#what is the difference between a default and a canonical redirect

[monochromatictoad]

📝,👯‍♀️,💞,👀 for any :3

I hope you don't mind me doing this for Buttons 👉👈

📝: How would your story in canon go? How would you influence the events of the original story?

So, Buttons wouldn't actually influence too much over the story. I'm constantly back and forth on whether or not the others learn or even know of Buttons' existence. I feel like, AM would be very cautious about letting anyone else around his Buttons. So if they got close to wherever it wandered off at, AM would simply redirect them, or just straight up punish them for being so close to his most precious thing.

The ending still plays out the same, with Gorrister, Nimdok, Benny, and Ellen dying, but when Ted becomes a slug creature, that's when AM finally introduces Buttons to him. Mind you, Buttons has completely lost its mind and previous identity to AM, but Ted still believes he hasn't.

In the Game, Buttons would be a secret character, who doesn't speak, but if you find the hidden documents in every character's level, you can piece together its story. Each character would have a slightly different speech at the end of the Bad Endings, where they talk alittle about Buttons, and then you get taken to a secret level where you play as Buttons, where it unleashes AM and becomes Buttons. In the good endings, the characters would talk about Buttons, and about trying to figure out how to bring its previous humanity back. There is a secret level behind this one too, where you play as Buttons meeting AM for the first time.

No matter, you can never change its outcome.

👯: What canon character are you most similar to?

It's hard to say, because the Comic, Radio Drama, Game, and Story all portray the characters differently, with the Game being the biggest difference. However, I relate more to AM than anyone else in the story, but Buttons isn't like anyone known in the story, having been an American scientist before getting taken by AM, where it becomes the Buttons that Ted meets at the end.

💞: Aside from with your f/o, who else would you commonly be shipped with? Why?

Probably either Ellen or Ted. It just depends on the continuity, but also, because Buttons previous gender is unknown, it would be more like a default Yuri or Yaoi, with very little in-between. If its the game continuity, it would be Ellen they ship it with, given they elaborate more on her story, and people would be fully into the "She deserves better than any of the men around her 😠", before trying to force a feminine design for Buttons and then try to cancel people who interpret Buttons in other ways. Other continuities, would be Ted, purely just to make a yaoi ship that isn't with AM.

👀: How does your ship with your f/o influence both of your characterisations and the world? Would there be any interesting metas written about your dynamic?

Yes. Buttons is in the heart of AM, and AM alters the perception of the other five to prevent them from finding it. However, AM is still AM at the end of the day, and is still a bastard, even towards Buttons. Buttons just doesn't have the understanding that AM is actually awful, seeing AM as a good being and its partner. It only thinks that AM is protecting it, but it also doesn't have the memory of humanity before hand.

I think there definitely could be, but I think there would also be people who don't fully understand the dynamic, thinking that AM is actually protecting Buttons, but in reality, AM is possessive. He doesn't let the others know of Buttons, because he doesn't want them touching, looking, or even sharing the same breath as it. Buttons is his and he does not share.

However, I think that some people could see that in a weird way, AM does love Buttons, but isn't programmed to love. That's kinda the point of his character. He can't love like a human, thus being angry and resentful, and destroying the world in the first place.

[rapidurlindexer-com]

Master SEO Indexing: The Complete Guide to Better Search Visibility

If you want your website to be found online, you need to understand SEO indexing. It's the foundation of search visibility - without it, even the most well-optimized content remains invisible to search engines and potential visitors.

Rapid URL Indexer has created a comprehensive guide to help you master this critical aspect of SEO, covering everything from basic concepts to advanced techniques.

What Is SEO Indexing?

SEO indexing is the process by which search engines add web pages to their database. This is distinct from crawling:

Crawling: Search engine bots visit web pages, following links and gathering information.

Indexing: The search engine decides to store and organize that information in its database.

A page must be indexed before it can rank for any search query. No indexing = no visibility in search results.

Why Indexing Matters for Your Website

Indexing directly impacts your site's ability to attract organic traffic. If your website has 1,000 pages but only 500 are indexed, you're missing out on potential visibility for half of your content.

Key components that influence indexation include:

Crawlability: Can search engines access your content?

Content quality: Is your content worth indexing?

Technical optimization: Is your site properly structured for search engines?

Site architecture: Can search engines easily navigate your website?

Best Practices for Better Indexation

Implementing these strategies can significantly improve your website's indexation:

Optimize Your Website Structure

A well-structured website makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your content efficiently:

Create a clear hierarchy with important pages closer to the homepage

Use descriptive URLs that clearly describe the content

Implement logical internal linking between related pages

Minimize the number of clicks required to reach any page

Leverage XML Sitemaps

XML sitemaps serve as a roadmap for search engines, helping them discover and crawl your content more efficiently:

Include all important pages you want indexed

Update your sitemap when adding new content

Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console

Consider creating separate sitemaps for different content types

Use Internal Links Strategically

Internal links create pathways for search engine crawlers to follow:

Link between related pages on your site

Use descriptive anchor text to provide context

Ensure important pages receive multiple internal links

Create a logical site structure through linking

Implement Proper Meta Robots Tags

Meta robots tags provide direct instructions to search engine crawlers:

Use "index, follow" for important pages (this is the default)

Apply "noindex, follow" to low-value pages you don't want in search results

Be careful with "nofollow" directives as they can impact link equity flow

Common Indexing Issues and Solutions

Many websites struggle with these common indexing problems:

Identifying Indexing Problems

You can identify indexing issues by:

Using Google Search Console's Index Coverage report

Performing site: searches in Google

Comparing your sitemap URLs with indexed pages

Monitoring organic search traffic for unexpected drops

Fixing Duplicate Content

Duplicate content confuses search engines and can lead to indexation issues:

Implement canonical tags to indicate the preferred version

Use 301 redirects for truly duplicate pages

Consolidate similar content into comprehensive resources

Handle URL parameters properly to avoid duplication

Addressing Technical Barriers

Technical issues can prevent proper indexation:

Ensure robots.txt isn't blocking important content

Fix server errors and broken links

Improve page load speed

Make sure your site is mobile-friendly

Mobile-First Indexing Optimization

With Google's mobile-first indexing approach, mobile optimization is crucial:

Ensure content parity between mobile and desktop versions

Optimize images and media for mobile devices

Use responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes

Test your site's mobile-friendliness regularly

Advanced Indexing Techniques

For larger or more complex websites, these advanced strategies can improve indexation:

Managing Index Bloat

Index bloat occurs when too many low-value pages get indexed:

Use noindex tags for tag pages, search results, and other auto-generated content

Implement proper canonicalization for similar pages

Regularly audit indexed pages and remove unnecessary ones

Handling Large-Scale Websites

Large websites require special attention for efficient indexation:

Prioritize your most important pages

Create a logical site structure with clear hierarchies

Break XML sitemaps into smaller, categorized files

Use log file analysis to understand crawl patterns

Accelerating Indexation

When you need faster indexation for important pages:

Use Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool

Share new content on social media to increase discovery

Implement a strong internal linking strategy

Consider using specialized tools like Rapid URL Indexer

How Rapid URL Indexer Enhances SEO Indexing

Rapid URL Indexer offers several advantages for websites struggling with indexation:

Get URLs indexed much faster than waiting for natural crawling

Index URLs without requiring Google Search Console access

Only pay for successfully indexed URLs with 100% credit refunds for failures

Track indexation progress with detailed reports and charts

This service is particularly beneficial for:

New websites struggling to get indexed

E-commerce sites with frequently changing product pages

News and media sites publishing time-sensitive content

Websites recovering from indexing issues or penalties

The Connection Between Indexing and Ranking

While indexing is essential, it's just the first step in the journey to search visibility:

Indexing makes a page eligible to appear in search results

Ranking determines where that page appears for specific queries

A page must be indexed to rank, but being indexed doesn't guarantee ranking

Newly indexed pages may take time to achieve stable rankings

By mastering SEO indexing and implementing the strategies outlined in this guide, you can ensure your content has the opportunity to rank for relevant searches and attract organic traffic to your website.

https://rapidurlindexer.com/seo-indexing/

[elanorpam]

i’m so bored at work rn i’m reading grav’s entire documentation in order

[theexistentialeasel]

The Cut, The Tear, and The Remix: Re-imagining Spaces for Art in a Covid Struck World

Week 2 | July 14th, 2021

In an exhibition entitled the cut, the tear, and the remix: contemporary collage and black futures presented by the McMaster Museum of Art and the Nia Center for the Arts's virtual exhibition the white cube is dematerialized to create a space for Black artists of the diaspora envisioning an Afrofuture.

The exhibition, curated by Stylo Starr during her curatorial internship with the McMaster Museum of Art, features eight Canadian artists of the African and Caribbean diaspora. Their works, each grounded in a different form of a collage, centers around their experience as immigrants. In this sense, collage is quite a fitting medium as it works with themes of construction and deconstruction, contextualization and decontextualization. The platform itself was created by the artist SPATIAL-ESK and is set in outer space with colourful planes carving out colour-coded rooms for each artist. The exhibition is removed from any familiarity and is without any floors or ceilings, instead exposed to the galaxy surrounding it. Once entered you can click and drag your mouse through the exhibition. Different icons lead you to a secondary webpages to get more information on the artist and their work or in certain cases to watch the artwork.

For example, after entering Sonya Mwamba's room in pastel blue, you can click on an icon to be redirected to the McMaster Museum's website where you can watch her short films. They reference the Kodak test photos and Hollywood movies where the white cultural canon reigned supreme. Mwamba thereby challenges the white default by superimposing the black bodies to recalibrate these films, thus taking back Black narratives and ways of being. Another artist whose work we are redirected to see is Kofi Oduro's hypertext code as an alternative to the performance of poetry. His works speak volumes about the creative potential of basic technology and hints at how the black and immigrant experience is often moved beyond physical space. Digital art can be understood to embody this state of being as it is at once a physical and imaginary space.  

Yung Yemi, “Nothing Real Can Be Threatened”, 2020

In another room, Yung Yemi's (also known as Adeyemi Adegbesan) black and white collages  refer to what he calls "the duality of blackness"; that is to be both infinitely diverse and singularly monolithic. Thinking about a future where blackness is freed of oppressive colonial rule, each collage is stripped of context and hung in white space. They are also simultaneously draped in detailed and decadent armour, expressing the need for protection even in an Afrofuture. In a yellow room, FEZA focuses on what she calls the 'middle space;' where reconciliation between the past and the present becomes possible. Her collages deconstruct and reconstruct her memories by tiling segments of photographic images together like pieces of a broken mirror that create an alternate reality.

Next, originally presented as an immersive exhibition, Anna Binta Diallo's work resembles portals using images of landscapes, space, or maps within the silhouettes of bodies that merge with the background of the exhibition. Themes of displacement emerge through the juxtaposition of different landscapes within the singular vessel. In a red-coloured room, Emkay's Adjei-Manu similarly collages into silhouettes focusing on hands and eyes signifying the search for one's own identity and history, and how they might speak to one's own future. Finally, in a brown room, Ghislan Timm's plays with GIFs and Marcel Camus' 1959 film Black Orpheus to bridge the past and the future by juxtaposing and assembling the fate of the two lovers with imagery of the joyful festivities of the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, thus inserting black and brown bodies into Greek mythologies. Her space is more furnished than most, with brown columns blending into the rooms' background.

Overall, the cut, the tear, and the remix: contemporary collage and black futures is successful in its two goals. Its first, presenting a diverse selection of collage artists that engage in the discussion about the Afrofuture. For example, although all the artists addressed feelings of non-belonging through their common language of collage, some like Sonya Mwamba or Anna Binta Diallo addressed their displacement and search for identity by creating a sort of an alternate reality where they would belong, while others like Kofi Oduro or FEZA offered more contemplative experiments of what it means to be a migrant.

As for its second goal; offering an alternative to the white cube, both Stylo Starr the curator, and SPATIAL-ESK the designer of the platform, were able to capture the experience of going to an art gallery within the comfort of our own home away from the 'snobby' art world. They were able to do this by taking what was important; scale, accessibility, and order, and discarding the rest leaving us in this space between the physical, and the immaterial. This makes the space itself its own kind of artwork which blend in really well with the theme of the exhibition. For example, one aspect that often gets lost in virtual spaces is the sense of scale, as we can be left to zoom in and out infinitely. However, because the viewer can't actually walk around the platform and is constrained to a clicking on a single marker, the collages never lose their sense of scale as seen in Anna Binta Diallo's series of collages where we can stilll grasp how big the works would have been in their original installation setting.

Having said this, there were two things that could have been improved. First, is the creation of a space where you could do everything, like see Sonya Mwamba's short films or Kofi Oduro poetry without being redirected to another webpage. Second, the work of interpreting the pieces somewhat on our own has been done for us. In every artist's individual page is a statement giving us a reading of the work on top of the artist's statement which isn't necessary as it almost robs the viewer of their imagination when looking at the art. In the end, the cut, the tear, and the remix bridges the gap that the pandemic has left us with this past year and a half by bringing together an interesting departure from the white cube to possibly offer a more inclusive space that isn't limited by the audience's distance or time.

Link to the exhibit: https://museum.mcmaster.ca/the-remix-virtual-exhibition/

[reubenraynor7]

What’s the best apply?

The right way to tell Google your taste is to go into your Google Search Console.

If you have no idea what Google Lookup Console is, then it's actually a free tool out of Google for tracking your site's search performance, indexing and optimising the visibility of one's website.

I highly urge you examining one other no cost Google software for web page to discover all of those various tools. I'm convinced that you are going to see a lot out of that.

Assuming that you have already affirmed your site in Google Search Console, you're now officially a site proprietor! Here would be the steps to configure the brand new website:

Just click Site Setting

Choose the preferences you need

You also may possibly need to verify possession of the www and non-www model of one's domain name.

As stated at Google Hunt Console:"Part of the practice of establishing a preferred domain name is to confirm you possess http://exabytes.digital/. Please check https://exabytes.digital/."After that, you should abide by the instructions and repeat Step 1 ).

In the event you need more detailed excuse of preferred domains, check out the official Google Lookup Console Help page here.

The aforementioned feature is now supported only in old Lookup Console.

Watch that - raydoor7.webgarden.cz

WordPress Search Engine Optimisation Recommendations:Yoast Plug in

If you are using WordPress since this material management system (CMS) of one's site, it is a lot much easier to set the canonical URL in your site header.

The plugin is going to possess a industry to allow you to insert the URL for the version of the page.

By default option, we will make it empty to follow along with permalink/URL of the webpage.

That really is very important to SEO: HTTPS

When you've already done setting preferred domain , remember to fill out the execution of HTTPS.

Some brand fresh webmasters haven't realised the substantial difference between HTTP and HTTPS as it comes to internet search engine optimization.

The truth is that Google has recently given a warning which the Chrome internet web browser will display a red"Not Safe" icon for non-HTTPS internet websites from October 2018< onwards.

301 redirect to just Inch structure of URL

To make your daily life less complicated, depending on the sort of server your site is hosted, I'd advise you to divert your URL into a single format.

.htaccess Redirection Script

In the event you chose to select a particular web arrangement variation, then you can utilize the following scripts to your .htaccess file. The script will probably do 2 things: First, induce HTTPS. Then divert non-www into www version.

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond%HTTPS away [OR]

RewriteCond %HTTP_HOST ! ^www\.yourdomainname\.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(. *)$ https://www.yourdomainname.com/$1 [L,R=301]

*Warning: back up your unique .htaccess ahead of doing the update. The script might not get the job done because different web sites have various configurations. In the event you aren't certain, remember to check your internet programmer and rear up everything .

In the event that you website is in Windows Server atmosphere, the aforementioned procedure might not work. Please consult your internet programmer or web hosting supplier that will assist you to configure.

Still desire to know the difference between www and non-www?

In summary, the distinction is actually only an issue of technicality. The'www' acts as a hostname that assists with DNS (domain name system) versatility. This allows the use of various subdomains and limits cookies.

Even the non-www domain or nude domain don't need such technological benefits.

You may like: raydoor7.webgarden.cz

Overview

As an example personally, I'd elect never to own the www.

Exactly why? That is due to the increasing dominance of cell usage in the future. Doing off with www allows your domain name name to be displayed directly on cell without the chance of being truncated.

This would make it less difficult for my audience to remember my domain name name for branding purpose.

I hope this web site post will demystify the debate of www or non-www. These two are perfectly nice for search engine optimisation, but I would rather non-www.

[gamebazu]

Shopify SEO: The Guide to Optimizing Shopify [Updated for 2022]

 A trend we’ve been noticing at Go Fish Digital is that more and more of our clients have been using the Shopify platform. While we initially thought this was just a coincidence, we can see that the data tells a different story:

The Shopify platform has been steadily rising in popularity throughout the years. Looking at BuiltWith usage statistics, we can see that usage of the CMS has more than doubled since October 2017. Currently, 4.24 of the top 10,000 sites and 3.02% of the top 100,000 are using Shopify.

Since we’ve worked with a good amount of Shopify stores, we wanted to share our process for common SEO improvements we help our clients with. The guide below should outline some common adjustments we make on Shopify stores.

What is Shopify SEO?

Shopify SEO is a set of  SEO adjustments that are unique to the Shopify platform. While Shopify stores come with some useful things for SEO, such as a blog and the ability to redirect, it can also create SEO issues such as duplicate content. 

Some of the most common Shopify SEO recommendations are:

Remove duplicate URLs from internal linking architecture

Remove duplicate paginated URLs

Create blog content for keywords with informational intent

Add “Product,” “Article,” & “BreadcrumbList” structured data

Determine how to handle product variant pages

Compress images using crush.pics

Remove unnecessary Shopify apps

We’ll go into how we handle each of these recommendations below:

Duplicate content

In terms of SEO, duplicate content is the highest priority issue we’ve seen created by Shopify. Duplicate content occurs when either duplicate or similar content exists on two separate URLs. This creates issues for search engines as they might not be able to determine which of the two pages should be the canonical version. On top of this, often times link signals are split between the pages.

We’ve seen Shopify create duplicate content in several different ways:

Duplicate product pages

Duplicate collections pages through pagination

Duplicate product pages

Shopify creates this issue within their product pages. By default, Shopify stores allow their /products/ pages to render at two different URL paths:

Canonical URL path: /products/

Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/

Shopify accounts for this by ensuring that all /collections/.*/products/ pages include a canonical tag to the associated /products/ page. Notice how the URL in the address differs from the “canonical” field:

While this certainly helps Google consolidate the duplicate content, a more alarming issue occurs when you look at the internal linking structure. By default, Shopify will link to the non-canonical version of all of your product pages.

As well, we’ve also seen Shopify link to the non-canonical versions of URLs when websites utilize “swatch” internal links that point to other color variants.

Thus, Shopify creates your entire site architecture around non-canonical links by default. This creates a high-priority SEO issue because the website is sending Google conflicting signals:

“Here are the pages we internally link to the most often”

“However, the pages we link to the most often are not the URLs we actually want to be ranking in Google. Please index these other URLs with few internal links”

While canonical tags are usually respected, remember Google does treat these as hints instead of directives. This means that you’re relying on Google to make a judgement about whether or not the content is duplicate each time that it crawls these pages. We prefer not to leave this up to chance, especially when dealing with content at scale.

Adjusting internal linking structure

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix for this. We’ve been able to work with our dev team to adjust the code in the product.grid-item.liquid file. Following those instructions will allow your Shopify site’s collections pages to point to the canonical /product/ URLs.

Duplicate collections pages

As well, we’ve seen many Shopify sites that create duplicate content through the site’s pagination. More specifically, a duplicate is created of the first collections page in a particular series. This is because once you're on a paginated URL in a series, the link to the first page will contain “?page=1”:

However, this will almost always be a duplicate page. A URL with “?page=1” will almost always contain the same content as the original non-parameterized URL. Once again, we recommend having a developer adjust the internal linking structure so that the first paginated result points to the canonical page.

Product variant pages

While this is technically an extension of Shopify’s duplicate content from above, we thought this warranted its own section because this isn’t necessarily always an SEO issue.

It’s not uncommon to see Shopify stores where multiple product URLs are created for the same product with slight variations. In this case, this can create duplicate content issues as often times the core product is the same, but only a slight attribute (color for instance) changes. This means that multiple pages can exist with duplicate/similar product descriptions and images. Here is an example of duplicate pages created by a variant: https://recordit.co/x6YRPkCDqG

If left alone, this once again creates an instance of duplicate content. However, variant URLs do not have to be an SEO issue. In fact, some sites could benefit from these URLs as they allow you to have indexable pages that could be optimized for very specific terms. Whether or not these are beneficial is going to differ on every site. Some key questions to ask yourself are:

Do your customers perform queries based on variant phrases?

