replicate versions of pages against their will, Shopify likewise avoids webmasters from having the ability to make manual edits to their store's robots.txt file. Obviously, Shopify sees this as a perk, taking care of the pesky technical SEO concerns in your place. But, when products 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 theme of your store, including meta robots tags into the section of each pertinent page. Shopify has actually created a detailed guide on how to hide redundant pages from search here.