Four common SEO issues with Shopify and how to repair 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 organizations, the CMS has a variety of issues that can be bothersome for SEO

Best SEO practices typically use to all CMS platforms, but Shopify has numerous inbuilt functions that can not be customized, indicating some items need more distinct workarounds

Edward Coram-James discusses problems such as limited URL structure and replicate material, supplying suggestions on how to fight Shopify's shortcomings in these areas

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

Similar to any new website, a fresh Shopify shop will need a good deal of effort on the part of its webmaster to develop the needed presence for users to find the site, let alone convert into clients. And similar to any CMS, there are a couple of SEO obstacles that keep owners will need to clear to guarantee that their site finds its audience efficiently. A few of these difficulties are more deep-rooted than others, so we have actually broken down 4 of the most typical SEO problems on Shopify and how you can repair them for your webstore.

1. Limited URL structure

In much the same manner in which WordPress divides content in between posts and pages, Shopify's CMS allows you to divide your product listings into two primary categories-- products and collections-- alongside more basic posts, pages, and blog sites. Producing a new item on Shopify permits you to note the specific items you have for sale, while collections give you the chances to bring your diverse products together and arrange them into easily-searched classifications.

The problem many people have with this imposed system of arranging content is that Shopify also implements a predetermined hierarchical structure with restricted personalization alternatives. The subfolders/ product and/ collection should be included in the URL of every brand-new product or collection you upload.

Regardless of it being a huge bone of contention with its users, Shopify has yet to address this and there is no service currently. As a result, you will need to be very mindful with the URLs slug (the only part that can be personalized). Ensure you are using the right keywords in the slug and categorize your posts smartly to provide your products the best chance of being found.

2. Immediately created duplicate material

Another aggravating concern users have with classifying their material as a product or collection occurs when they include a particular product into a collection. This is because, although there will already be a URL in place for the product page, connecting an item to a collection automatically produces an extra URL for it within that collection. Shopify immediately treats the collection URL as the canonical one for internal links, instead of the item one, which can make things very challenging when it comes to guaranteeing that the ideal pages are indexed.

In this circumstances, nevertheless, Shopify has allowed for fixes, though it does involve editing code in the back end of your store's theme. Following these directions will advise your Shopify site's collections pages to internally link only to the canonical/ item/ URLs.

3. No routing slash redirect

Another of Shopify's duplicate content concerns relates to the routing slash, which is essentially a '/' at the end of the URL used to mark a directory. By default, Shopify instantly ends URLs without a routing slash, however variations of the same URL with a trailing slash are accessible to both users and search engines.

Shopify rather advises that webmasters utilize canonical tags to inform Google which version of each page is preferred for indexing. As the only repair available so far, it will have to do, however it's far from perfect and frequently results in 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 duplicate variations of pages against their will, Shopify also avoids web designers from being able to make manual edits to their shop's robots.txt file. Apparently, Shopify sees this as a perk, looking after the pesky technical SEO problems in your place. However, gold coast seo when items head 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 edit the theme of your shop, incorporating meta robotics tags into the area of each relevant page. Shopify has developed a detailed guide on how to conceal redundant pages from search here.