Do you have the resources to create unique content for all of your product variants?

Is this content unique enough to stand on its own?

For a more in-depth guide, Jenny Halasz wrote a great article on determining the best course of action for product variations. If your Shopify store contains product variants, than it’s worth determining early on whether or not these pages should exist at a separate URL. If they should, then you should create unique content for every one and optimize each for that variant’s target keywords.

Crawling and indexing

After analyzing quite a few Shopify stores, we’ve found some SEO items that are unique to Shopify when it comes to crawling and indexing. Since this is very often an important component of e-commerce SEO, we thought it would be good to share the ones that apply to Shopify.

Robots.txt file

By default, Shopify creates a robots.txt file for your store with quite a few prewritten “Disallow” commands. We find that in most cases, Shopify’s default robots.txt rules are good enough for most store owners. You can see an example of Shopify’s default robots.txt rules here:

Here are some sections of the site that Shopify will disallow crawling in:

Admin area

Checkout

Orders

Shopping cart

Internal search

Policies page

However, as Shopify stores get bigger and more customized, there’s a greater chance that you might need to adjust the robots.txt file. Fortunately, as of June 2021, Shopify now let’s you update the robots.txt file. 

In order to edit the Shopify robots.txt file, store owners must create a robots.txt.liquid file and then create custom rules to specify any changes.

In order to create a robots.txt.liquid file, store owners can perform the following steps:

Login to your Shopify admin area

In the left sidebar, go to Online Store > Themes

Choose Actions > Edit code

In “Templates”, select the “Add a new template” link

Find the left-most dropdown and choose “robots.txt”

Choose “Create template”

This should create your Shopify robots.txt.liquid file. You can then add rules to your robots.txt.liquid file by adding liquid code. Fortunately, this code isn’t too difficult to add, and Shopify does a good job of highlighting how to do it in their official documentation. Following these steps should allow you to have much more control over which URLs are crawled in your Shopify site.

Sitemap.xml

By default, Shopify will generate a sitemap.xml index file at the URL path “domain.com/sitemap.xml”. Shopify’s sitemap.xml index file will automatically create links to child sitemaps that contain URLs of the following page types:

Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)

Collection Pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)

Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)

Marketing Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)

This sitemap.xml file will dynamically update as new pages are added/removed from to the site. Generally, the Shopify sitemap.xml is good to go out of the box and doesn’t need to be adjusted.

One thing to be aware of is that Shopify will include any published pages in the sitemap.xml file. The most common issue we see is that legacy pages that are published but no longer linked to on the site get included in the sitemap.xml file. It’s worth crawling your sitemap.xml to find any instances of published pages that are included in the sitemap but are not important for search engines to crawl.

Adding the “noindex” tag

While you cannot adjust the robots.txt, Shopify does allow you to add the “noindex” tag. You can exclude a specific page from the index by adding the following code to your theme.liquid file.

As well, if you want to exclude an entire template, you can use this code:

Redirects

Shopify does allow you to implement redirects out-of-the-box, which is great. You can use this for consolidating old/expired pages or any other content that no longer exists. You can do this by going to:

Online Store

Navigation

URL Redirects

The big thing to keep in mind is that you will need to delete a page before you can implement a redirect on Shopify. This means that you’ll want to be really sure you’re not going to use the page in the future. To make this process a little less stressful, we recommend implementing the “Rewind Backups” app.

Log files

As of now, Shopify does not allow you to access log files directly through the platform. This has been confirmed by Shopify support.

Fast Simon implementation

Fast Simon is an enterprise solution that adds robust personalization features to your Shopify store, and is becoming increasingly popular. If your Shopify site is utilizing the Fast Simon technology, you’ll want to be sure that you’re taking steps to adjust any potential indexing issues from an improper implementation. 

Confirm that Fast Simon is pre-rendering your website’s content so that Google doesn’t run into crawling and indexing issues. This will give Googlebot a server-side, rendered version of your site that will make it easier for it to interpret the content. For more details, you can read our case study here. 

Structured data

Product structured data

Overall, Shopify does a pretty good job with structured data. Many Shopify themes should contain “Product” markup out-of-the-box that provides Google with key information such as your product’s name, description, price etc. This is probably the highest priority structured data to have on any e-commerce site, so it’s great that many themes do this for you.

Shopify sites might also benefit from expanding the Product structured data to collections pages as well. This involves adding the Product structured data to define each individual product link in a product listing page. The good folks at Distilled recommend including this structured data on category pages.

Article structured data

As well, if you use Shopify’s blog functionality, you should use “Article” structured data. This is a fantastic schema type that lets Google know that your blog content is more editorial in nature. Of all of the informational content schema, “Article” seems to be the one that Google may prefer since that’s what’s referenced in their official documentation. However, “BlogPosting” schema is also another type of structured data you could add to your Shopify blog

BreadcrumbList structured data

One addition that we routinely add to Shopify sites are breadcrumb internal links with BreadcrumbList structured data. We believe breadcrumbs are crucial to any e-commerce site, as they provide users with easy-to-use internal links that indicate where they’re at within the hierarchy of a website. As well, these breadcrumbs can help Google better understand the website’s structure. We typically suggest adding site breadcrumbs to Shopify sites and marking those up with BreadcrumbList structured data to help Google better understand those internal links.

Implementing structured data on Shopify

If you want to implement structured data and have a developer on hand, it can be good to have them add the above structured data types. This ensures that these schema elements will always be present on your site.

However, if your development resources are more limited, we find that Schema App Total Schema Markup is a great option. This will incorporate structured data types such as Product and BlogPosting schema on the proper pages of the site. As well, it will even add OfferCatalog schema to mark up every single product within a category page. Their support is also fantastic as they’re team helps you with any technical issues you might encounter.

Improving Shopify site speed

One of the biggest complaints we hear about Shopify is that it suffers from slower speeds. However, compared to other e-commerce platforms, we find that Shopify performs quite well. Out of the box, Shopify uses the Fastly CDN and leverages browser caching which gives you a solid performance foundation. In the past, we’ve actually benchmarked the average speed metrics of 400+ Shopify sites. Below are the average performance metrics of the Shopify sites we tested in our dataset.

First Contentful Paint: 3.8 seconds

Time To Interactive: 22.1 seconds

Total Page Size: 4.41 MB

Total Image Assets: 2.1 MB

Requests: 171

In terms of improving performance, below are the things we’ll generally advise our clients to do:

Lazy load images with the lazysizes library

Automatically compress images using Crush.pics

Eliminate any low usage Shopify apps

Manually resize and compress large images on high priority pages

Migrate tracking codes to Google Tag Manager

Keyword research

Performing keyword research for Shopify stores will be very similar to the research you would perform for other e-commerce stores.

Some general ways to generate keywords are:

Export your keyword data from Google AdWords. Track and optimize for those that generate the most revenue for the site.

Research your AdWords keywords that have high conversion rates. Even if the volume is lower, a high conversion rate indicates that this keyword is more transactional.

Review the keywords the site currently gets clicks/impressions for in Google Search Console.

Research your high priority keywords and generate new ideas using Moz’s Keyword Explorer.

Run your competitors through tools like Ahrefs. Using the “Content Gap” report, you can find keyword opportunities where competitor sites are ranking but yours is not.

If you have keywords that use similar modifiers, you can use MergeWords to automatically generate a large variety of keyword variations.

Keyword optimization

Similar to Yoast SEO, Shopify does allow you to optimize key elements such as your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs. Where possible, you should be using your target keywords in these elements.

To adjust these elements, you simply need to navigate to the page you wish to adjust and scroll down to “Search Engine Listing Preview”:

Adding content to product pages

If you decide that each individual product should be indexed, ideally you’ll want to add unique content to each page. Initially, your Shopify products may not have unique on-page content associated with them. This is a common issue for Shopify stores, as oftentimes the same descriptions are used across multiple products or no descriptions are present. Adding product descriptions with on-page best practices will give your products the best chance of ranking in the SERPs.

However, we understand that it’s time-consuming to create unique content for every product that you offer. With clients in the past, we’ve taken a targeted approach as to which products to optimize first. We like to use the “Sales By Product” report which can help prioritize which are the most important products to start adding content to. You can find this report in Analytics > Dashboard > Top Products By Units Sold.

By taking this approach, we can quickly identify some of the highest priority pages in the store to optimize. We can then work with a copywriter to start creating content for each individual product. Also, keep in mind that your product descriptions should always be written from a user-focused view. Writing about the features of the product they care about the most will give your site the best chance at improving both conversions and SEO.

Shopify blog

Shopify does include the ability to create a blog, but we often see this missing from a large number of Shopify stores. It makes sense, as revenue is the primary goal of an e-commerce site, so the initial build of the site is product-focused.

However, we live in an era where it’s getting harder and harder to rank product pages in Google. For instance, the below screenshot illustrates the top 3 organic results for the term “cloth diapers”:

While many would assume that this is primarily a transactional query, we’re seeing Google is ranking two articles and a single product listing page in the top three results. This is just one instance of a major trend we’ve seen where Google is starting to prefer to rank more informational content above transactional.

By excluding a blog from a Shopify store, we think this results in a huge missed opportunity for many businesses. The inclusion of a blog allows you to have a natural place where you can create this informational content. If you’re seeing that Google is ranking more blog/article types of content for the keywords mapped to your Shopify store, your best bet is to go out and create that content yourself.

If you run a Shopify store (or any e-commerce site), we would urge you to take the following few steps:

Identify your highest priority keywords

Manually perform a Google query for each one

Make note of the types of content Google is ranking on the first page. Is it primarily informational, transactional, or a mix of both?

If you’re seeing primarily mixed or informational content, evaluate your own content to see if you have any that matches the user intent. If so, improve the quality and optimize.

If you do not have this content, consider creating new blog content around informational topics that seems to fulfill the user intent

As an example, we have a client that was interested in ranking for the term “CRM software,” an extremely competitive keyword. When analyzing the SERPs, we found that Google was ranking primarily informational pages about “What Is CRM Software?” Since they only had a product page that highlighted their specific CRM, we suggested the client create a more informational page that talked generally about what CRM software is and the benefits it provides. After creating and optimizing the page, we soon saw a significant increase in organic traffic (credit to Ally Mickler):

The issue that we see on many Shopify sites is that there is very little focus on informational pages despite the fact that those perform well in the search engines. Most Shopify sites should be using the blogging platform, as this will provide an avenue to create informational content that will result in organic traffic and revenue.

Apps

Similar to WordPress’s plugins, Shopify offers “Apps” that allow you to add advanced functionality to your site without having to manually adjust the code. However, unlike WordPress, most of the Shopify Apps you’ll find are paid. This will require either a one-time or monthly fee.

Shopify apps for SEO

While your best bet is likely teaming up with a developer who's comfortable with Shopify, here are some Shopify apps that can help improve the SEO of your site.

Crush.pics: A great automated way of compressing large image files. Crucial for most Shopify sites as many of these sites are heavily image-based.

Schema App Total Schema Markup: This app may be used if you do not have a Shopify developer who is able to add custom structured data to your site.

Smart SEO: An app that can add meta tags, alt tags, & JSON-LD

Yotpo Reviews: This app can help you add product reviews to your site, making your content eligible for rich review stars in the SERPs.

Rewind Backups: Creates backups of your site. Great to implement before making development changes or adding redirects.

Is Yoast SEO available for Shopify?

Yoast SEO is exclusively a WordPress plugin. There is currently no Yoast SEO Shopify App.

Limiting your Shopify apps

Similar to WordPress plugins, Shopify apps will inject additional code onto your site. This means that adding a large number of apps can slow down the site. Shopify sites are especially susceptible to bloat, as many apps are focused on improving conversions. Often times, these apps will add more JavaScript and CSS files which can hurt page load times. You’ll want to be sure that you regularly audit the apps you’re using and remove any that are not adding value or being utilized by the site.

Client results

We’ve seen pretty good success in our clients that use Shopify stores. Below you can find some of the results we’ve been able to achieve for them. However, please note that these case studies do not just include the recommendations above. For these clients, we have used a combination of some of the recommendations outlined above as well as other SEO initiatives.

In one example, we worked with a Shopify store that was interested in ranking for very competitive terms surrounding the main product their store focused on. We evaluated their top performing products in the “Sales by product” report. This resulted in a large effort to work with the client to add new content to their product pages as they were not initially optimized. This combined with other initiatives has helped improve their first page rankings by 113 keywords (credit to Jennifer Wright & LaRhonda Sparrow).

In another instance, a client came to us with an issue that they were not ranking for their branded keywords. Instead, third-party retailers that also carried their products were often outranking them. We worked with them to adjust their internal linking structure to point to the canonical pages instead of the duplicate pages created by Shopify. We also optimized their content to better utilize the branded terminology on relevant pages. As a result, they’ve seen a nice increase in overall rankings in just several months time.

Moving forward

As Shopify usage continues to grow, it will be increasingly important to understand the SEO implications that come with the platform. Hopefully, this guide has provided you with additional knowledge that will help make your Shopify store stronger in the search engines. If you’re interested in learning more about Shopify, you can also check out our Shopify SEO Learning Center.

[noithatotoaz]

Shopify SEO: The Guide to Optimizing Shopify [Updated for 2022]

 A trend we’ve been noticing at Go Fish Digital is that more and more of our clients have been using the Shopify platform. While we initially thought this was just a coincidence, we can see that the data tells a different story:

The Shopify platform has been steadily rising in popularity throughout the years. Looking at BuiltWith usage statistics, we can see that usage of the CMS has more than doubled since October 2017. Currently, 4.24 of the top 10,000 sites and 3.02% of the top 100,000 are using Shopify.

Since we’ve worked with a good amount of Shopify stores, we wanted to share our process for common SEO improvements we help our clients with. The guide below should outline some common adjustments we make on Shopify stores.

What is Shopify SEO?

Shopify SEO is a set of  SEO adjustments that are unique to the Shopify platform. While Shopify stores come with some useful things for SEO, such as a blog and the ability to redirect, it can also create SEO issues such as duplicate content. 

Some of the most common Shopify SEO recommendations are:

Remove duplicate URLs from internal linking architecture

Remove duplicate paginated URLs

Create blog content for keywords with informational intent

Add “Product,” “Article,” & “BreadcrumbList” structured data

Determine how to handle product variant pages

Compress images using crush.pics

Remove unnecessary Shopify apps

We’ll go into how we handle each of these recommendations below:

Duplicate content

In terms of SEO, duplicate content is the highest priority issue we’ve seen created by Shopify. Duplicate content occurs when either duplicate or similar content exists on two separate URLs. This creates issues for search engines as they might not be able to determine which of the two pages should be the canonical version. On top of this, often times link signals are split between the pages.

We’ve seen Shopify create duplicate content in several different ways:

Duplicate product pages

Duplicate collections pages through pagination

Duplicate product pages

Shopify creates this issue within their product pages. By default, Shopify stores allow their /products/ pages to render at two different URL paths:

Canonical URL path: /products/

Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/

Shopify accounts for this by ensuring that all /collections/.*/products/ pages include a canonical tag to the associated /products/ page. Notice how the URL in the address differs from the “canonical” field:

While this certainly helps Google consolidate the duplicate content, a more alarming issue occurs when you look at the internal linking structure. By default, Shopify will link to the non-canonical version of all of your product pages.

As well, we’ve also seen Shopify link to the non-canonical versions of URLs when websites utilize “swatch” internal links that point to other color variants.

Thus, Shopify creates your entire site architecture around non-canonical links by default. This creates a high-priority SEO issue because the website is sending Google conflicting signals:

“Here are the pages we internally link to the most often”

“However, the pages we link to the most often are not the URLs we actually want to be ranking in Google. Please index these other URLs with few internal links”

While canonical tags are usually respected, remember Google does treat these as hints instead of directives. This means that you’re relying on Google to make a judgement about whether or not the content is duplicate each time that it crawls these pages. We prefer not to leave this up to chance, especially when dealing with content at scale.

Adjusting internal linking structure

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix for this. We’ve been able to work with our dev team to adjust the code in the product.grid-item.liquid file. Following those instructions will allow your Shopify site’s collections pages to point to the canonical /product/ URLs.

Duplicate collections pages

As well, we’ve seen many Shopify sites that create duplicate content through the site’s pagination. More specifically, a duplicate is created of the first collections page in a particular series. This is because once you're on a paginated URL in a series, the link to the first page will contain “?page=1”:

However, this will almost always be a duplicate page. A URL with “?page=1” will almost always contain the same content as the original non-parameterized URL. Once again, we recommend having a developer adjust the internal linking structure so that the first paginated result points to the canonical page.

Product variant pages

While this is technically an extension of Shopify’s duplicate content from above, we thought this warranted its own section because this isn’t necessarily always an SEO issue.

It’s not uncommon to see Shopify stores where multiple product URLs are created for the same product with slight variations. In this case, this can create duplicate content issues as often times the core product is the same, but only a slight attribute (color for instance) changes. This means that multiple pages can exist with duplicate/similar product descriptions and images. Here is an example of duplicate pages created by a variant: https://recordit.co/x6YRPkCDqG

If left alone, this once again creates an instance of duplicate content. However, variant URLs do not have to be an SEO issue. In fact, some sites could benefit from these URLs as they allow you to have indexable pages that could be optimized for very specific terms. Whether or not these are beneficial is going to differ on every site. Some key questions to ask yourself are:

Do your customers perform queries based on variant phrases?

Do you have the resources to create unique content for all of your product variants?

Is this content unique enough to stand on its own?

For a more in-depth guide, Jenny Halasz wrote a great article on determining the best course of action for product variations. If your Shopify store contains product variants, than it’s worth determining early on whether or not these pages should exist at a separate URL. If they should, then you should create unique content for every one and optimize each for that variant’s target keywords.

Crawling and indexing

After analyzing quite a few Shopify stores, we’ve found some SEO items that are unique to Shopify when it comes to crawling and indexing. Since this is very often an important component of e-commerce SEO, we thought it would be good to share the ones that apply to Shopify.

Robots.txt file

By default, Shopify creates a robots.txt file for your store with quite a few prewritten “Disallow” commands. We find that in most cases, Shopify’s default robots.txt rules are good enough for most store owners. You can see an example of Shopify’s default robots.txt rules here:

Here are some sections of the site that Shopify will disallow crawling in:

Admin area

Checkout

Orders

Shopping cart

Internal search

Policies page

However, as Shopify stores get bigger and more customized, there’s a greater chance that you might need to adjust the robots.txt file. Fortunately, as of June 2021, Shopify now let’s you update the robots.txt file. 

In order to edit the Shopify robots.txt file, store owners must create a robots.txt.liquid file and then create custom rules to specify any changes.

In order to create a robots.txt.liquid file, store owners can perform the following steps:

Login to your Shopify admin area

In the left sidebar, go to Online Store > Themes

Choose Actions > Edit code

In “Templates”, select the “Add a new template” link

Find the left-most dropdown and choose “robots.txt”

Choose “Create template”

This should create your Shopify robots.txt.liquid file. You can then add rules to your robots.txt.liquid file by adding liquid code. Fortunately, this code isn’t too difficult to add, and Shopify does a good job of highlighting how to do it in their official documentation. Following these steps should allow you to have much more control over which URLs are crawled in your Shopify site.

Sitemap.xml

By default, Shopify will generate a sitemap.xml index file at the URL path “domain.com/sitemap.xml”. Shopify’s sitemap.xml index file will automatically create links to child sitemaps that contain URLs of the following page types:

Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)

Collection Pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)

Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)

Marketing Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)

This sitemap.xml file will dynamically update as new pages are added/removed from to the site. Generally, the Shopify sitemap.xml is good to go out of the box and doesn’t need to be adjusted.

One thing to be aware of is that Shopify will include any published pages in the sitemap.xml file. The most common issue we see is that legacy pages that are published but no longer linked to on the site get included in the sitemap.xml file. It’s worth crawling your sitemap.xml to find any instances of published pages that are included in the sitemap but are not important for search engines to crawl.

Adding the “noindex” tag

While you cannot adjust the robots.txt, Shopify does allow you to add the “noindex” tag. You can exclude a specific page from the index by adding the following code to your theme.liquid file.

