Shopify is the most popular eCommerce platform, making it easier than ever for companies to sell their products online. The simple CMS is especially helpful for smaller businesses amid the pandemic, helping them to recoup about 94% of revenues that would have been lost otherwise.
Like any CMS, business owners must overcome a few SEO barriers to guarantee that their website effectively reaches its target audience.
Some of these roadblocks are more entrenched than others, so this article has outlined four of the most frequent Shopify SEO issues, how to address them for your online business, and where to find an SEO expert in Perth.
Automatically Created Duplicate Content
When users define their material as a product or collection, they run into another annoyance when they want to add a specific product to a collection. Although the product page will already have a URL, connecting a product to a collection produces a new URL within that collection.
When it comes to internal links, Shopify uses the collection URL rather than the product URL as the canonical one, making things exceedingly tough to ensure that the proper pages are indexed.
On the other hand, Shopify has allowed for solutions; in this case, however, they do require modifying code in the back end of your store’s theme. Following these procedures, the collections pages on your Shopify site will only refer to the canonical /product/ URLs.
No Control Over the robots.txt File On the Website
Shopify also inhibits web admins from manually editing their store’s robots.txt file, in addition to requiring users to produce duplicate copies of sites against their will.
Shopify appears to view this as a benefit, taking care of the bothersome technical SEO concerns on your behalf. However, you can’t noindex or nofollow the redundant pages left behind when goods go out of stock or collections are withdrawn.
In this case, you may modify your store’s theme by inserting meta robots tags into the head> part of each relevant page.
No Redirect With A Trailing Slash
Another of Shopify’s duplicate content concerns is the trailing slash, essentially a ‘/’ at the end of the URL used to denote a directory.
URLs with and without the following slash are treated as separate pages by Google.
By default, Shopify terminates URLs without the following slash. However, users and search engines can access versions of the same URL with a trailing slash.
Normally, this may be prevented by using the website’s htaccess file to enforce a site-wide trailing slash redirect; however, Shopify does not allow access to the htaccess file.
SEO for Shopify should instead utilize canonical tags to tell Google which page version is favoured for indexing. It’ll have to do for now because it’s the only solution available, but it’s far from ideal and frequently causes data attribution difficulties in Google Analytics and other monitoring tools.
Restricted URL Structure
Shopify’s CMS allows you to arrange your product listings into two primary categories — products and collections—as well as more general articles, pages, and blogs, similar to how WordPress divides material into posts and pages.
On Shopify, creating a new product allows you to display the individual things you have for sale. In contrast, collections allow you to group your products and arrange them into readily searchable categories.
Most individuals have a problem with Shopify’s imposed content organization system since it imposes a preset hierarchical structure with few modification possibilities. Every new product or collection you submit must contain the URL’s subfolders /product and /collection.
Although it is a major source of dissatisfaction among Shopify users, the company has yet to address the issue, and there is presently no solution. As a result, the URL slug must be used with extreme caution (the only part that can be customized). To offer your items the best chance of getting found, make sure you include the relevant keywords in the slug and properly classify your postings.
Shopify SEO: frequently asked questions
Does Shopify create duplicate content automatically?
Yes. Shopify often generates more than one URL for the same product when it sits in several collections, and it creates separate pages for product variants. Set a canonical tag pointing to the main product URL so Google knows which version to rank.
Can you edit the robots.txt file on Shopify?
You can now edit robots.txt.liquid on Shopify, though it is limited. For most stores the defaults are fine, so only change it if you have a specific crawling issue, and test carefully so you do not block pages you want indexed.
How do you fix the trailing-slash duplicate issue on Shopify?
Shopify can serve some URLs both with and without a trailing slash, which looks like duplicate content. Pick one version, keep your internal links consistent with it, and use canonical tags to consolidate the signals.
Is Shopify good for SEO?
Shopify can rank well. Its URL structure is more rigid than WordPress and a few quirks need managing, but with clean canonicals, fast product pages, genuinely useful content and solid internal linking, Shopify stores compete just fine in search.
Struggling with Shopify SEO?
If your Shopify store is not pulling the traffic it should, we can help. The SEO Room works with e-commerce businesses across Perth and Australia to fix the technical issues above, sharpen product-page content, and turn browsers into buyers, with no lock-in contracts. See how we approach SEO.
Conclusion
Like any new website, a new Shopify store would necessitate a significant amount of effort on the part of SEO strategies for Shopify to generate the required exposure for consumers to locate the site, much alone convert into customers.
At The SEO Room (an SEO Agency in Perth), we combine conventional and digital marketing best practices such as SEO strategies for Shopify to ensure that your initiatives are as successful as possible. Accelerate your brand’s growth by working with us!