As well, if you want to exclude an entire template, you can use this code:

Redirects

Shopify does allow you to implement redirects out-of-the-box, which is great. You can use this for consolidating old/expired pages or any other content that no longer exists. You can do this by going to:

Online Store

Navigation

URL Redirects

The big thing to keep in mind is that you will need to delete a page before you can implement a redirect on Shopify. This means that you’ll want to be really sure you’re not going to use the page in the future. To make this process a little less stressful, we recommend implementing the “Rewind Backups” app.

Log files

As of now, Shopify does not allow you to access log files directly through the platform. This has been confirmed by Shopify support.

Fast Simon implementation

Fast Simon is an enterprise solution that adds robust personalization features to your Shopify store, and is becoming increasingly popular. If your Shopify site is utilizing the Fast Simon technology, you’ll want to be sure that you’re taking steps to adjust any potential indexing issues from an improper implementation. 

Confirm that Fast Simon is pre-rendering your website’s content so that Google doesn’t run into crawling and indexing issues. This will give Googlebot a server-side, rendered version of your site that will make it easier for it to interpret the content. For more details, you can read our case study here. 

Structured data

Product structured data

Overall, Shopify does a pretty good job with structured data. Many Shopify themes should contain “Product” markup out-of-the-box that provides Google with key information such as your product’s name, description, price etc. This is probably the highest priority structured data to have on any e-commerce site, so it’s great that many themes do this for you.

Shopify sites might also benefit from expanding the Product structured data to collections pages as well. This involves adding the Product structured data to define each individual product link in a product listing page. The good folks at Distilled recommend including this structured data on category pages.

Article structured data

As well, if you use Shopify’s blog functionality, you should use “Article” structured data. This is a fantastic schema type that lets Google know that your blog content is more editorial in nature. Of all of the informational content schema, “Article” seems to be the one that Google may prefer since that’s what’s referenced in their official documentation. However, “BlogPosting” schema is also another type of structured data you could add to your Shopify blog

BreadcrumbList structured data

One addition that we routinely add to Shopify sites are breadcrumb internal links with BreadcrumbList structured data. We believe breadcrumbs are crucial to any e-commerce site, as they provide users with easy-to-use internal links that indicate where they’re at within the hierarchy of a website. As well, these breadcrumbs can help Google better understand the website’s structure. We typically suggest adding site breadcrumbs to Shopify sites and marking those up with BreadcrumbList structured data to help Google better understand those internal links.

Implementing structured data on Shopify

If you want to implement structured data and have a developer on hand, it can be good to have them add the above structured data types. This ensures that these schema elements will always be present on your site.

However, if your development resources are more limited, we find that Schema App Total Schema Markup is a great option. This will incorporate structured data types such as Product and BlogPosting schema on the proper pages of the site. As well, it will even add OfferCatalog schema to mark up every single product within a category page. Their support is also fantastic as they’re team helps you with any technical issues you might encounter.

Improving Shopify site speed

One of the biggest complaints we hear about Shopify is that it suffers from slower speeds. However, compared to other e-commerce platforms, we find that Shopify performs quite well. Out of the box, Shopify uses the Fastly CDN and leverages browser caching which gives you a solid performance foundation. In the past, we’ve actually benchmarked the average speed metrics of 400+ Shopify sites. Below are the average performance metrics of the Shopify sites we tested in our dataset.

First Contentful Paint: 3.8 seconds

Time To Interactive: 22.1 seconds

Total Page Size: 4.41 MB

Total Image Assets: 2.1 MB

Requests: 171

In terms of improving performance, below are the things we’ll generally advise our clients to do:

Lazy load images with the lazysizes library

Automatically compress images using Crush.pics

Eliminate any low usage Shopify apps

Manually resize and compress large images on high priority pages

Migrate tracking codes to Google Tag Manager

Keyword research

Performing keyword research for Shopify stores will be very similar to the research you would perform for other e-commerce stores.

Some general ways to generate keywords are:

Export your keyword data from Google AdWords. Track and optimize for those that generate the most revenue for the site.

Research your AdWords keywords that have high conversion rates. Even if the volume is lower, a high conversion rate indicates that this keyword is more transactional.

Review the keywords the site currently gets clicks/impressions for in Google Search Console.

Research your high priority keywords and generate new ideas using Moz’s Keyword Explorer.

Run your competitors through tools like Ahrefs. Using the “Content Gap” report, you can find keyword opportunities where competitor sites are ranking but yours is not.

If you have keywords that use similar modifiers, you can use MergeWords to automatically generate a large variety of keyword variations.

Keyword optimization

Similar to Yoast SEO, Shopify does allow you to optimize key elements such as your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs. Where possible, you should be using your target keywords in these elements.

To adjust these elements, you simply need to navigate to the page you wish to adjust and scroll down to “Search Engine Listing Preview”:

Adding content to product pages

If you decide that each individual product should be indexed, ideally you’ll want to add unique content to each page. Initially, your Shopify products may not have unique on-page content associated with them. This is a common issue for Shopify stores, as oftentimes the same descriptions are used across multiple products or no descriptions are present. Adding product descriptions with on-page best practices will give your products the best chance of ranking in the SERPs.

However, we understand that it’s time-consuming to create unique content for every product that you offer. With clients in the past, we’ve taken a targeted approach as to which products to optimize first. We like to use the “Sales By Product” report which can help prioritize which are the most important products to start adding content to. You can find this report in Analytics > Dashboard > Top Products By Units Sold.

By taking this approach, we can quickly identify some of the highest priority pages in the store to optimize. We can then work with a copywriter to start creating content for each individual product. Also, keep in mind that your product descriptions should always be written from a user-focused view. Writing about the features of the product they care about the most will give your site the best chance at improving both conversions and SEO.

Shopify blog

Shopify does include the ability to create a blog, but we often see this missing from a large number of Shopify stores. It makes sense, as revenue is the primary goal of an e-commerce site, so the initial build of the site is product-focused.

However, we live in an era where it’s getting harder and harder to rank product pages in Google. For instance, the below screenshot illustrates the top 3 organic results for the term “cloth diapers”:

While many would assume that this is primarily a transactional query, we’re seeing Google is ranking two articles and a single product listing page in the top three results. This is just one instance of a major trend we’ve seen where Google is starting to prefer to rank more informational content above transactional.

By excluding a blog from a Shopify store, we think this results in a huge missed opportunity for many businesses. The inclusion of a blog allows you to have a natural place where you can create this informational content. If you’re seeing that Google is ranking more blog/article types of content for the keywords mapped to your Shopify store, your best bet is to go out and create that content yourself.

If you run a Shopify store (or any e-commerce site), we would urge you to take the following few steps:

Identify your highest priority keywords

Manually perform a Google query for each one

Make note of the types of content Google is ranking on the first page. Is it primarily informational, transactional, or a mix of both?

If you’re seeing primarily mixed or informational content, evaluate your own content to see if you have any that matches the user intent. If so, improve the quality and optimize.

If you do not have this content, consider creating new blog content around informational topics that seems to fulfill the user intent

As an example, we have a client that was interested in ranking for the term “CRM software,” an extremely competitive keyword. When analyzing the SERPs, we found that Google was ranking primarily informational pages about “What Is CRM Software?” Since they only had a product page that highlighted their specific CRM, we suggested the client create a more informational page that talked generally about what CRM software is and the benefits it provides. After creating and optimizing the page, we soon saw a significant increase in organic traffic (credit to Ally Mickler):

The issue that we see on many Shopify sites is that there is very little focus on informational pages despite the fact that those perform well in the search engines. Most Shopify sites should be using the blogging platform, as this will provide an avenue to create informational content that will result in organic traffic and revenue.

Apps

Similar to WordPress’s plugins, Shopify offers “Apps” that allow you to add advanced functionality to your site without having to manually adjust the code. However, unlike WordPress, most of the Shopify Apps you’ll find are paid. This will require either a one-time or monthly fee.

Shopify apps for SEO

While your best bet is likely teaming up with a developer who's comfortable with Shopify, here are some Shopify apps that can help improve the SEO of your site.

Crush.pics: A great automated way of compressing large image files. Crucial for most Shopify sites as many of these sites are heavily image-based.

Schema App Total Schema Markup: This app may be used if you do not have a Shopify developer who is able to add custom structured data to your site.

Smart SEO: An app that can add meta tags, alt tags, & JSON-LD

Yotpo Reviews: This app can help you add product reviews to your site, making your content eligible for rich review stars in the SERPs.

Rewind Backups: Creates backups of your site. Great to implement before making development changes or adding redirects.

Is Yoast SEO available for Shopify?

Yoast SEO is exclusively a WordPress plugin. There is currently no Yoast SEO Shopify App.

Limiting your Shopify apps

Similar to WordPress plugins, Shopify apps will inject additional code onto your site. This means that adding a large number of apps can slow down the site. Shopify sites are especially susceptible to bloat, as many apps are focused on improving conversions. Often times, these apps will add more JavaScript and CSS files which can hurt page load times. You’ll want to be sure that you regularly audit the apps you’re using and remove any that are not adding value or being utilized by the site.

Client results

We’ve seen pretty good success in our clients that use Shopify stores. Below you can find some of the results we’ve been able to achieve for them. However, please note that these case studies do not just include the recommendations above. For these clients, we have used a combination of some of the recommendations outlined above as well as other SEO initiatives.

In one example, we worked with a Shopify store that was interested in ranking for very competitive terms surrounding the main product their store focused on. We evaluated their top performing products in the “Sales by product” report. This resulted in a large effort to work with the client to add new content to their product pages as they were not initially optimized. This combined with other initiatives has helped improve their first page rankings by 113 keywords (credit to Jennifer Wright & LaRhonda Sparrow).

In another instance, a client came to us with an issue that they were not ranking for their branded keywords. Instead, third-party retailers that also carried their products were often outranking them. We worked with them to adjust their internal linking structure to point to the canonical pages instead of the duplicate pages created by Shopify. We also optimized their content to better utilize the branded terminology on relevant pages. As a result, they’ve seen a nice increase in overall rankings in just several months time.

Moving forward

As Shopify usage continues to grow, it will be increasingly important to understand the SEO implications that come with the platform. Hopefully, this guide has provided you with additional knowledge that will help make your Shopify store stronger in the search engines. If you’re interested in learning more about Shopify, you can also check out our Shopify SEO Learning Center.

[thanhtuandoan89]

Shopify SEO: The Guide to Optimizing Shopify [Updated for 2022]

 A trend we’ve been noticing at Go Fish Digital is that more and more of our clients have been using the Shopify platform. While we initially thought this was just a coincidence, we can see that the data tells a different story:

The Shopify platform has been steadily rising in popularity throughout the years. Looking at BuiltWith usage statistics, we can see that usage of the CMS has more than doubled since October 2017. Currently, 4.24 of the top 10,000 sites and 3.02% of the top 100,000 are using Shopify.

Since we’ve worked with a good amount of Shopify stores, we wanted to share our process for common SEO improvements we help our clients with. The guide below should outline some common adjustments we make on Shopify stores.

What is Shopify SEO?

Shopify SEO is a set of  SEO adjustments that are unique to the Shopify platform. While Shopify stores come with some useful things for SEO, such as a blog and the ability to redirect, it can also create SEO issues such as duplicate content. 

Some of the most common Shopify SEO recommendations are:

Remove duplicate URLs from internal linking architecture

Remove duplicate paginated URLs

Create blog content for keywords with informational intent

Add “Product,” “Article,” & “BreadcrumbList” structured data

Determine how to handle product variant pages

Compress images using crush.pics

Remove unnecessary Shopify apps

We’ll go into how we handle each of these recommendations below:

Duplicate content

In terms of SEO, duplicate content is the highest priority issue we’ve seen created by Shopify. Duplicate content occurs when either duplicate or similar content exists on two separate URLs. This creates issues for search engines as they might not be able to determine which of the two pages should be the canonical version. On top of this, often times link signals are split between the pages.

We’ve seen Shopify create duplicate content in several different ways:

Duplicate product pages

Duplicate collections pages through pagination

Duplicate product pages

Shopify creates this issue within their product pages. By default, Shopify stores allow their /products/ pages to render at two different URL paths:

Canonical URL path: /products/

Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/

Shopify accounts for this by ensuring that all /collections/.*/products/ pages include a canonical tag to the associated /products/ page. Notice how the URL in the address differs from the “canonical” field:

While this certainly helps Google consolidate the duplicate content, a more alarming issue occurs when you look at the internal linking structure. By default, Shopify will link to the non-canonical version of all of your product pages.

As well, we’ve also seen Shopify link to the non-canonical versions of URLs when websites utilize “swatch” internal links that point to other color variants.

Thus, Shopify creates your entire site architecture around non-canonical links by default. This creates a high-priority SEO issue because the website is sending Google conflicting signals:

“Here are the pages we internally link to the most often”

“However, the pages we link to the most often are not the URLs we actually want to be ranking in Google. Please index these other URLs with few internal links”

While canonical tags are usually respected, remember Google does treat these as hints instead of directives. This means that you’re relying on Google to make a judgement about whether or not the content is duplicate each time that it crawls these pages. We prefer not to leave this up to chance, especially when dealing with content at scale.

Adjusting internal linking structure

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix for this. We’ve been able to work with our dev team to adjust the code in the product.grid-item.liquid file. Following those instructions will allow your Shopify site’s collections pages to point to the canonical /product/ URLs.

Duplicate collections pages

As well, we’ve seen many Shopify sites that create duplicate content through the site’s pagination. More specifically, a duplicate is created of the first collections page in a particular series. This is because once you're on a paginated URL in a series, the link to the first page will contain “?page=1”:

However, this will almost always be a duplicate page. A URL with “?page=1” will almost always contain the same content as the original non-parameterized URL. Once again, we recommend having a developer adjust the internal linking structure so that the first paginated result points to the canonical page.

Product variant pages

While this is technically an extension of Shopify’s duplicate content from above, we thought this warranted its own section because this isn’t necessarily always an SEO issue.

It’s not uncommon to see Shopify stores where multiple product URLs are created for the same product with slight variations. In this case, this can create duplicate content issues as often times the core product is the same, but only a slight attribute (color for instance) changes. This means that multiple pages can exist with duplicate/similar product descriptions and images. Here is an example of duplicate pages created by a variant: https://recordit.co/x6YRPkCDqG

If left alone, this once again creates an instance of duplicate content. However, variant URLs do not have to be an SEO issue. In fact, some sites could benefit from these URLs as they allow you to have indexable pages that could be optimized for very specific terms. Whether or not these are beneficial is going to differ on every site. Some key questions to ask yourself are:

Do your customers perform queries based on variant phrases?

Do you have the resources to create unique content for all of your product variants?

Is this content unique enough to stand on its own?

For a more in-depth guide, Jenny Halasz wrote a great article on determining the best course of action for product variations. If your Shopify store contains product variants, than it’s worth determining early on whether or not these pages should exist at a separate URL. If they should, then you should create unique content for every one and optimize each for that variant’s target keywords.

Crawling and indexing

After analyzing quite a few Shopify stores, we’ve found some SEO items that are unique to Shopify when it comes to crawling and indexing. Since this is very often an important component of e-commerce SEO, we thought it would be good to share the ones that apply to Shopify.

Robots.txt file

By default, Shopify creates a robots.txt file for your store with quite a few prewritten “Disallow” commands. We find that in most cases, Shopify’s default robots.txt rules are good enough for most store owners. You can see an example of Shopify’s default robots.txt rules here:

Here are some sections of the site that Shopify will disallow crawling in:

Admin area

Checkout

Orders

Shopping cart

Internal search

Policies page

However, as Shopify stores get bigger and more customized, there’s a greater chance that you might need to adjust the robots.txt file. Fortunately, as of June 2021, Shopify now let’s you update the robots.txt file. 

In order to edit the Shopify robots.txt file, store owners must create a robots.txt.liquid file and then create custom rules to specify any changes.

In order to create a robots.txt.liquid file, store owners can perform the following steps:

Login to your Shopify admin area

In the left sidebar, go to Online Store > Themes

Choose Actions > Edit code

In “Templates”, select the “Add a new template” link

Find the left-most dropdown and choose “robots.txt”

Choose “Create template”

This should create your Shopify robots.txt.liquid file. You can then add rules to your robots.txt.liquid file by adding liquid code. Fortunately, this code isn’t too difficult to add, and Shopify does a good job of highlighting how to do it in their official documentation. Following these steps should allow you to have much more control over which URLs are crawled in your Shopify site.

Sitemap.xml

By default, Shopify will generate a sitemap.xml index file at the URL path “domain.com/sitemap.xml”. Shopify’s sitemap.xml index file will automatically create links to child sitemaps that contain URLs of the following page types:

Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)

Collection Pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)

Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)

Marketing Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)

This sitemap.xml file will dynamically update as new pages are added/removed from to the site. Generally, the Shopify sitemap.xml is good to go out of the box and doesn’t need to be adjusted.

One thing to be aware of is that Shopify will include any published pages in the sitemap.xml file. The most common issue we see is that legacy pages that are published but no longer linked to on the site get included in the sitemap.xml file. It’s worth crawling your sitemap.xml to find any instances of published pages that are included in the sitemap but are not important for search engines to crawl.

Adding the “noindex” tag

While you cannot adjust the robots.txt, Shopify does allow you to add the “noindex” tag. You can exclude a specific page from the index by adding the following code to your theme.liquid file.

As well, if you want to exclude an entire template, you can use this code:

Redirects

Shopify does allow you to implement redirects out-of-the-box, which is great. You can use this for consolidating old/expired pages or any other content that no longer exists. You can do this by going to:

Online Store

Navigation

URL Redirects

The big thing to keep in mind is that you will need to delete a page before you can implement a redirect on Shopify. This means that you’ll want to be really sure you’re not going to use the page in the future. To make this process a little less stressful, we recommend implementing the “Rewind Backups” app.

Log files

As of now, Shopify does not allow you to access log files directly through the platform. This has been confirmed by Shopify support.

Fast Simon implementation

Fast Simon is an enterprise solution that adds robust personalization features to your Shopify store, and is becoming increasingly popular. If your Shopify site is utilizing the Fast Simon technology, you’ll want to be sure that you’re taking steps to adjust any potential indexing issues from an improper implementation. 

Confirm that Fast Simon is pre-rendering your website’s content so that Google doesn’t run into crawling and indexing issues. This will give Googlebot a server-side, rendered version of your site that will make it easier for it to interpret the content. For more details, you can read our case study here. 

Structured data

Product structured data

Overall, Shopify does a pretty good job with structured data. Many Shopify themes should contain “Product” markup out-of-the-box that provides Google with key information such as your product’s name, description, price etc. This is probably the highest priority structured data to have on any e-commerce site, so it’s great that many themes do this for you.

Shopify sites might also benefit from expanding the Product structured data to collections pages as well. This involves adding the Product structured data to define each individual product link in a product listing page. The good folks at Distilled recommend including this structured data on category pages.

Article structured data

As well, if you use Shopify’s blog functionality, you should use “Article” structured data. This is a fantastic schema type that lets Google know that your blog content is more editorial in nature. Of all of the informational content schema, “Article” seems to be the one that Google may prefer since that’s what’s referenced in their official documentation. However, “BlogPosting” schema is also another type of structured data you could add to your Shopify blog

BreadcrumbList structured data

One addition that we routinely add to Shopify sites are breadcrumb internal links with BreadcrumbList structured data. We believe breadcrumbs are crucial to any e-commerce site, as they provide users with easy-to-use internal links that indicate where they’re at within the hierarchy of a website. As well, these breadcrumbs can help Google better understand the website’s structure. We typically suggest adding site breadcrumbs to Shopify sites and marking those up with BreadcrumbList structured data to help Google better understand those internal links.

Implementing structured data on Shopify

If you want to implement structured data and have a developer on hand, it can be good to have them add the above structured data types. This ensures that these schema elements will always be present on your site.

However, if your development resources are more limited, we find that Schema App Total Schema Markup is a great option. This will incorporate structured data types such as Product and BlogPosting schema on the proper pages of the site. As well, it will even add OfferCatalog schema to mark up every single product within a category page. Their support is also fantastic as they’re team helps you with any technical issues you might encounter.

Improving Shopify site speed

One of the biggest complaints we hear about Shopify is that it suffers from slower speeds. However, compared to other e-commerce platforms, we find that Shopify performs quite well. Out of the box, Shopify uses the Fastly CDN and leverages browser caching which gives you a solid performance foundation. In the past, we’ve actually benchmarked the average speed metrics of 400+ Shopify sites. Below are the average performance metrics of the Shopify sites we tested in our dataset.

First Contentful Paint: 3.8 seconds

Time To Interactive: 22.1 seconds

Total Page Size: 4.41 MB

Total Image Assets: 2.1 MB

Requests: 171

In terms of improving performance, below are the things we’ll generally advise our clients to do:

Lazy load images with the lazysizes library

Automatically compress images using Crush.pics

Eliminate any low usage Shopify apps

Manually resize and compress large images on high priority pages

Migrate tracking codes to Google Tag Manager

Keyword research

Performing keyword research for Shopify stores will be very similar to the research you would perform for other e-commerce stores.

Some general ways to generate keywords are:

Export your keyword data from Google AdWords. Track and optimize for those that generate the most revenue for the site.

Research your AdWords keywords that have high conversion rates. Even if the volume is lower, a high conversion rate indicates that this keyword is more transactional.

Review the keywords the site currently gets clicks/impressions for in Google Search Console.

Research your high priority keywords and generate new ideas using Moz’s Keyword Explorer.

Run your competitors through tools like Ahrefs. Using the “Content Gap” report, you can find keyword opportunities where competitor sites are ranking but yours is not.

If you have keywords that use similar modifiers, you can use MergeWords to automatically generate a large variety of keyword variations.

Keyword optimization

Similar to Yoast SEO, Shopify does allow you to optimize key elements such as your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs. Where possible, you should be using your target keywords in these elements.

To adjust these elements, you simply need to navigate to the page you wish to adjust and scroll down to “Search Engine Listing Preview”:

Adding content to product pages

If you decide that each individual product should be indexed, ideally you’ll want to add unique content to each page. Initially, your Shopify products may not have unique on-page content associated with them. This is a common issue for Shopify stores, as oftentimes the same descriptions are used across multiple products or no descriptions are present. Adding product descriptions with on-page best practices will give your products the best chance of ranking in the SERPs.

However, we understand that it’s time-consuming to create unique content for every product that you offer. With clients in the past, we’ve taken a targeted approach as to which products to optimize first. We like to use the “Sales By Product” report which can help prioritize which are the most important products to start adding content to. You can find this report in Analytics > Dashboard > Top Products By Units Sold.

By taking this approach, we can quickly identify some of the highest priority pages in the store to optimize. We can then work with a copywriter to start creating content for each individual product. Also, keep in mind that your product descriptions should always be written from a user-focused view. Writing about the features of the product they care about the most will give your site the best chance at improving both conversions and SEO.

Shopify blog

Shopify does include the ability to create a blog, but we often see this missing from a large number of Shopify stores. It makes sense, as revenue is the primary goal of an e-commerce site, so the initial build of the site is product-focused.

However, we live in an era where it’s getting harder and harder to rank product pages in Google. For instance, the below screenshot illustrates the top 3 organic results for the term “cloth diapers”:

While many would assume that this is primarily a transactional query, we’re seeing Google is ranking two articles and a single product listing page in the top three results. This is just one instance of a major trend we’ve seen where Google is starting to prefer to rank more informational content above transactional.

By excluding a blog from a Shopify store, we think this results in a huge missed opportunity for many businesses. The inclusion of a blog allows you to have a natural place where you can create this informational content. If you’re seeing that Google is ranking more blog/article types of content for the keywords mapped to your Shopify store, your best bet is to go out and create that content yourself.

If you run a Shopify store (or any e-commerce site), we would urge you to take the following few steps:

Identify your highest priority keywords

Manually perform a Google query for each one

Make note of the types of content Google is ranking on the first page. Is it primarily informational, transactional, or a mix of both?

If you’re seeing primarily mixed or informational content, evaluate your own content to see if you have any that matches the user intent. If so, improve the quality and optimize.

If you do not have this content, consider creating new blog content around informational topics that seems to fulfill the user intent

As an example, we have a client that was interested in ranking for the term “CRM software,” an extremely competitive keyword. When analyzing the SERPs, we found that Google was ranking primarily informational pages about “What Is CRM Software?” Since they only had a product page that highlighted their specific CRM, we suggested the client create a more informational page that talked generally about what CRM software is and the benefits it provides. After creating and optimizing the page, we soon saw a significant increase in organic traffic (credit to Ally Mickler):

The issue that we see on many Shopify sites is that there is very little focus on informational pages despite the fact that those perform well in the search engines. Most Shopify sites should be using the blogging platform, as this will provide an avenue to create informational content that will result in organic traffic and revenue.

Apps

Similar to WordPress’s plugins, Shopify offers “Apps” that allow you to add advanced functionality to your site without having to manually adjust the code. However, unlike WordPress, most of the Shopify Apps you’ll find are paid. This will require either a one-time or monthly fee.

Shopify apps for SEO

While your best bet is likely teaming up with a developer who's comfortable with Shopify, here are some Shopify apps that can help improve the SEO of your site.

Crush.pics: A great automated way of compressing large image files. Crucial for most Shopify sites as many of these sites are heavily image-based.

Schema App Total Schema Markup: This app may be used if you do not have a Shopify developer who is able to add custom structured data to your site.

Smart SEO: An app that can add meta tags, alt tags, & JSON-LD

Yotpo Reviews: This app can help you add product reviews to your site, making your content eligible for rich review stars in the SERPs.

Rewind Backups: Creates backups of your site. Great to implement before making development changes or adding redirects.

Is Yoast SEO available for Shopify?

Yoast SEO is exclusively a WordPress plugin. There is currently no Yoast SEO Shopify App.

Limiting your Shopify apps

Similar to WordPress plugins, Shopify apps will inject additional code onto your site. This means that adding a large number of apps can slow down the site. Shopify sites are especially susceptible to bloat, as many apps are focused on improving conversions. Often times, these apps will add more JavaScript and CSS files which can hurt page load times. You’ll want to be sure that you regularly audit the apps you’re using and remove any that are not adding value or being utilized by the site.

Client results

We’ve seen pretty good success in our clients that use Shopify stores. Below you can find some of the results we’ve been able to achieve for them. However, please note that these case studies do not just include the recommendations above. For these clients, we have used a combination of some of the recommendations outlined above as well as other SEO initiatives.

In one example, we worked with a Shopify store that was interested in ranking for very competitive terms surrounding the main product their store focused on. We evaluated their top performing products in the “Sales by product” report. This resulted in a large effort to work with the client to add new content to their product pages as they were not initially optimized. This combined with other initiatives has helped improve their first page rankings by 113 keywords (credit to Jennifer Wright & LaRhonda Sparrow).

In another instance, a client came to us with an issue that they were not ranking for their branded keywords. Instead, third-party retailers that also carried their products were often outranking them. We worked with them to adjust their internal linking structure to point to the canonical pages instead of the duplicate pages created by Shopify. We also optimized their content to better utilize the branded terminology on relevant pages. As a result, they’ve seen a nice increase in overall rankings in just several months time.

Moving forward

As Shopify usage continues to grow, it will be increasingly important to understand the SEO implications that come with the platform. Hopefully, this guide has provided you with additional knowledge that will help make your Shopify store stronger in the search engines. If you’re interested in learning more about Shopify, you can also check out our Shopify SEO Learning Center.

[drummcarpentry]

Shopify SEO: The Guide to Optimizing Shopify [Updated for 2022]

 A trend we’ve been noticing at Go Fish Digital is that more and more of our clients have been using the Shopify platform. While we initially thought this was just a coincidence, we can see that the data tells a different story:

The Shopify platform has been steadily rising in popularity throughout the years. Looking at BuiltWith usage statistics, we can see that usage of the CMS has more than doubled since October 2017. Currently, 4.24 of the top 10,000 sites and 3.02% of the top 100,000 are using Shopify.

Since we’ve worked with a good amount of Shopify stores, we wanted to share our process for common SEO improvements we help our clients with. The guide below should outline some common adjustments we make on Shopify stores.

What is Shopify SEO?

Shopify SEO is a set of  SEO adjustments that are unique to the Shopify platform. While Shopify stores come with some useful things for SEO, such as a blog and the ability to redirect, it can also create SEO issues such as duplicate content. 

Some of the most common Shopify SEO recommendations are:

Remove duplicate URLs from internal linking architecture

Remove duplicate paginated URLs

Create blog content for keywords with informational intent

Add “Product,” “Article,” & “BreadcrumbList” structured data

Determine how to handle product variant pages

Compress images using crush.pics

Remove unnecessary Shopify apps

We’ll go into how we handle each of these recommendations below:

Duplicate content

In terms of SEO, duplicate content is the highest priority issue we’ve seen created by Shopify. Duplicate content occurs when either duplicate or similar content exists on two separate URLs. This creates issues for search engines as they might not be able to determine which of the two pages should be the canonical version. On top of this, often times link signals are split between the pages.

We’ve seen Shopify create duplicate content in several different ways:

Duplicate product pages

Duplicate collections pages through pagination

Duplicate product pages

Shopify creates this issue within their product pages. By default, Shopify stores allow their /products/ pages to render at two different URL paths:

Canonical URL path: /products/

Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/

Shopify accounts for this by ensuring that all /collections/.*/products/ pages include a canonical tag to the associated /products/ page. Notice how the URL in the address differs from the “canonical” field:

While this certainly helps Google consolidate the duplicate content, a more alarming issue occurs when you look at the internal linking structure. By default, Shopify will link to the non-canonical version of all of your product pages.

As well, we’ve also seen Shopify link to the non-canonical versions of URLs when websites utilize “swatch” internal links that point to other color variants.

Thus, Shopify creates your entire site architecture around non-canonical links by default. This creates a high-priority SEO issue because the website is sending Google conflicting signals:

“Here are the pages we internally link to the most often”

“However, the pages we link to the most often are not the URLs we actually want to be ranking in Google. Please index these other URLs with few internal links”

While canonical tags are usually respected, remember Google does treat these as hints instead of directives. This means that you’re relying on Google to make a judgement about whether or not the content is duplicate each time that it crawls these pages. We prefer not to leave this up to chance, especially when dealing with content at scale.

Adjusting internal linking structure

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix for this. We’ve been able to work with our dev team to adjust the code in the product.grid-item.liquid file. Following those instructions will allow your Shopify site’s collections pages to point to the canonical /product/ URLs.

Duplicate collections pages

As well, we’ve seen many Shopify sites that create duplicate content through the site’s pagination. More specifically, a duplicate is created of the first collections page in a particular series. This is because once you're on a paginated URL in a series, the link to the first page will contain “?page=1”:

However, this will almost always be a duplicate page. A URL with “?page=1” will almost always contain the same content as the original non-parameterized URL. Once again, we recommend having a developer adjust the internal linking structure so that the first paginated result points to the canonical page.

Product variant pages

While this is technically an extension of Shopify’s duplicate content from above, we thought this warranted its own section because this isn’t necessarily always an SEO issue.

It’s not uncommon to see Shopify stores where multiple product URLs are created for the same product with slight variations. In this case, this can create duplicate content issues as often times the core product is the same, but only a slight attribute (color for instance) changes. This means that multiple pages can exist with duplicate/similar product descriptions and images. Here is an example of duplicate pages created by a variant: https://recordit.co/x6YRPkCDqG

If left alone, this once again creates an instance of duplicate content. However, variant URLs do not have to be an SEO issue. In fact, some sites could benefit from these URLs as they allow you to have indexable pages that could be optimized for very specific terms. Whether or not these are beneficial is going to differ on every site. Some key questions to ask yourself are:

Do your customers perform queries based on variant phrases?

Do you have the resources to create unique content for all of your product variants?

Is this content unique enough to stand on its own?

For a more in-depth guide, Jenny Halasz wrote a great article on determining the best course of action for product variations. If your Shopify store contains product variants, than it’s worth determining early on whether or not these pages should exist at a separate URL. If they should, then you should create unique content for every one and optimize each for that variant’s target keywords.

Crawling and indexing

After analyzing quite a few Shopify stores, we’ve found some SEO items that are unique to Shopify when it comes to crawling and indexing. Since this is very often an important component of e-commerce SEO, we thought it would be good to share the ones that apply to Shopify.

Robots.txt file

By default, Shopify creates a robots.txt file for your store with quite a few prewritten “Disallow” commands. We find that in most cases, Shopify’s default robots.txt rules are good enough for most store owners. You can see an example of Shopify’s default robots.txt rules here:

Here are some sections of the site that Shopify will disallow crawling in:

Admin area

Checkout

Orders

Shopping cart

Internal search

Policies page

However, as Shopify stores get bigger and more customized, there’s a greater chance that you might need to adjust the robots.txt file. Fortunately, as of June 2021, Shopify now let’s you update the robots.txt file. 

In order to edit the Shopify robots.txt file, store owners must create a robots.txt.liquid file and then create custom rules to specify any changes.

In order to create a robots.txt.liquid file, store owners can perform the following steps:

Login to your Shopify admin area

In the left sidebar, go to Online Store > Themes

Choose Actions > Edit code

In “Templates”, select the “Add a new template” link

Find the left-most dropdown and choose “robots.txt”

Choose “Create template”

This should create your Shopify robots.txt.liquid file. You can then add rules to your robots.txt.liquid file by adding liquid code. Fortunately, this code isn’t too difficult to add, and Shopify does a good job of highlighting how to do it in their official documentation. Following these steps should allow you to have much more control over which URLs are crawled in your Shopify site.

Sitemap.xml

By default, Shopify will generate a sitemap.xml index file at the URL path “domain.com/sitemap.xml”. Shopify’s sitemap.xml index file will automatically create links to child sitemaps that contain URLs of the following page types:

Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)

Collection Pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)

Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)

Marketing Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)

This sitemap.xml file will dynamically update as new pages are added/removed from to the site. Generally, the Shopify sitemap.xml is good to go out of the box and doesn’t need to be adjusted.

One thing to be aware of is that Shopify will include any published pages in the sitemap.xml file. The most common issue we see is that legacy pages that are published but no longer linked to on the site get included in the sitemap.xml file. It’s worth crawling your sitemap.xml to find any instances of published pages that are included in the sitemap but are not important for search engines to crawl.

Adding the “noindex” tag

While you cannot adjust the robots.txt, Shopify does allow you to add the “noindex” tag. You can exclude a specific page from the index by adding the following code to your theme.liquid file.

As well, if you want to exclude an entire template, you can use this code:

Redirects

Shopify does allow you to implement redirects out-of-the-box, which is great. You can use this for consolidating old/expired pages or any other content that no longer exists. You can do this by going to:

Online Store

Navigation

URL Redirects

The big thing to keep in mind is that you will need to delete a page before you can implement a redirect on Shopify. This means that you’ll want to be really sure you’re not going to use the page in the future. To make this process a little less stressful, we recommend implementing the “Rewind Backups” app.

Log files

As of now, Shopify does not allow you to access log files directly through the platform. This has been confirmed by Shopify support.

Fast Simon implementation

Fast Simon is an enterprise solution that adds robust personalization features to your Shopify store, and is becoming increasingly popular. If your Shopify site is utilizing the Fast Simon technology, you’ll want to be sure that you’re taking steps to adjust any potential indexing issues from an improper implementation. 

Confirm that Fast Simon is pre-rendering your website’s content so that Google doesn’t run into crawling and indexing issues. This will give Googlebot a server-side, rendered version of your site that will make it easier for it to interpret the content. For more details, you can read our case study here. 

Structured data

Product structured data

Overall, Shopify does a pretty good job with structured data. Many Shopify themes should contain “Product” markup out-of-the-box that provides Google with key information such as your product’s name, description, price etc. This is probably the highest priority structured data to have on any e-commerce site, so it’s great that many themes do this for you.

Shopify sites might also benefit from expanding the Product structured data to collections pages as well. This involves adding the Product structured data to define each individual product link in a product listing page. The good folks at Distilled recommend including this structured data on category pages.

Article structured data

As well, if you use Shopify’s blog functionality, you should use “Article” structured data. This is a fantastic schema type that lets Google know that your blog content is more editorial in nature. Of all of the informational content schema, “Article” seems to be the one that Google may prefer since that’s what’s referenced in their official documentation. However, “BlogPosting” schema is also another type of structured data you could add to your Shopify blog

BreadcrumbList structured data

One addition that we routinely add to Shopify sites are breadcrumb internal links with BreadcrumbList structured data. We believe breadcrumbs are crucial to any e-commerce site, as they provide users with easy-to-use internal links that indicate where they’re at within the hierarchy of a website. As well, these breadcrumbs can help Google better understand the website’s structure. We typically suggest adding site breadcrumbs to Shopify sites and marking those up with BreadcrumbList structured data to help Google better understand those internal links.

Implementing structured data on Shopify

If you want to implement structured data and have a developer on hand, it can be good to have them add the above structured data types. This ensures that these schema elements will always be present on your site.

However, if your development resources are more limited, we find that Schema App Total Schema Markup is a great option. This will incorporate structured data types such as Product and BlogPosting schema on the proper pages of the site. As well, it will even add OfferCatalog schema to mark up every single product within a category page. Their support is also fantastic as they’re team helps you with any technical issues you might encounter.

Improving Shopify site speed

One of the biggest complaints we hear about Shopify is that it suffers from slower speeds. However, compared to other e-commerce platforms, we find that Shopify performs quite well. Out of the box, Shopify uses the Fastly CDN and leverages browser caching which gives you a solid performance foundation. In the past, we’ve actually benchmarked the average speed metrics of 400+ Shopify sites. Below are the average performance metrics of the Shopify sites we tested in our dataset.

First Contentful Paint: 3.8 seconds

Time To Interactive: 22.1 seconds

Total Page Size: 4.41 MB

Total Image Assets: 2.1 MB

Requests: 171

In terms of improving performance, below are the things we’ll generally advise our clients to do:

Lazy load images with the lazysizes library

Automatically compress images using Crush.pics

Eliminate any low usage Shopify apps

Manually resize and compress large images on high priority pages

Migrate tracking codes to Google Tag Manager

Keyword research

Performing keyword research for Shopify stores will be very similar to the research you would perform for other e-commerce stores.

Some general ways to generate keywords are:

Export your keyword data from Google AdWords. Track and optimize for those that generate the most revenue for the site.

Research your AdWords keywords that have high conversion rates. Even if the volume is lower, a high conversion rate indicates that this keyword is more transactional.

Review the keywords the site currently gets clicks/impressions for in Google Search Console.

Research your high priority keywords and generate new ideas using Moz’s Keyword Explorer.

Run your competitors through tools like Ahrefs. Using the “Content Gap” report, you can find keyword opportunities where competitor sites are ranking but yours is not.

If you have keywords that use similar modifiers, you can use MergeWords to automatically generate a large variety of keyword variations.

Keyword optimization

Similar to Yoast SEO, Shopify does allow you to optimize key elements such as your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs. Where possible, you should be using your target keywords in these elements.

To adjust these elements, you simply need to navigate to the page you wish to adjust and scroll down to “Search Engine Listing Preview”:

Adding content to product pages

If you decide that each individual product should be indexed, ideally you’ll want to add unique content to each page. Initially, your Shopify products may not have unique on-page content associated with them. This is a common issue for Shopify stores, as oftentimes the same descriptions are used across multiple products or no descriptions are present. Adding product descriptions with on-page best practices will give your products the best chance of ranking in the SERPs.

However, we understand that it’s time-consuming to create unique content for every product that you offer. With clients in the past, we’ve taken a targeted approach as to which products to optimize first. We like to use the “Sales By Product” report which can help prioritize which are the most important products to start adding content to. You can find this report in Analytics > Dashboard > Top Products By Units Sold.

By taking this approach, we can quickly identify some of the highest priority pages in the store to optimize. We can then work with a copywriter to start creating content for each individual product. Also, keep in mind that your product descriptions should always be written from a user-focused view. Writing about the features of the product they care about the most will give your site the best chance at improving both conversions and SEO.

Shopify blog

Shopify does include the ability to create a blog, but we often see this missing from a large number of Shopify stores. It makes sense, as revenue is the primary goal of an e-commerce site, so the initial build of the site is product-focused.

However, we live in an era where it’s getting harder and harder to rank product pages in Google. For instance, the below screenshot illustrates the top 3 organic results for the term “cloth diapers”:

While many would assume that this is primarily a transactional query, we’re seeing Google is ranking two articles and a single product listing page in the top three results. This is just one instance of a major trend we’ve seen where Google is starting to prefer to rank more informational content above transactional.

By excluding a blog from a Shopify store, we think this results in a huge missed opportunity for many businesses. The inclusion of a blog allows you to have a natural place where you can create this informational content. If you’re seeing that Google is ranking more blog/article types of content for the keywords mapped to your Shopify store, your best bet is to go out and create that content yourself.

If you run a Shopify store (or any e-commerce site), we would urge you to take the following few steps:

Identify your highest priority keywords

Manually perform a Google query for each one

Make note of the types of content Google is ranking on the first page. Is it primarily informational, transactional, or a mix of both?

If you’re seeing primarily mixed or informational content, evaluate your own content to see if you have any that matches the user intent. If so, improve the quality and optimize.

If you do not have this content, consider creating new blog content around informational topics that seems to fulfill the user intent

As an example, we have a client that was interested in ranking for the term “CRM software,” an extremely competitive keyword. When analyzing the SERPs, we found that Google was ranking primarily informational pages about “What Is CRM Software?” Since they only had a product page that highlighted their specific CRM, we suggested the client create a more informational page that talked generally about what CRM software is and the benefits it provides. After creating and optimizing the page, we soon saw a significant increase in organic traffic (credit to Ally Mickler):

The issue that we see on many Shopify sites is that there is very little focus on informational pages despite the fact that those perform well in the search engines. Most Shopify sites should be using the blogging platform, as this will provide an avenue to create informational content that will result in organic traffic and revenue.

Apps

Similar to WordPress’s plugins, Shopify offers “Apps” that allow you to add advanced functionality to your site without having to manually adjust the code. However, unlike WordPress, most of the Shopify Apps you’ll find are paid. This will require either a one-time or monthly fee.

Shopify apps for SEO

While your best bet is likely teaming up with a developer who's comfortable with Shopify, here are some Shopify apps that can help improve the SEO of your site.

Crush.pics: A great automated way of compressing large image files. Crucial for most Shopify sites as many of these sites are heavily image-based.

Schema App Total Schema Markup: This app may be used if you do not have a Shopify developer who is able to add custom structured data to your site.

Smart SEO: An app that can add meta tags, alt tags, & JSON-LD

Yotpo Reviews: This app can help you add product reviews to your site, making your content eligible for rich review stars in the SERPs.

Rewind Backups: Creates backups of your site. Great to implement before making development changes or adding redirects.

Is Yoast SEO available for Shopify?

Yoast SEO is exclusively a WordPress plugin. There is currently no Yoast SEO Shopify App.

Limiting your Shopify apps

Similar to WordPress plugins, Shopify apps will inject additional code onto your site. This means that adding a large number of apps can slow down the site. Shopify sites are especially susceptible to bloat, as many apps are focused on improving conversions. Often times, these apps will add more JavaScript and CSS files which can hurt page load times. You’ll want to be sure that you regularly audit the apps you’re using and remove any that are not adding value or being utilized by the site.

Client results

We’ve seen pretty good success in our clients that use Shopify stores. Below you can find some of the results we’ve been able to achieve for them. However, please note that these case studies do not just include the recommendations above. For these clients, we have used a combination of some of the recommendations outlined above as well as other SEO initiatives.

In one example, we worked with a Shopify store that was interested in ranking for very competitive terms surrounding the main product their store focused on. We evaluated their top performing products in the “Sales by product” report. This resulted in a large effort to work with the client to add new content to their product pages as they were not initially optimized. This combined with other initiatives has helped improve their first page rankings by 113 keywords (credit to Jennifer Wright & LaRhonda Sparrow).

In another instance, a client came to us with an issue that they were not ranking for their branded keywords. Instead, third-party retailers that also carried their products were often outranking them. We worked with them to adjust their internal linking structure to point to the canonical pages instead of the duplicate pages created by Shopify. We also optimized their content to better utilize the branded terminology on relevant pages. As a result, they’ve seen a nice increase in overall rankings in just several months time.

Moving forward

As Shopify usage continues to grow, it will be increasingly important to understand the SEO implications that come with the platform. Hopefully, this guide has provided you with additional knowledge that will help make your Shopify store stronger in the search engines. If you’re interested in learning more about Shopify, you can also check out our Shopify SEO Learning Center.

[lakelandseo]

Shopify SEO: The Guide to Optimizing Shopify [Updated for 2022]

 A trend we’ve been noticing at Go Fish Digital is that more and more of our clients have been using the Shopify platform. While we initially thought this was just a coincidence, we can see that the data tells a different story:

The Shopify platform has been steadily rising in popularity throughout the years. Looking at BuiltWith usage statistics, we can see that usage of the CMS has more than doubled since October 2017. Currently, 4.24 of the top 10,000 sites and 3.02% of the top 100,000 are using Shopify.

Since we’ve worked with a good amount of Shopify stores, we wanted to share our process for common SEO improvements we help our clients with. The guide below should outline some common adjustments we make on Shopify stores.

What is Shopify SEO?

Shopify SEO is a set of  SEO adjustments that are unique to the Shopify platform. While Shopify stores come with some useful things for SEO, such as a blog and the ability to redirect, it can also create SEO issues such as duplicate content. 

Some of the most common Shopify SEO recommendations are:

Remove duplicate URLs from internal linking architecture

Remove duplicate paginated URLs

Create blog content for keywords with informational intent

Add “Product,” “Article,” & “BreadcrumbList” structured data

Determine how to handle product variant pages

Compress images using crush.pics

Remove unnecessary Shopify apps

We’ll go into how we handle each of these recommendations below:

Duplicate content

In terms of SEO, duplicate content is the highest priority issue we’ve seen created by Shopify. Duplicate content occurs when either duplicate or similar content exists on two separate URLs. This creates issues for search engines as they might not be able to determine which of the two pages should be the canonical version. On top of this, often times link signals are split between the pages.

We’ve seen Shopify create duplicate content in several different ways:

Duplicate product pages

Duplicate collections pages through pagination

Duplicate product pages

Shopify creates this issue within their product pages. By default, Shopify stores allow their /products/ pages to render at two different URL paths:

Canonical URL path: /products/

Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/

Shopify accounts for this by ensuring that all /collections/.*/products/ pages include a canonical tag to the associated /products/ page. Notice how the URL in the address differs from the “canonical” field:

While this certainly helps Google consolidate the duplicate content, a more alarming issue occurs when you look at the internal linking structure. By default, Shopify will link to the non-canonical version of all of your product pages.

As well, we’ve also seen Shopify link to the non-canonical versions of URLs when websites utilize “swatch” internal links that point to other color variants.

Thus, Shopify creates your entire site architecture around non-canonical links by default. This creates a high-priority SEO issue because the website is sending Google conflicting signals:

“Here are the pages we internally link to the most often”

“However, the pages we link to the most often are not the URLs we actually want to be ranking in Google. Please index these other URLs with few internal links”

While canonical tags are usually respected, remember Google does treat these as hints instead of directives. This means that you’re relying on Google to make a judgement about whether or not the content is duplicate each time that it crawls these pages. We prefer not to leave this up to chance, especially when dealing with content at scale.

Adjusting internal linking structure

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix for this. We’ve been able to work with our dev team to adjust the code in the product.grid-item.liquid file. Following those instructions will allow your Shopify site’s collections pages to point to the canonical /product/ URLs.

Duplicate collections pages

As well, we’ve seen many Shopify sites that create duplicate content through the site’s pagination. More specifically, a duplicate is created of the first collections page in a particular series. This is because once you're on a paginated URL in a series, the link to the first page will contain “?page=1”:

However, this will almost always be a duplicate page. A URL with “?page=1” will almost always contain the same content as the original non-parameterized URL. Once again, we recommend having a developer adjust the internal linking structure so that the first paginated result points to the canonical page.

Product variant pages

While this is technically an extension of Shopify’s duplicate content from above, we thought this warranted its own section because this isn’t necessarily always an SEO issue.

It’s not uncommon to see Shopify stores where multiple product URLs are created for the same product with slight variations. In this case, this can create duplicate content issues as often times the core product is the same, but only a slight attribute (color for instance) changes. This means that multiple pages can exist with duplicate/similar product descriptions and images. Here is an example of duplicate pages created by a variant: https://recordit.co/x6YRPkCDqG

If left alone, this once again creates an instance of duplicate content. However, variant URLs do not have to be an SEO issue. In fact, some sites could benefit from these URLs as they allow you to have indexable pages that could be optimized for very specific terms. Whether or not these are beneficial is going to differ on every site. Some key questions to ask yourself are:

Do your customers perform queries based on variant phrases?

Do you have the resources to create unique content for all of your product variants?

Is this content unique enough to stand on its own?

For a more in-depth guide, Jenny Halasz wrote a great article on determining the best course of action for product variations. If your Shopify store contains product variants, than it’s worth determining early on whether or not these pages should exist at a separate URL. If they should, then you should create unique content for every one and optimize each for that variant’s target keywords.

Crawling and indexing

After analyzing quite a few Shopify stores, we’ve found some SEO items that are unique to Shopify when it comes to crawling and indexing. Since this is very often an important component of e-commerce SEO, we thought it would be good to share the ones that apply to Shopify.

Robots.txt file

By default, Shopify creates a robots.txt file for your store with quite a few prewritten “Disallow” commands. We find that in most cases, Shopify’s default robots.txt rules are good enough for most store owners. You can see an example of Shopify’s default robots.txt rules here:

Here are some sections of the site that Shopify will disallow crawling in:

Admin area

Checkout

Orders

Shopping cart

Internal search

Policies page

However, as Shopify stores get bigger and more customized, there’s a greater chance that you might need to adjust the robots.txt file. Fortunately, as of June 2021, Shopify now let’s you update the robots.txt file. 

In order to edit the Shopify robots.txt file, store owners must create a robots.txt.liquid file and then create custom rules to specify any changes.

In order to create a robots.txt.liquid file, store owners can perform the following steps:

Login to your Shopify admin area

In the left sidebar, go to Online Store > Themes

Choose Actions > Edit code

In “Templates”, select the “Add a new template” link

Find the left-most dropdown and choose “robots.txt”

Choose “Create template”

This should create your Shopify robots.txt.liquid file. You can then add rules to your robots.txt.liquid file by adding liquid code. Fortunately, this code isn’t too difficult to add, and Shopify does a good job of highlighting how to do it in their official documentation. Following these steps should allow you to have much more control over which URLs are crawled in your Shopify site.

Sitemap.xml

By default, Shopify will generate a sitemap.xml index file at the URL path “domain.com/sitemap.xml”. Shopify’s sitemap.xml index file will automatically create links to child sitemaps that contain URLs of the following page types:

Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)

Collection Pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)

Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)

Marketing Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)

This sitemap.xml file will dynamically update as new pages are added/removed from to the site. Generally, the Shopify sitemap.xml is good to go out of the box and doesn’t need to be adjusted.

One thing to be aware of is that Shopify will include any published pages in the sitemap.xml file. The most common issue we see is that legacy pages that are published but no longer linked to on the site get included in the sitemap.xml file. It’s worth crawling your sitemap.xml to find any instances of published pages that are included in the sitemap but are not important for search engines to crawl.

Adding the “noindex” tag

While you cannot adjust the robots.txt, Shopify does allow you to add the “noindex” tag. You can exclude a specific page from the index by adding the following code to your theme.liquid file.

As well, if you want to exclude an entire template, you can use this code:

Redirects

Shopify does allow you to implement redirects out-of-the-box, which is great. You can use this for consolidating old/expired pages or any other content that no longer exists. You can do this by going to:

Online Store

Navigation

URL Redirects

The big thing to keep in mind is that you will need to delete a page before you can implement a redirect on Shopify. This means that you’ll want to be really sure you’re not going to use the page in the future. To make this process a little less stressful, we recommend implementing the “Rewind Backups” app.

Log files

As of now, Shopify does not allow you to access log files directly through the platform. This has been confirmed by Shopify support.

Fast Simon implementation

Fast Simon is an enterprise solution that adds robust personalization features to your Shopify store, and is becoming increasingly popular. If your Shopify site is utilizing the Fast Simon technology, you’ll want to be sure that you’re taking steps to adjust any potential indexing issues from an improper implementation. 

Confirm that Fast Simon is pre-rendering your website’s content so that Google doesn’t run into crawling and indexing issues. This will give Googlebot a server-side, rendered version of your site that will make it easier for it to interpret the content. For more details, you can read our case study here. 

Structured data

Product structured data

Overall, Shopify does a pretty good job with structured data. Many Shopify themes should contain “Product” markup out-of-the-box that provides Google with key information such as your product’s name, description, price etc. This is probably the highest priority structured data to have on any e-commerce site, so it’s great that many themes do this for you.

Shopify sites might also benefit from expanding the Product structured data to collections pages as well. This involves adding the Product structured data to define each individual product link in a product listing page. The good folks at Distilled recommend including this structured data on category pages.

Article structured data

As well, if you use Shopify’s blog functionality, you should use “Article” structured data. This is a fantastic schema type that lets Google know that your blog content is more editorial in nature. Of all of the informational content schema, “Article” seems to be the one that Google may prefer since that’s what’s referenced in their official documentation. However, “BlogPosting” schema is also another type of structured data you could add to your Shopify blog

BreadcrumbList structured data

One addition that we routinely add to Shopify sites are breadcrumb internal links with BreadcrumbList structured data. We believe breadcrumbs are crucial to any e-commerce site, as they provide users with easy-to-use internal links that indicate where they’re at within the hierarchy of a website. As well, these breadcrumbs can help Google better understand the website’s structure. We typically suggest adding site breadcrumbs to Shopify sites and marking those up with BreadcrumbList structured data to help Google better understand those internal links.

Implementing structured data on Shopify

If you want to implement structured data and have a developer on hand, it can be good to have them add the above structured data types. This ensures that these schema elements will always be present on your site.

However, if your development resources are more limited, we find that Schema App Total Schema Markup is a great option. This will incorporate structured data types such as Product and BlogPosting schema on the proper pages of the site. As well, it will even add OfferCatalog schema to mark up every single product within a category page. Their support is also fantastic as they’re team helps you with any technical issues you might encounter.

Improving Shopify site speed

One of the biggest complaints we hear about Shopify is that it suffers from slower speeds. However, compared to other e-commerce platforms, we find that Shopify performs quite well. Out of the box, Shopify uses the Fastly CDN and leverages browser caching which gives you a solid performance foundation. In the past, we’ve actually benchmarked the average speed metrics of 400+ Shopify sites. Below are the average performance metrics of the Shopify sites we tested in our dataset.

First Contentful Paint: 3.8 seconds

Time To Interactive: 22.1 seconds

Total Page Size: 4.41 MB

Total Image Assets: 2.1 MB

Requests: 171

In terms of improving performance, below are the things we’ll generally advise our clients to do:

Lazy load images with the lazysizes library

Automatically compress images using Crush.pics

Eliminate any low usage Shopify apps

Manually resize and compress large images on high priority pages

Migrate tracking codes to Google Tag Manager

Keyword research

Performing keyword research for Shopify stores will be very similar to the research you would perform for other e-commerce stores.

Some general ways to generate keywords are:

Export your keyword data from Google AdWords. Track and optimize for those that generate the most revenue for the site.

Research your AdWords keywords that have high conversion rates. Even if the volume is lower, a high conversion rate indicates that this keyword is more transactional.

Review the keywords the site currently gets clicks/impressions for in Google Search Console.

Research your high priority keywords and generate new ideas using Moz’s Keyword Explorer.

Run your competitors through tools like Ahrefs. Using the “Content Gap” report, you can find keyword opportunities where competitor sites are ranking but yours is not.

If you have keywords that use similar modifiers, you can use MergeWords to automatically generate a large variety of keyword variations.

Keyword optimization

Similar to Yoast SEO, Shopify does allow you to optimize key elements such as your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs. Where possible, you should be using your target keywords in these elements.

To adjust these elements, you simply need to navigate to the page you wish to adjust and scroll down to “Search Engine Listing Preview”:

Adding content to product pages

If you decide that each individual product should be indexed, ideally you’ll want to add unique content to each page. Initially, your Shopify products may not have unique on-page content associated with them. This is a common issue for Shopify stores, as oftentimes the same descriptions are used across multiple products or no descriptions are present. Adding product descriptions with on-page best practices will give your products the best chance of ranking in the SERPs.

However, we understand that it’s time-consuming to create unique content for every product that you offer. With clients in the past, we’ve taken a targeted approach as to which products to optimize first. We like to use the “Sales By Product” report which can help prioritize which are the most important products to start adding content to. You can find this report in Analytics > Dashboard > Top Products By Units Sold.

By taking this approach, we can quickly identify some of the highest priority pages in the store to optimize. We can then work with a copywriter to start creating content for each individual product. Also, keep in mind that your product descriptions should always be written from a user-focused view. Writing about the features of the product they care about the most will give your site the best chance at improving both conversions and SEO.

Shopify blog

Shopify does include the ability to create a blog, but we often see this missing from a large number of Shopify stores. It makes sense, as revenue is the primary goal of an e-commerce site, so the initial build of the site is product-focused.

However, we live in an era where it’s getting harder and harder to rank product pages in Google. For instance, the below screenshot illustrates the top 3 organic results for the term “cloth diapers”:

While many would assume that this is primarily a transactional query, we’re seeing Google is ranking two articles and a single product listing page in the top three results. This is just one instance of a major trend we’ve seen where Google is starting to prefer to rank more informational content above transactional.

By excluding a blog from a Shopify store, we think this results in a huge missed opportunity for many businesses. The inclusion of a blog allows you to have a natural place where you can create this informational content. If you’re seeing that Google is ranking more blog/article types of content for the keywords mapped to your Shopify store, your best bet is to go out and create that content yourself.

If you run a Shopify store (or any e-commerce site), we would urge you to take the following few steps:

Identify your highest priority keywords

Manually perform a Google query for each one

Make note of the types of content Google is ranking on the first page. Is it primarily informational, transactional, or a mix of both?

If you’re seeing primarily mixed or informational content, evaluate your own content to see if you have any that matches the user intent. If so, improve the quality and optimize.

If you do not have this content, consider creating new blog content around informational topics that seems to fulfill the user intent

As an example, we have a client that was interested in ranking for the term “CRM software,” an extremely competitive keyword. When analyzing the SERPs, we found that Google was ranking primarily informational pages about “What Is CRM Software?” Since they only had a product page that highlighted their specific CRM, we suggested the client create a more informational page that talked generally about what CRM software is and the benefits it provides. After creating and optimizing the page, we soon saw a significant increase in organic traffic (credit to Ally Mickler):

The issue that we see on many Shopify sites is that there is very little focus on informational pages despite the fact that those perform well in the search engines. Most Shopify sites should be using the blogging platform, as this will provide an avenue to create informational content that will result in organic traffic and revenue.

Apps

Similar to WordPress’s plugins, Shopify offers “Apps” that allow you to add advanced functionality to your site without having to manually adjust the code. However, unlike WordPress, most of the Shopify Apps you’ll find are paid. This will require either a one-time or monthly fee.

Shopify apps for SEO

While your best bet is likely teaming up with a developer who's comfortable with Shopify, here are some Shopify apps that can help improve the SEO of your site.

Crush.pics: A great automated way of compressing large image files. Crucial for most Shopify sites as many of these sites are heavily image-based.

Schema App Total Schema Markup: This app may be used if you do not have a Shopify developer who is able to add custom structured data to your site.

Smart SEO: An app that can add meta tags, alt tags, & JSON-LD

Yotpo Reviews: This app can help you add product reviews to your site, making your content eligible for rich review stars in the SERPs.

Rewind Backups: Creates backups of your site. Great to implement before making development changes or adding redirects.

Is Yoast SEO available for Shopify?

Yoast SEO is exclusively a WordPress plugin. There is currently no Yoast SEO Shopify App.

Limiting your Shopify apps

Similar to WordPress plugins, Shopify apps will inject additional code onto your site. This means that adding a large number of apps can slow down the site. Shopify sites are especially susceptible to bloat, as many apps are focused on improving conversions. Often times, these apps will add more JavaScript and CSS files which can hurt page load times. You’ll want to be sure that you regularly audit the apps you’re using and remove any that are not adding value or being utilized by the site.

Client results

We’ve seen pretty good success in our clients that use Shopify stores. Below you can find some of the results we’ve been able to achieve for them. However, please note that these case studies do not just include the recommendations above. For these clients, we have used a combination of some of the recommendations outlined above as well as other SEO initiatives.

In one example, we worked with a Shopify store that was interested in ranking for very competitive terms surrounding the main product their store focused on. We evaluated their top performing products in the “Sales by product” report. This resulted in a large effort to work with the client to add new content to their product pages as they were not initially optimized. This combined with other initiatives has helped improve their first page rankings by 113 keywords (credit to Jennifer Wright & LaRhonda Sparrow).

In another instance, a client came to us with an issue that they were not ranking for their branded keywords. Instead, third-party retailers that also carried their products were often outranking them. We worked with them to adjust their internal linking structure to point to the canonical pages instead of the duplicate pages created by Shopify. We also optimized their content to better utilize the branded terminology on relevant pages. As a result, they’ve seen a nice increase in overall rankings in just several months time.

Moving forward

As Shopify usage continues to grow, it will be increasingly important to understand the SEO implications that come with the platform. Hopefully, this guide has provided you with additional knowledge that will help make your Shopify store stronger in the search engines. If you’re interested in learning more about Shopify, you can also check out our Shopify SEO Learning Center.

[kjt-lawyers]

Shopify SEO: The Guide to Optimizing Shopify [Updated for 2022]

 A trend we’ve been noticing at Go Fish Digital is that more and more of our clients have been using the Shopify platform. While we initially thought this was just a coincidence, we can see that the data tells a different story:

The Shopify platform has been steadily rising in popularity throughout the years. Looking at BuiltWith usage statistics, we can see that usage of the CMS has more than doubled since October 2017. Currently, 4.24 of the top 10,000 sites and 3.02% of the top 100,000 are using Shopify.

Since we’ve worked with a good amount of Shopify stores, we wanted to share our process for common SEO improvements we help our clients with. The guide below should outline some common adjustments we make on Shopify stores.

What is Shopify SEO?

Shopify SEO is a set of  SEO adjustments that are unique to the Shopify platform. While Shopify stores come with some useful things for SEO, such as a blog and the ability to redirect, it can also create SEO issues such as duplicate content. 

Some of the most common Shopify SEO recommendations are:

Remove duplicate URLs from internal linking architecture

Remove duplicate paginated URLs

Create blog content for keywords with informational intent

Add “Product,” “Article,” & “BreadcrumbList” structured data

Determine how to handle product variant pages

Compress images using crush.pics

Remove unnecessary Shopify apps

We’ll go into how we handle each of these recommendations below:

Duplicate content

In terms of SEO, duplicate content is the highest priority issue we’ve seen created by Shopify. Duplicate content occurs when either duplicate or similar content exists on two separate URLs. This creates issues for search engines as they might not be able to determine which of the two pages should be the canonical version. On top of this, often times link signals are split between the pages.

We’ve seen Shopify create duplicate content in several different ways:

Duplicate product pages

Duplicate collections pages through pagination

Duplicate product pages

Shopify creates this issue within their product pages. By default, Shopify stores allow their /products/ pages to render at two different URL paths:

Canonical URL path: /products/

Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/

Shopify accounts for this by ensuring that all /collections/.*/products/ pages include a canonical tag to the associated /products/ page. Notice how the URL in the address differs from the “canonical” field:

While this certainly helps Google consolidate the duplicate content, a more alarming issue occurs when you look at the internal linking structure. By default, Shopify will link to the non-canonical version of all of your product pages.

As well, we’ve also seen Shopify link to the non-canonical versions of URLs when websites utilize “swatch” internal links that point to other color variants.

Thus, Shopify creates your entire site architecture around non-canonical links by default. This creates a high-priority SEO issue because the website is sending Google conflicting signals:

“Here are the pages we internally link to the most often”

“However, the pages we link to the most often are not the URLs we actually want to be ranking in Google. Please index these other URLs with few internal links”

While canonical tags are usually respected, remember Google does treat these as hints instead of directives. This means that you’re relying on Google to make a judgement about whether or not the content is duplicate each time that it crawls these pages. We prefer not to leave this up to chance, especially when dealing with content at scale.

Adjusting internal linking structure

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix for this. We’ve been able to work with our dev team to adjust the code in the product.grid-item.liquid file. Following those instructions will allow your Shopify site’s collections pages to point to the canonical /product/ URLs.

Duplicate collections pages

As well, we’ve seen many Shopify sites that create duplicate content through the site’s pagination. More specifically, a duplicate is created of the first collections page in a particular series. This is because once you're on a paginated URL in a series, the link to the first page will contain “?page=1”:

However, this will almost always be a duplicate page. A URL with “?page=1” will almost always contain the same content as the original non-parameterized URL. Once again, we recommend having a developer adjust the internal linking structure so that the first paginated result points to the canonical page.

Product variant pages

While this is technically an extension of Shopify’s duplicate content from above, we thought this warranted its own section because this isn’t necessarily always an SEO issue.

It’s not uncommon to see Shopify stores where multiple product URLs are created for the same product with slight variations. In this case, this can create duplicate content issues as often times the core product is the same, but only a slight attribute (color for instance) changes. This means that multiple pages can exist with duplicate/similar product descriptions and images. Here is an example of duplicate pages created by a variant: https://recordit.co/x6YRPkCDqG

If left alone, this once again creates an instance of duplicate content. However, variant URLs do not have to be an SEO issue. In fact, some sites could benefit from these URLs as they allow you to have indexable pages that could be optimized for very specific terms. Whether or not these are beneficial is going to differ on every site. Some key questions to ask yourself are:

Do your customers perform queries based on variant phrases?

Do you have the resources to create unique content for all of your product variants?

Is this content unique enough to stand on its own?

For a more in-depth guide, Jenny Halasz wrote a great article on determining the best course of action for product variations. If your Shopify store contains product variants, than it’s worth determining early on whether or not these pages should exist at a separate URL. If they should, then you should create unique content for every one and optimize each for that variant’s target keywords.

Crawling and indexing

After analyzing quite a few Shopify stores, we’ve found some SEO items that are unique to Shopify when it comes to crawling and indexing. Since this is very often an important component of e-commerce SEO, we thought it would be good to share the ones that apply to Shopify.

Robots.txt file

By default, Shopify creates a robots.txt file for your store with quite a few prewritten “Disallow” commands. We find that in most cases, Shopify’s default robots.txt rules are good enough for most store owners. You can see an example of Shopify’s default robots.txt rules here:

Here are some sections of the site that Shopify will disallow crawling in:

Admin area

Checkout

Orders

Shopping cart

Internal search

Policies page

However, as Shopify stores get bigger and more customized, there’s a greater chance that you might need to adjust the robots.txt file. Fortunately, as of June 2021, Shopify now let’s you update the robots.txt file. 

In order to edit the Shopify robots.txt file, store owners must create a robots.txt.liquid file and then create custom rules to specify any changes.

In order to create a robots.txt.liquid file, store owners can perform the following steps:

Login to your Shopify admin area

In the left sidebar, go to Online Store > Themes

Choose Actions > Edit code

In “Templates”, select the “Add a new template” link

Find the left-most dropdown and choose “robots.txt”

Choose “Create template”

This should create your Shopify robots.txt.liquid file. You can then add rules to your robots.txt.liquid file by adding liquid code. Fortunately, this code isn’t too difficult to add, and Shopify does a good job of highlighting how to do it in their official documentation. Following these steps should allow you to have much more control over which URLs are crawled in your Shopify site.

Sitemap.xml

By default, Shopify will generate a sitemap.xml index file at the URL path “domain.com/sitemap.xml”. Shopify’s sitemap.xml index file will automatically create links to child sitemaps that contain URLs of the following page types:

Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)

Collection Pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)

Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)

Marketing Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)

This sitemap.xml file will dynamically update as new pages are added/removed from to the site. Generally, the Shopify sitemap.xml is good to go out of the box and doesn’t need to be adjusted.

One thing to be aware of is that Shopify will include any published pages in the sitemap.xml file. The most common issue we see is that legacy pages that are published but no longer linked to on the site get included in the sitemap.xml file. It’s worth crawling your sitemap.xml to find any instances of published pages that are included in the sitemap but are not important for search engines to crawl.

Adding the “noindex” tag

While you cannot adjust the robots.txt, Shopify does allow you to add the “noindex” tag. You can exclude a specific page from the index by adding the following code to your theme.liquid file.

As well, if you want to exclude an entire template, you can use this code:

Redirects

Shopify does allow you to implement redirects out-of-the-box, which is great. You can use this for consolidating old/expired pages or any other content that no longer exists. You can do this by going to:

Online Store

Navigation

URL Redirects

The big thing to keep in mind is that you will need to delete a page before you can implement a redirect on Shopify. This means that you’ll want to be really sure you’re not going to use the page in the future. To make this process a little less stressful, we recommend implementing the “Rewind Backups” app.

Log files

As of now, Shopify does not allow you to access log files directly through the platform. This has been confirmed by Shopify support.

Fast Simon implementation

Fast Simon is an enterprise solution that adds robust personalization features to your Shopify store, and is becoming increasingly popular. If your Shopify site is utilizing the Fast Simon technology, you’ll want to be sure that you’re taking steps to adjust any potential indexing issues from an improper implementation. 

Confirm that Fast Simon is pre-rendering your website’s content so that Google doesn’t run into crawling and indexing issues. This will give Googlebot a server-side, rendered version of your site that will make it easier for it to interpret the content. For more details, you can read our case study here. 

Structured data

Product structured data

Overall, Shopify does a pretty good job with structured data. Many Shopify themes should contain “Product” markup out-of-the-box that provides Google with key information such as your product’s name, description, price etc. This is probably the highest priority structured data to have on any e-commerce site, so it’s great that many themes do this for you.

Shopify sites might also benefit from expanding the Product structured data to collections pages as well. This involves adding the Product structured data to define each individual product link in a product listing page. The good folks at Distilled recommend including this structured data on category pages.

Article structured data

As well, if you use Shopify’s blog functionality, you should use “Article” structured data. This is a fantastic schema type that lets Google know that your blog content is more editorial in nature. Of all of the informational content schema, “Article” seems to be the one that Google may prefer since that’s what’s referenced in their official documentation. However, “BlogPosting” schema is also another type of structured data you could add to your Shopify blog

BreadcrumbList structured data

One addition that we routinely add to Shopify sites are breadcrumb internal links with BreadcrumbList structured data. We believe breadcrumbs are crucial to any e-commerce site, as they provide users with easy-to-use internal links that indicate where they’re at within the hierarchy of a website. As well, these breadcrumbs can help Google better understand the website’s structure. We typically suggest adding site breadcrumbs to Shopify sites and marking those up with BreadcrumbList structured data to help Google better understand those internal links.

Implementing structured data on Shopify

If you want to implement structured data and have a developer on hand, it can be good to have them add the above structured data types. This ensures that these schema elements will always be present on your site.

However, if your development resources are more limited, we find that Schema App Total Schema Markup is a great option. This will incorporate structured data types such as Product and BlogPosting schema on the proper pages of the site. As well, it will even add OfferCatalog schema to mark up every single product within a category page. Their support is also fantastic as they’re team helps you with any technical issues you might encounter.

Improving Shopify site speed

One of the biggest complaints we hear about Shopify is that it suffers from slower speeds. However, compared to other e-commerce platforms, we find that Shopify performs quite well. Out of the box, Shopify uses the Fastly CDN and leverages browser caching which gives you a solid performance foundation. In the past, we’ve actually benchmarked the average speed metrics of 400+ Shopify sites. Below are the average performance metrics of the Shopify sites we tested in our dataset.

First Contentful Paint: 3.8 seconds

Time To Interactive: 22.1 seconds

Total Page Size: 4.41 MB

Total Image Assets: 2.1 MB

Requests: 171

In terms of improving performance, below are the things we’ll generally advise our clients to do:

Lazy load images with the lazysizes library

Automatically compress images using Crush.pics

Eliminate any low usage Shopify apps

Manually resize and compress large images on high priority pages

Migrate tracking codes to Google Tag Manager

Keyword research

Performing keyword research for Shopify stores will be very similar to the research you would perform for other e-commerce stores.

Some general ways to generate keywords are:

Export your keyword data from Google AdWords. Track and optimize for those that generate the most revenue for the site.

Research your AdWords keywords that have high conversion rates. Even if the volume is lower, a high conversion rate indicates that this keyword is more transactional.

Review the keywords the site currently gets clicks/impressions for in Google Search Console.

Research your high priority keywords and generate new ideas using Moz’s Keyword Explorer.

Run your competitors through tools like Ahrefs. Using the “Content Gap” report, you can find keyword opportunities where competitor sites are ranking but yours is not.

If you have keywords that use similar modifiers, you can use MergeWords to automatically generate a large variety of keyword variations.

Keyword optimization

Similar to Yoast SEO, Shopify does allow you to optimize key elements such as your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs. Where possible, you should be using your target keywords in these elements.

To adjust these elements, you simply need to navigate to the page you wish to adjust and scroll down to “Search Engine Listing Preview”:

Adding content to product pages

If you decide that each individual product should be indexed, ideally you’ll want to add unique content to each page. Initially, your Shopify products may not have unique on-page content associated with them. This is a common issue for Shopify stores, as oftentimes the same descriptions are used across multiple products or no descriptions are present. Adding product descriptions with on-page best practices will give your products the best chance of ranking in the SERPs.

However, we understand that it’s time-consuming to create unique content for every product that you offer. With clients in the past, we’ve taken a targeted approach as to which products to optimize first. We like to use the “Sales By Product” report which can help prioritize which are the most important products to start adding content to. You can find this report in Analytics > Dashboard > Top Products By Units Sold.

By taking this approach, we can quickly identify some of the highest priority pages in the store to optimize. We can then work with a copywriter to start creating content for each individual product. Also, keep in mind that your product descriptions should always be written from a user-focused view. Writing about the features of the product they care about the most will give your site the best chance at improving both conversions and SEO.

Shopify blog

Shopify does include the ability to create a blog, but we often see this missing from a large number of Shopify stores. It makes sense, as revenue is the primary goal of an e-commerce site, so the initial build of the site is product-focused.

However, we live in an era where it’s getting harder and harder to rank product pages in Google. For instance, the below screenshot illustrates the top 3 organic results for the term “cloth diapers”:

While many would assume that this is primarily a transactional query, we’re seeing Google is ranking two articles and a single product listing page in the top three results. This is just one instance of a major trend we’ve seen where Google is starting to prefer to rank more informational content above transactional.

By excluding a blog from a Shopify store, we think this results in a huge missed opportunity for many businesses. The inclusion of a blog allows you to have a natural place where you can create this informational content. If you’re seeing that Google is ranking more blog/article types of content for the keywords mapped to your Shopify store, your best bet is to go out and create that content yourself.

If you run a Shopify store (or any e-commerce site), we would urge you to take the following few steps:

Identify your highest priority keywords

Manually perform a Google query for each one

Make note of the types of content Google is ranking on the first page. Is it primarily informational, transactional, or a mix of both?

If you’re seeing primarily mixed or informational content, evaluate your own content to see if you have any that matches the user intent. If so, improve the quality and optimize.

If you do not have this content, consider creating new blog content around informational topics that seems to fulfill the user intent

As an example, we have a client that was interested in ranking for the term “CRM software,” an extremely competitive keyword. When analyzing the SERPs, we found that Google was ranking primarily informational pages about “What Is CRM Software?” Since they only had a product page that highlighted their specific CRM, we suggested the client create a more informational page that talked generally about what CRM software is and the benefits it provides. After creating and optimizing the page, we soon saw a significant increase in organic traffic (credit to Ally Mickler):

The issue that we see on many Shopify sites is that there is very little focus on informational pages despite the fact that those perform well in the search engines. Most Shopify sites should be using the blogging platform, as this will provide an avenue to create informational content that will result in organic traffic and revenue.

Apps

Similar to WordPress’s plugins, Shopify offers “Apps” that allow you to add advanced functionality to your site without having to manually adjust the code. However, unlike WordPress, most of the Shopify Apps you’ll find are paid. This will require either a one-time or monthly fee.

Shopify apps for SEO

While your best bet is likely teaming up with a developer who's comfortable with Shopify, here are some Shopify apps that can help improve the SEO of your site.

Crush.pics: A great automated way of compressing large image files. Crucial for most Shopify sites as many of these sites are heavily image-based.

Schema App Total Schema Markup: This app may be used if you do not have a Shopify developer who is able to add custom structured data to your site.

Smart SEO: An app that can add meta tags, alt tags, & JSON-LD

Yotpo Reviews: This app can help you add product reviews to your site, making your content eligible for rich review stars in the SERPs.

Rewind Backups: Creates backups of your site. Great to implement before making development changes or adding redirects.

Is Yoast SEO available for Shopify?

Yoast SEO is exclusively a WordPress plugin. There is currently no Yoast SEO Shopify App.

Limiting your Shopify apps

Similar to WordPress plugins, Shopify apps will inject additional code onto your site. This means that adding a large number of apps can slow down the site. Shopify sites are especially susceptible to bloat, as many apps are focused on improving conversions. Often times, these apps will add more JavaScript and CSS files which can hurt page load times. You’ll want to be sure that you regularly audit the apps you’re using and remove any that are not adding value or being utilized by the site.

Client results

We’ve seen pretty good success in our clients that use Shopify stores. Below you can find some of the results we’ve been able to achieve for them. However, please note that these case studies do not just include the recommendations above. For these clients, we have used a combination of some of the recommendations outlined above as well as other SEO initiatives.

In one example, we worked with a Shopify store that was interested in ranking for very competitive terms surrounding the main product their store focused on. We evaluated their top performing products in the “Sales by product” report. This resulted in a large effort to work with the client to add new content to their product pages as they were not initially optimized. This combined with other initiatives has helped improve their first page rankings by 113 keywords (credit to Jennifer Wright & LaRhonda Sparrow).

In another instance, a client came to us with an issue that they were not ranking for their branded keywords. Instead, third-party retailers that also carried their products were often outranking them. We worked with them to adjust their internal linking structure to point to the canonical pages instead of the duplicate pages created by Shopify. We also optimized their content to better utilize the branded terminology on relevant pages. As a result, they’ve seen a nice increase in overall rankings in just several months time.

Moving forward

As Shopify usage continues to grow, it will be increasingly important to understand the SEO implications that come with the platform. Hopefully, this guide has provided you with additional knowledge that will help make your Shopify store stronger in the search engines. If you’re interested in learning more about Shopify, you can also check out our Shopify SEO Learning Center.

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Shopify SEO: The Guide to Optimizing Shopify [Updated for 2022]

 A trend we’ve been noticing at Go Fish Digital is that more and more of our clients have been using the Shopify platform. While we initially thought this was just a coincidence, we can see that the data tells a different story:

The Shopify platform has been steadily rising in popularity throughout the years. Looking at BuiltWith usage statistics, we can see that usage of the CMS has more than doubled since October 2017. Currently, 4.24 of the top 10,000 sites and 3.02% of the top 100,000 are using Shopify.

Since we’ve worked with a good amount of Shopify stores, we wanted to share our process for common SEO improvements we help our clients with. The guide below should outline some common adjustments we make on Shopify stores.

What is Shopify SEO?

Shopify SEO is a set of  SEO adjustments that are unique to the Shopify platform. While Shopify stores come with some useful things for SEO, such as a blog and the ability to redirect, it can also create SEO issues such as duplicate content. 

Some of the most common Shopify SEO recommendations are:

Remove duplicate URLs from internal linking architecture

Remove duplicate paginated URLs

Create blog content for keywords with informational intent

Add “Product,” “Article,” & “BreadcrumbList” structured data

Determine how to handle product variant pages

Compress images using crush.pics

Remove unnecessary Shopify apps

We’ll go into how we handle each of these recommendations below:

Duplicate content

In terms of SEO, duplicate content is the highest priority issue we’ve seen created by Shopify. Duplicate content occurs when either duplicate or similar content exists on two separate URLs. This creates issues for search engines as they might not be able to determine which of the two pages should be the canonical version. On top of this, often times link signals are split between the pages.

We’ve seen Shopify create duplicate content in several different ways:

Duplicate product pages

Duplicate collections pages through pagination

Duplicate product pages

Shopify creates this issue within their product pages. By default, Shopify stores allow their /products/ pages to render at two different URL paths:

Canonical URL path: /products/

Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/

Shopify accounts for this by ensuring that all /collections/.*/products/ pages include a canonical tag to the associated /products/ page. Notice how the URL in the address differs from the “canonical” field:

While this certainly helps Google consolidate the duplicate content, a more alarming issue occurs when you look at the internal linking structure. By default, Shopify will link to the non-canonical version of all of your product pages.

As well, we’ve also seen Shopify link to the non-canonical versions of URLs when websites utilize “swatch” internal links that point to other color variants.

Thus, Shopify creates your entire site architecture around non-canonical links by default. This creates a high-priority SEO issue because the website is sending Google conflicting signals:

“Here are the pages we internally link to the most often”

“However, the pages we link to the most often are not the URLs we actually want to be ranking in Google. Please index these other URLs with few internal links”

While canonical tags are usually respected, remember Google does treat these as hints instead of directives. This means that you’re relying on Google to make a judgement about whether or not the content is duplicate each time that it crawls these pages. We prefer not to leave this up to chance, especially when dealing with content at scale.

Adjusting internal linking structure

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix for this. We’ve been able to work with our dev team to adjust the code in the product.grid-item.liquid file. Following those instructions will allow your Shopify site’s collections pages to point to the canonical /product/ URLs.

Duplicate collections pages

As well, we’ve seen many Shopify sites that create duplicate content through the site’s pagination. More specifically, a duplicate is created of the first collections page in a particular series. This is because once you're on a paginated URL in a series, the link to the first page will contain “?page=1”:

However, this will almost always be a duplicate page. A URL with “?page=1” will almost always contain the same content as the original non-parameterized URL. Once again, we recommend having a developer adjust the internal linking structure so that the first paginated result points to the canonical page.

Product variant pages

While this is technically an extension of Shopify’s duplicate content from above, we thought this warranted its own section because this isn’t necessarily always an SEO issue.

It’s not uncommon to see Shopify stores where multiple product URLs are created for the same product with slight variations. In this case, this can create duplicate content issues as often times the core product is the same, but only a slight attribute (color for instance) changes. This means that multiple pages can exist with duplicate/similar product descriptions and images. Here is an example of duplicate pages created by a variant: https://recordit.co/x6YRPkCDqG

If left alone, this once again creates an instance of duplicate content. However, variant URLs do not have to be an SEO issue. In fact, some sites could benefit from these URLs as they allow you to have indexable pages that could be optimized for very specific terms. Whether or not these are beneficial is going to differ on every site. Some key questions to ask yourself are:

Do your customers perform queries based on variant phrases?

Do you have the resources to create unique content for all of your product variants?

Is this content unique enough to stand on its own?

For a more in-depth guide, Jenny Halasz wrote a great article on determining the best course of action for product variations. If your Shopify store contains product variants, than it’s worth determining early on whether or not these pages should exist at a separate URL. If they should, then you should create unique content for every one and optimize each for that variant’s target keywords.

Crawling and indexing

After analyzing quite a few Shopify stores, we’ve found some SEO items that are unique to Shopify when it comes to crawling and indexing. Since this is very often an important component of e-commerce SEO, we thought it would be good to share the ones that apply to Shopify.

Robots.txt file

By default, Shopify creates a robots.txt file for your store with quite a few prewritten “Disallow” commands. We find that in most cases, Shopify’s default robots.txt rules are good enough for most store owners. You can see an example of Shopify’s default robots.txt rules here:

Here are some sections of the site that Shopify will disallow crawling in:

Admin area

Checkout

Orders

Shopping cart

Internal search

Policies page

However, as Shopify stores get bigger and more customized, there’s a greater chance that you might need to adjust the robots.txt file. Fortunately, as of June 2021, Shopify now let’s you update the robots.txt file. 

In order to edit the Shopify robots.txt file, store owners must create a robots.txt.liquid file and then create custom rules to specify any changes.

In order to create a robots.txt.liquid file, store owners can perform the following steps:

Login to your Shopify admin area

In the left sidebar, go to Online Store > Themes

Choose Actions > Edit code

In “Templates”, select the “Add a new template” link

Find the left-most dropdown and choose “robots.txt”

Choose “Create template”

This should create your Shopify robots.txt.liquid file. You can then add rules to your robots.txt.liquid file by adding liquid code. Fortunately, this code isn’t too difficult to add, and Shopify does a good job of highlighting how to do it in their official documentation. Following these steps should allow you to have much more control over which URLs are crawled in your Shopify site.

Sitemap.xml

By default, Shopify will generate a sitemap.xml index file at the URL path “domain.com/sitemap.xml”. Shopify’s sitemap.xml index file will automatically create links to child sitemaps that contain URLs of the following page types:

Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)

Collection Pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)

Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)

Marketing Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)

This sitemap.xml file will dynamically update as new pages are added/removed from to the site. Generally, the Shopify sitemap.xml is good to go out of the box and doesn’t need to be adjusted.

One thing to be aware of is that Shopify will include any published pages in the sitemap.xml file. The most common issue we see is that legacy pages that are published but no longer linked to on the site get included in the sitemap.xml file. It’s worth crawling your sitemap.xml to find any instances of published pages that are included in the sitemap but are not important for search engines to crawl.

Adding the “noindex” tag

While you cannot adjust the robots.txt, Shopify does allow you to add the “noindex” tag. You can exclude a specific page from the index by adding the following code to your theme.liquid file.

As well, if you want to exclude an entire template, you can use this code:

Redirects

Shopify does allow you to implement redirects out-of-the-box, which is great. You can use this for consolidating old/expired pages or any other content that no longer exists. You can do this by going to:

Online Store

Navigation

URL Redirects

The big thing to keep in mind is that you will need to delete a page before you can implement a redirect on Shopify. This means that you’ll want to be really sure you’re not going to use the page in the future. To make this process a little less stressful, we recommend implementing the “Rewind Backups” app.

Log files

As of now, Shopify does not allow you to access log files directly through the platform. This has been confirmed by Shopify support.

Fast Simon implementation

Fast Simon is an enterprise solution that adds robust personalization features to your Shopify store, and is becoming increasingly popular. If your Shopify site is utilizing the Fast Simon technology, you’ll want to be sure that you’re taking steps to adjust any potential indexing issues from an improper implementation. 

Confirm that Fast Simon is pre-rendering your website’s content so that Google doesn’t run into crawling and indexing issues. This will give Googlebot a server-side, rendered version of your site that will make it easier for it to interpret the content. For more details, you can read our case study here. 

Structured data

Product structured data

Overall, Shopify does a pretty good job with structured data. Many Shopify themes should contain “Product” markup out-of-the-box that provides Google with key information such as your product’s name, description, price etc. This is probably the highest priority structured data to have on any e-commerce site, so it’s great that many themes do this for you.

Shopify sites might also benefit from expanding the Product structured data to collections pages as well. This involves adding the Product structured data to define each individual product link in a product listing page. The good folks at Distilled recommend including this structured data on category pages.

Article structured data

As well, if you use Shopify’s blog functionality, you should use “Article” structured data. This is a fantastic schema type that lets Google know that your blog content is more editorial in nature. Of all of the informational content schema, “Article” seems to be the one that Google may prefer since that’s what’s referenced in their official documentation. However, “BlogPosting” schema is also another type of structured data you could add to your Shopify blog

BreadcrumbList structured data

One addition that we routinely add to Shopify sites are breadcrumb internal links with BreadcrumbList structured data. We believe breadcrumbs are crucial to any e-commerce site, as they provide users with easy-to-use internal links that indicate where they’re at within the hierarchy of a website. As well, these breadcrumbs can help Google better understand the website’s structure. We typically suggest adding site breadcrumbs to Shopify sites and marking those up with BreadcrumbList structured data to help Google better understand those internal links.

Implementing structured data on Shopify

If you want to implement structured data and have a developer on hand, it can be good to have them add the above structured data types. This ensures that these schema elements will always be present on your site.

However, if your development resources are more limited, we find that Schema App Total Schema Markup is a great option. This will incorporate structured data types such as Product and BlogPosting schema on the proper pages of the site. As well, it will even add OfferCatalog schema to mark up every single product within a category page. Their support is also fantastic as they’re team helps you with any technical issues you might encounter.

Improving Shopify site speed

One of the biggest complaints we hear about Shopify is that it suffers from slower speeds. However, compared to other e-commerce platforms, we find that Shopify performs quite well. Out of the box, Shopify uses the Fastly CDN and leverages browser caching which gives you a solid performance foundation. In the past, we’ve actually benchmarked the average speed metrics of 400+ Shopify sites. Below are the average performance metrics of the Shopify sites we tested in our dataset.

First Contentful Paint: 3.8 seconds

Time To Interactive: 22.1 seconds

Total Page Size: 4.41 MB

Total Image Assets: 2.1 MB

Requests: 171

In terms of improving performance, below are the things we’ll generally advise our clients to do:

Lazy load images with the lazysizes library

Automatically compress images using Crush.pics

Eliminate any low usage Shopify apps

Manually resize and compress large images on high priority pages

Migrate tracking codes to Google Tag Manager

Keyword research

Performing keyword research for Shopify stores will be very similar to the research you would perform for other e-commerce stores.

Some general ways to generate keywords are:

Export your keyword data from Google AdWords. Track and optimize for those that generate the most revenue for the site.

Research your AdWords keywords that have high conversion rates. Even if the volume is lower, a high conversion rate indicates that this keyword is more transactional.

Review the keywords the site currently gets clicks/impressions for in Google Search Console.

Research your high priority keywords and generate new ideas using Moz’s Keyword Explorer.

Run your competitors through tools like Ahrefs. Using the “Content Gap” report, you can find keyword opportunities where competitor sites are ranking but yours is not.

If you have keywords that use similar modifiers, you can use MergeWords to automatically generate a large variety of keyword variations.

Keyword optimization

Similar to Yoast SEO, Shopify does allow you to optimize key elements such as your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs. Where possible, you should be using your target keywords in these elements.

To adjust these elements, you simply need to navigate to the page you wish to adjust and scroll down to “Search Engine Listing Preview”:

Adding content to product pages

If you decide that each individual product should be indexed, ideally you’ll want to add unique content to each page. Initially, your Shopify products may not have unique on-page content associated with them. This is a common issue for Shopify stores, as oftentimes the same descriptions are used across multiple products or no descriptions are present. Adding product descriptions with on-page best practices will give your products the best chance of ranking in the SERPs.

However, we understand that it’s time-consuming to create unique content for every product that you offer. With clients in the past, we’ve taken a targeted approach as to which products to optimize first. We like to use the “Sales By Product” report which can help prioritize which are the most important products to start adding content to. You can find this report in Analytics > Dashboard > Top Products By Units Sold.

By taking this approach, we can quickly identify some of the highest priority pages in the store to optimize. We can then work with a copywriter to start creating content for each individual product. Also, keep in mind that your product descriptions should always be written from a user-focused view. Writing about the features of the product they care about the most will give your site the best chance at improving both conversions and SEO.

Shopify blog

Shopify does include the ability to create a blog, but we often see this missing from a large number of Shopify stores. It makes sense, as revenue is the primary goal of an e-commerce site, so the initial build of the site is product-focused.

However, we live in an era where it’s getting harder and harder to rank product pages in Google. For instance, the below screenshot illustrates the top 3 organic results for the term “cloth diapers”:

While many would assume that this is primarily a transactional query, we’re seeing Google is ranking two articles and a single product listing page in the top three results. This is just one instance of a major trend we’ve seen where Google is starting to prefer to rank more informational content above transactional.

By excluding a blog from a Shopify store, we think this results in a huge missed opportunity for many businesses. The inclusion of a blog allows you to have a natural place where you can create this informational content. If you’re seeing that Google is ranking more blog/article types of content for the keywords mapped to your Shopify store, your best bet is to go out and create that content yourself.

If you run a Shopify store (or any e-commerce site), we would urge you to take the following few steps:

Identify your highest priority keywords

Manually perform a Google query for each one

Make note of the types of content Google is ranking on the first page. Is it primarily informational, transactional, or a mix of both?

If you’re seeing primarily mixed or informational content, evaluate your own content to see if you have any that matches the user intent. If so, improve the quality and optimize.

If you do not have this content, consider creating new blog content around informational topics that seems to fulfill the user intent

As an example, we have a client that was interested in ranking for the term “CRM software,” an extremely competitive keyword. When analyzing the SERPs, we found that Google was ranking primarily informational pages about “What Is CRM Software?” Since they only had a product page that highlighted their specific CRM, we suggested the client create a more informational page that talked generally about what CRM software is and the benefits it provides. After creating and optimizing the page, we soon saw a significant increase in organic traffic (credit to Ally Mickler):

The issue that we see on many Shopify sites is that there is very little focus on informational pages despite the fact that those perform well in the search engines. Most Shopify sites should be using the blogging platform, as this will provide an avenue to create informational content that will result in organic traffic and revenue.

Apps

Similar to WordPress’s plugins, Shopify offers “Apps” that allow you to add advanced functionality to your site without having to manually adjust the code. However, unlike WordPress, most of the Shopify Apps you’ll find are paid. This will require either a one-time or monthly fee.

Shopify apps for SEO

While your best bet is likely teaming up with a developer who's comfortable with Shopify, here are some Shopify apps that can help improve the SEO of your site.

Crush.pics: A great automated way of compressing large image files. Crucial for most Shopify sites as many of these sites are heavily image-based.

Schema App Total Schema Markup: This app may be used if you do not have a Shopify developer who is able to add custom structured data to your site.

Smart SEO: An app that can add meta tags, alt tags, & JSON-LD

Yotpo Reviews: This app can help you add product reviews to your site, making your content eligible for rich review stars in the SERPs.

Rewind Backups: Creates backups of your site. Great to implement before making development changes or adding redirects.

Is Yoast SEO available for Shopify?

Yoast SEO is exclusively a WordPress plugin. There is currently no Yoast SEO Shopify App.

Limiting your Shopify apps

Similar to WordPress plugins, Shopify apps will inject additional code onto your site. This means that adding a large number of apps can slow down the site. Shopify sites are especially susceptible to bloat, as many apps are focused on improving conversions. Often times, these apps will add more JavaScript and CSS files which can hurt page load times. You’ll want to be sure that you regularly audit the apps you’re using and remove any that are not adding value or being utilized by the site.

Client results

We’ve seen pretty good success in our clients that use Shopify stores. Below you can find some of the results we’ve been able to achieve for them. However, please note that these case studies do not just include the recommendations above. For these clients, we have used a combination of some of the recommendations outlined above as well as other SEO initiatives.

In one example, we worked with a Shopify store that was interested in ranking for very competitive terms surrounding the main product their store focused on. We evaluated their top performing products in the “Sales by product” report. This resulted in a large effort to work with the client to add new content to their product pages as they were not initially optimized. This combined with other initiatives has helped improve their first page rankings by 113 keywords (credit to Jennifer Wright & LaRhonda Sparrow).

In another instance, a client came to us with an issue that they were not ranking for their branded keywords. Instead, third-party retailers that also carried their products were often outranking them. We worked with them to adjust their internal linking structure to point to the canonical pages instead of the duplicate pages created by Shopify. We also optimized their content to better utilize the branded terminology on relevant pages. As a result, they’ve seen a nice increase in overall rankings in just several months time.

Moving forward

As Shopify usage continues to grow, it will be increasingly important to understand the SEO implications that come with the platform. Hopefully, this guide has provided you with additional knowledge that will help make your Shopify store stronger in the search engines. If you’re interested in learning more about Shopify, you can also check out our Shopify SEO Learning Center.

[epackingvietnam]

Shopify SEO: The Guide to Optimizing Shopify [Updated for 2022]

 A trend we’ve been noticing at Go Fish Digital is that more and more of our clients have been using the Shopify platform. While we initially thought this was just a coincidence, we can see that the data tells a different story:

The Shopify platform has been steadily rising in popularity throughout the years. Looking at BuiltWith usage statistics, we can see that usage of the CMS has more than doubled since October 2017. Currently, 4.24 of the top 10,000 sites and 3.02% of the top 100,000 are using Shopify.

Since we’ve worked with a good amount of Shopify stores, we wanted to share our process for common SEO improvements we help our clients with. The guide below should outline some common adjustments we make on Shopify stores.

What is Shopify SEO?

Shopify SEO is a set of  SEO adjustments that are unique to the Shopify platform. While Shopify stores come with some useful things for SEO, such as a blog and the ability to redirect, it can also create SEO issues such as duplicate content. 

Some of the most common Shopify SEO recommendations are:

Remove duplicate URLs from internal linking architecture

Remove duplicate paginated URLs

Create blog content for keywords with informational intent

Add “Product,” “Article,” & “BreadcrumbList” structured data

Determine how to handle product variant pages

Compress images using crush.pics

Remove unnecessary Shopify apps

We’ll go into how we handle each of these recommendations below:

Duplicate content

In terms of SEO, duplicate content is the highest priority issue we’ve seen created by Shopify. Duplicate content occurs when either duplicate or similar content exists on two separate URLs. This creates issues for search engines as they might not be able to determine which of the two pages should be the canonical version. On top of this, often times link signals are split between the pages.

We’ve seen Shopify create duplicate content in several different ways:

Duplicate product pages

Duplicate collections pages through pagination

Duplicate product pages

Shopify creates this issue within their product pages. By default, Shopify stores allow their /products/ pages to render at two different URL paths:

Canonical URL path: /products/

Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/

Shopify accounts for this by ensuring that all /collections/.*/products/ pages include a canonical tag to the associated /products/ page. Notice how the URL in the address differs from the “canonical” field:

While this certainly helps Google consolidate the duplicate content, a more alarming issue occurs when you look at the internal linking structure. By default, Shopify will link to the non-canonical version of all of your product pages.

As well, we’ve also seen Shopify link to the non-canonical versions of URLs when websites utilize “swatch” internal links that point to other color variants.

Thus, Shopify creates your entire site architecture around non-canonical links by default. This creates a high-priority SEO issue because the website is sending Google conflicting signals:

“Here are the pages we internally link to the most often”

“However, the pages we link to the most often are not the URLs we actually want to be ranking in Google. Please index these other URLs with few internal links”

While canonical tags are usually respected, remember Google does treat these as hints instead of directives. This means that you’re relying on Google to make a judgement about whether or not the content is duplicate each time that it crawls these pages. We prefer not to leave this up to chance, especially when dealing with content at scale.

Adjusting internal linking structure

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix for this. We’ve been able to work with our dev team to adjust the code in the product.grid-item.liquid file. Following those instructions will allow your Shopify site’s collections pages to point to the canonical /product/ URLs.

Duplicate collections pages

As well, we’ve seen many Shopify sites that create duplicate content through the site’s pagination. More specifically, a duplicate is created of the first collections page in a particular series. This is because once you're on a paginated URL in a series, the link to the first page will contain “?page=1”:

However, this will almost always be a duplicate page. A URL with “?page=1” will almost always contain the same content as the original non-parameterized URL. Once again, we recommend having a developer adjust the internal linking structure so that the first paginated result points to the canonical page.

Product variant pages

While this is technically an extension of Shopify’s duplicate content from above, we thought this warranted its own section because this isn’t necessarily always an SEO issue.

It’s not uncommon to see Shopify stores where multiple product URLs are created for the same product with slight variations. In this case, this can create duplicate content issues as often times the core product is the same, but only a slight attribute (color for instance) changes. This means that multiple pages can exist with duplicate/similar product descriptions and images. Here is an example of duplicate pages created by a variant: https://recordit.co/x6YRPkCDqG

If left alone, this once again creates an instance of duplicate content. However, variant URLs do not have to be an SEO issue. In fact, some sites could benefit from these URLs as they allow you to have indexable pages that could be optimized for very specific terms. Whether or not these are beneficial is going to differ on every site. Some key questions to ask yourself are:

Do your customers perform queries based on variant phrases?

Do you have the resources to create unique content for all of your product variants?

Is this content unique enough to stand on its own?

For a more in-depth guide, Jenny Halasz wrote a great article on determining the best course of action for product variations. If your Shopify store contains product variants, than it’s worth determining early on whether or not these pages should exist at a separate URL. If they should, then you should create unique content for every one and optimize each for that variant’s target keywords.

Crawling and indexing

After analyzing quite a few Shopify stores, we’ve found some SEO items that are unique to Shopify when it comes to crawling and indexing. Since this is very often an important component of e-commerce SEO, we thought it would be good to share the ones that apply to Shopify.

Robots.txt file

By default, Shopify creates a robots.txt file for your store with quite a few prewritten “Disallow” commands. We find that in most cases, Shopify’s default robots.txt rules are good enough for most store owners. You can see an example of Shopify’s default robots.txt rules here:

Here are some sections of the site that Shopify will disallow crawling in:

Admin area

Checkout

Orders

Shopping cart

Internal search

Policies page

However, as Shopify stores get bigger and more customized, there’s a greater chance that you might need to adjust the robots.txt file. Fortunately, as of June 2021, Shopify now let’s you update the robots.txt file. 

In order to edit the Shopify robots.txt file, store owners must create a robots.txt.liquid file and then create custom rules to specify any changes.

In order to create a robots.txt.liquid file, store owners can perform the following steps:

Login to your Shopify admin area

In the left sidebar, go to Online Store > Themes

Choose Actions > Edit code

In “Templates”, select the “Add a new template” link

Find the left-most dropdown and choose “robots.txt”

Choose “Create template”

This should create your Shopify robots.txt.liquid file. You can then add rules to your robots.txt.liquid file by adding liquid code. Fortunately, this code isn’t too difficult to add, and Shopify does a good job of highlighting how to do it in their official documentation. Following these steps should allow you to have much more control over which URLs are crawled in your Shopify site.

Sitemap.xml

By default, Shopify will generate a sitemap.xml index file at the URL path “domain.com/sitemap.xml”. Shopify’s sitemap.xml index file will automatically create links to child sitemaps that contain URLs of the following page types:

Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)

Collection Pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)

Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)

Marketing Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)

This sitemap.xml file will dynamically update as new pages are added/removed from to the site. Generally, the Shopify sitemap.xml is good to go out of the box and doesn’t need to be adjusted.

One thing to be aware of is that Shopify will include any published pages in the sitemap.xml file. The most common issue we see is that legacy pages that are published but no longer linked to on the site get included in the sitemap.xml file. It’s worth crawling your sitemap.xml to find any instances of published pages that are included in the sitemap but are not important for search engines to crawl.

Adding the “noindex” tag

While you cannot adjust the robots.txt, Shopify does allow you to add the “noindex” tag. You can exclude a specific page from the index by adding the following code to your theme.liquid file.

As well, if you want to exclude an entire template, you can use this code:

Redirects

Shopify does allow you to implement redirects out-of-the-box, which is great. You can use this for consolidating old/expired pages or any other content that no longer exists. You can do this by going to:

Online Store

Navigation

URL Redirects

The big thing to keep in mind is that you will need to delete a page before you can implement a redirect on Shopify. This means that you’ll want to be really sure you’re not going to use the page in the future. To make this process a little less stressful, we recommend implementing the “Rewind Backups” app.

Log files

As of now, Shopify does not allow you to access log files directly through the platform. This has been confirmed by Shopify support.

Fast Simon implementation

Fast Simon is an enterprise solution that adds robust personalization features to your Shopify store, and is becoming increasingly popular. If your Shopify site is utilizing the Fast Simon technology, you’ll want to be sure that you’re taking steps to adjust any potential indexing issues from an improper implementation. 

Confirm that Fast Simon is pre-rendering your website’s content so that Google doesn’t run into crawling and indexing issues. This will give Googlebot a server-side, rendered version of your site that will make it easier for it to interpret the content. For more details, you can read our case study here. 

Structured data

Product structured data

Overall, Shopify does a pretty good job with structured data. Many Shopify themes should contain “Product” markup out-of-the-box that provides Google with key information such as your product’s name, description, price etc. This is probably the highest priority structured data to have on any e-commerce site, so it’s great that many themes do this for you.

Shopify sites might also benefit from expanding the Product structured data to collections pages as well. This involves adding the Product structured data to define each individual product link in a product listing page. The good folks at Distilled recommend including this structured data on category pages.

Article structured data

As well, if you use Shopify’s blog functionality, you should use “Article” structured data. This is a fantastic schema type that lets Google know that your blog content is more editorial in nature. Of all of the informational content schema, “Article” seems to be the one that Google may prefer since that’s what’s referenced in their official documentation. However, “BlogPosting” schema is also another type of structured data you could add to your Shopify blog

BreadcrumbList structured data

One addition that we routinely add to Shopify sites are breadcrumb internal links with BreadcrumbList structured data. We believe breadcrumbs are crucial to any e-commerce site, as they provide users with easy-to-use internal links that indicate where they’re at within the hierarchy of a website. As well, these breadcrumbs can help Google better understand the website’s structure. We typically suggest adding site breadcrumbs to Shopify sites and marking those up with BreadcrumbList structured data to help Google better understand those internal links.

Implementing structured data on Shopify

If you want to implement structured data and have a developer on hand, it can be good to have them add the above structured data types. This ensures that these schema elements will always be present on your site.

However, if your development resources are more limited, we find that Schema App Total Schema Markup is a great option. This will incorporate structured data types such as Product and BlogPosting schema on the proper pages of the site. As well, it will even add OfferCatalog schema to mark up every single product within a category page. Their support is also fantastic as they’re team helps you with any technical issues you might encounter.

Improving Shopify site speed

One of the biggest complaints we hear about Shopify is that it suffers from slower speeds. However, compared to other e-commerce platforms, we find that Shopify performs quite well. Out of the box, Shopify uses the Fastly CDN and leverages browser caching which gives you a solid performance foundation. In the past, we’ve actually benchmarked the average speed metrics of 400+ Shopify sites. Below are the average performance metrics of the Shopify sites we tested in our dataset.

First Contentful Paint: 3.8 seconds

Time To Interactive: 22.1 seconds

Total Page Size: 4.41 MB

Total Image Assets: 2.1 MB

Requests: 171

In terms of improving performance, below are the things we’ll generally advise our clients to do:

Lazy load images with the lazysizes library

Automatically compress images using Crush.pics

Eliminate any low usage Shopify apps

Manually resize and compress large images on high priority pages

Migrate tracking codes to Google Tag Manager

Keyword research

Performing keyword research for Shopify stores will be very similar to the research you would perform for other e-commerce stores.

Some general ways to generate keywords are:

Export your keyword data from Google AdWords. Track and optimize for those that generate the most revenue for the site.

Research your AdWords keywords that have high conversion rates. Even if the volume is lower, a high conversion rate indicates that this keyword is more transactional.

Review the keywords the site currently gets clicks/impressions for in Google Search Console.

Research your high priority keywords and generate new ideas using Moz’s Keyword Explorer.

Run your competitors through tools like Ahrefs. Using the “Content Gap” report, you can find keyword opportunities where competitor sites are ranking but yours is not.

If you have keywords that use similar modifiers, you can use MergeWords to automatically generate a large variety of keyword variations.

Keyword optimization

Similar to Yoast SEO, Shopify does allow you to optimize key elements such as your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs. Where possible, you should be using your target keywords in these elements.

To adjust these elements, you simply need to navigate to the page you wish to adjust and scroll down to “Search Engine Listing Preview”:

Adding content to product pages

If you decide that each individual product should be indexed, ideally you’ll want to add unique content to each page. Initially, your Shopify products may not have unique on-page content associated with them. This is a common issue for Shopify stores, as oftentimes the same descriptions are used across multiple products or no descriptions are present. Adding product descriptions with on-page best practices will give your products the best chance of ranking in the SERPs.

However, we understand that it’s time-consuming to create unique content for every product that you offer. With clients in the past, we’ve taken a targeted approach as to which products to optimize first. We like to use the “Sales By Product” report which can help prioritize which are the most important products to start adding content to. You can find this report in Analytics > Dashboard > Top Products By Units Sold.

By taking this approach, we can quickly identify some of the highest priority pages in the store to optimize. We can then work with a copywriter to start creating content for each individual product. Also, keep in mind that your product descriptions should always be written from a user-focused view. Writing about the features of the product they care about the most will give your site the best chance at improving both conversions and SEO.

Shopify blog

Shopify does include the ability to create a blog, but we often see this missing from a large number of Shopify stores. It makes sense, as revenue is the primary goal of an e-commerce site, so the initial build of the site is product-focused.

However, we live in an era where it’s getting harder and harder to rank product pages in Google. For instance, the below screenshot illustrates the top 3 organic results for the term “cloth diapers”:

While many would assume that this is primarily a transactional query, we’re seeing Google is ranking two articles and a single product listing page in the top three results. This is just one instance of a major trend we’ve seen where Google is starting to prefer to rank more informational content above transactional.

By excluding a blog from a Shopify store, we think this results in a huge missed opportunity for many businesses. The inclusion of a blog allows you to have a natural place where you can create this informational content. If you’re seeing that Google is ranking more blog/article types of content for the keywords mapped to your Shopify store, your best bet is to go out and create that content yourself.

If you run a Shopify store (or any e-commerce site), we would urge you to take the following few steps:

Identify your highest priority keywords

Manually perform a Google query for each one

Make note of the types of content Google is ranking on the first page. Is it primarily informational, transactional, or a mix of both?

If you’re seeing primarily mixed or informational content, evaluate your own content to see if you have any that matches the user intent. If so, improve the quality and optimize.

If you do not have this content, consider creating new blog content around informational topics that seems to fulfill the user intent

As an example, we have a client that was interested in ranking for the term “CRM software,” an extremely competitive keyword. When analyzing the SERPs, we found that Google was ranking primarily informational pages about “What Is CRM Software?” Since they only had a product page that highlighted their specific CRM, we suggested the client create a more informational page that talked generally about what CRM software is and the benefits it provides. After creating and optimizing the page, we soon saw a significant increase in organic traffic (credit to Ally Mickler):

The issue that we see on many Shopify sites is that there is very little focus on informational pages despite the fact that those perform well in the search engines. Most Shopify sites should be using the blogging platform, as this will provide an avenue to create informational content that will result in organic traffic and revenue.

Apps

Similar to WordPress’s plugins, Shopify offers “Apps” that allow you to add advanced functionality to your site without having to manually adjust the code. However, unlike WordPress, most of the Shopify Apps you’ll find are paid. This will require either a one-time or monthly fee.

Shopify apps for SEO

While your best bet is likely teaming up with a developer who's comfortable with Shopify, here are some Shopify apps that can help improve the SEO of your site.

Crush.pics: A great automated way of compressing large image files. Crucial for most Shopify sites as many of these sites are heavily image-based.

Schema App Total Schema Markup: This app may be used if you do not have a Shopify developer who is able to add custom structured data to your site.

Smart SEO: An app that can add meta tags, alt tags, & JSON-LD

Yotpo Reviews: This app can help you add product reviews to your site, making your content eligible for rich review stars in the SERPs.

Rewind Backups: Creates backups of your site. Great to implement before making development changes or adding redirects.

Is Yoast SEO available for Shopify?

Yoast SEO is exclusively a WordPress plugin. There is currently no Yoast SEO Shopify App.

Limiting your Shopify apps

Similar to WordPress plugins, Shopify apps will inject additional code onto your site. This means that adding a large number of apps can slow down the site. Shopify sites are especially susceptible to bloat, as many apps are focused on improving conversions. Often times, these apps will add more JavaScript and CSS files which can hurt page load times. You’ll want to be sure that you regularly audit the apps you’re using and remove any that are not adding value or being utilized by the site.

Client results

We’ve seen pretty good success in our clients that use Shopify stores. Below you can find some of the results we’ve been able to achieve for them. However, please note that these case studies do not just include the recommendations above. For these clients, we have used a combination of some of the recommendations outlined above as well as other SEO initiatives.

In one example, we worked with a Shopify store that was interested in ranking for very competitive terms surrounding the main product their store focused on. We evaluated their top performing products in the “Sales by product” report. This resulted in a large effort to work with the client to add new content to their product pages as they were not initially optimized. This combined with other initiatives has helped improve their first page rankings by 113 keywords (credit to Jennifer Wright & LaRhonda Sparrow).

In another instance, a client came to us with an issue that they were not ranking for their branded keywords. Instead, third-party retailers that also carried their products were often outranking them. We worked with them to adjust their internal linking structure to point to the canonical pages instead of the duplicate pages created by Shopify. We also optimized their content to better utilize the branded terminology on relevant pages. As a result, they’ve seen a nice increase in overall rankings in just several months time.

Moving forward

As Shopify usage continues to grow, it will be increasingly important to understand the SEO implications that come with the platform. Hopefully, this guide has provided you with additional knowledge that will help make your Shopify store stronger in the search engines. If you’re interested in learning more about Shopify, you can also check out our Shopify SEO Learning Center.

#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking

[bfxenon]

Shopify SEO: The Guide to Optimizing Shopify [Updated for 2022]

 A trend we’ve been noticing at Go Fish Digital is that more and more of our clients have been using the Shopify platform. While we initially thought this was just a coincidence, we can see that the data tells a different story:

The Shopify platform has been steadily rising in popularity throughout the years. Looking at BuiltWith usage statistics, we can see that usage of the CMS has more than doubled since October 2017. Currently, 4.24 of the top 10,000 sites and 3.02% of the top 100,000 are using Shopify.

Since we’ve worked with a good amount of Shopify stores, we wanted to share our process for common SEO improvements we help our clients with. The guide below should outline some common adjustments we make on Shopify stores.

What is Shopify SEO?

Shopify SEO is a set of  SEO adjustments that are unique to the Shopify platform. While Shopify stores come with some useful things for SEO, such as a blog and the ability to redirect, it can also create SEO issues such as duplicate content. 

Some of the most common Shopify SEO recommendations are:

Remove duplicate URLs from internal linking architecture

Remove duplicate paginated URLs

Create blog content for keywords with informational intent

Add “Product,” “Article,” & “BreadcrumbList” structured data

Determine how to handle product variant pages

Compress images using crush.pics

Remove unnecessary Shopify apps

We’ll go into how we handle each of these recommendations below:

Duplicate content

In terms of SEO, duplicate content is the highest priority issue we’ve seen created by Shopify. Duplicate content occurs when either duplicate or similar content exists on two separate URLs. This creates issues for search engines as they might not be able to determine which of the two pages should be the canonical version. On top of this, often times link signals are split between the pages.

We’ve seen Shopify create duplicate content in several different ways:

Duplicate product pages

Duplicate collections pages through pagination

Duplicate product pages

Shopify creates this issue within their product pages. By default, Shopify stores allow their /products/ pages to render at two different URL paths:

Canonical URL path: /products/

Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/

Shopify accounts for this by ensuring that all /collections/.*/products/ pages include a canonical tag to the associated /products/ page. Notice how the URL in the address differs from the “canonical” field:

While this certainly helps Google consolidate the duplicate content, a more alarming issue occurs when you look at the internal linking structure. By default, Shopify will link to the non-canonical version of all of your product pages.

As well, we’ve also seen Shopify link to the non-canonical versions of URLs when websites utilize “swatch” internal links that point to other color variants.

Thus, Shopify creates your entire site architecture around non-canonical links by default. This creates a high-priority SEO issue because the website is sending Google conflicting signals:

“Here are the pages we internally link to the most often”

“However, the pages we link to the most often are not the URLs we actually want to be ranking in Google. Please index these other URLs with few internal links”

While canonical tags are usually respected, remember Google does treat these as hints instead of directives. This means that you’re relying on Google to make a judgement about whether or not the content is duplicate each time that it crawls these pages. We prefer not to leave this up to chance, especially when dealing with content at scale.

Adjusting internal linking structure

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix for this. We’ve been able to work with our dev team to adjust the code in the product.grid-item.liquid file. Following those instructions will allow your Shopify site’s collections pages to point to the canonical /product/ URLs.

Duplicate collections pages

As well, we’ve seen many Shopify sites that create duplicate content through the site’s pagination. More specifically, a duplicate is created of the first collections page in a particular series. This is because once you're on a paginated URL in a series, the link to the first page will contain “?page=1”:

However, this will almost always be a duplicate page. A URL with “?page=1” will almost always contain the same content as the original non-parameterized URL. Once again, we recommend having a developer adjust the internal linking structure so that the first paginated result points to the canonical page.

Product variant pages

While this is technically an extension of Shopify’s duplicate content from above, we thought this warranted its own section because this isn’t necessarily always an SEO issue.

It’s not uncommon to see Shopify stores where multiple product URLs are created for the same product with slight variations. In this case, this can create duplicate content issues as often times the core product is the same, but only a slight attribute (color for instance) changes. This means that multiple pages can exist with duplicate/similar product descriptions and images. Here is an example of duplicate pages created by a variant: https://recordit.co/x6YRPkCDqG

If left alone, this once again creates an instance of duplicate content. However, variant URLs do not have to be an SEO issue. In fact, some sites could benefit from these URLs as they allow you to have indexable pages that could be optimized for very specific terms. Whether or not these are beneficial is going to differ on every site. Some key questions to ask yourself are:

Do your customers perform queries based on variant phrases?

Do you have the resources to create unique content for all of your product variants?

Is this content unique enough to stand on its own?

For a more in-depth guide, Jenny Halasz wrote a great article on determining the best course of action for product variations. If your Shopify store contains product variants, than it’s worth determining early on whether or not these pages should exist at a separate URL. If they should, then you should create unique content for every one and optimize each for that variant’s target keywords.

Crawling and indexing

After analyzing quite a few Shopify stores, we’ve found some SEO items that are unique to Shopify when it comes to crawling and indexing. Since this is very often an important component of e-commerce SEO, we thought it would be good to share the ones that apply to Shopify.

Robots.txt file

By default, Shopify creates a robots.txt file for your store with quite a few prewritten “Disallow” commands. We find that in most cases, Shopify’s default robots.txt rules are good enough for most store owners. You can see an example of Shopify’s default robots.txt rules here:

Here are some sections of the site that Shopify will disallow crawling in:

Admin area

Checkout

Orders

Shopping cart

Internal search

Policies page

However, as Shopify stores get bigger and more customized, there’s a greater chance that you might need to adjust the robots.txt file. Fortunately, as of June 2021, Shopify now let’s you update the robots.txt file. 

In order to edit the Shopify robots.txt file, store owners must create a robots.txt.liquid file and then create custom rules to specify any changes.

In order to create a robots.txt.liquid file, store owners can perform the following steps:

Login to your Shopify admin area

In the left sidebar, go to Online Store > Themes

Choose Actions > Edit code

In “Templates”, select the “Add a new template” link

Find the left-most dropdown and choose “robots.txt”

Choose “Create template”

This should create your Shopify robots.txt.liquid file. You can then add rules to your robots.txt.liquid file by adding liquid code. Fortunately, this code isn’t too difficult to add, and Shopify does a good job of highlighting how to do it in their official documentation. Following these steps should allow you to have much more control over which URLs are crawled in your Shopify site.

Sitemap.xml

By default, Shopify will generate a sitemap.xml index file at the URL path “domain.com/sitemap.xml”. Shopify’s sitemap.xml index file will automatically create links to child sitemaps that contain URLs of the following page types:

Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)

Collection Pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)

Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)

Marketing Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)

This sitemap.xml file will dynamically update as new pages are added/removed from to the site. Generally, the Shopify sitemap.xml is good to go out of the box and doesn’t need to be adjusted.

One thing to be aware of is that Shopify will include any published pages in the sitemap.xml file. The most common issue we see is that legacy pages that are published but no longer linked to on the site get included in the sitemap.xml file. It’s worth crawling your sitemap.xml to find any instances of published pages that are included in the sitemap but are not important for search engines to crawl.

Adding the “noindex” tag

While you cannot adjust the robots.txt, Shopify does allow you to add the “noindex” tag. You can exclude a specific page from the index by adding the following code to your theme.liquid file.

As well, if you want to exclude an entire template, you can use this code:

Redirects

Shopify does allow you to implement redirects out-of-the-box, which is great. You can use this for consolidating old/expired pages or any other content that no longer exists. You can do this by going to:

Online Store

Navigation

URL Redirects

The big thing to keep in mind is that you will need to delete a page before you can implement a redirect on Shopify. This means that you’ll want to be really sure you’re not going to use the page in the future. To make this process a little less stressful, we recommend implementing the “Rewind Backups” app.

Log files

As of now, Shopify does not allow you to access log files directly through the platform. This has been confirmed by Shopify support.

Fast Simon implementation

Fast Simon is an enterprise solution that adds robust personalization features to your Shopify store, and is becoming increasingly popular. If your Shopify site is utilizing the Fast Simon technology, you’ll want to be sure that you’re taking steps to adjust any potential indexing issues from an improper implementation. 

Confirm that Fast Simon is pre-rendering your website’s content so that Google doesn’t run into crawling and indexing issues. This will give Googlebot a server-side, rendered version of your site that will make it easier for it to interpret the content. For more details, you can read our case study here. 

Structured data

Product structured data

Overall, Shopify does a pretty good job with structured data. Many Shopify themes should contain “Product” markup out-of-the-box that provides Google with key information such as your product’s name, description, price etc. This is probably the highest priority structured data to have on any e-commerce site, so it’s great that many themes do this for you.

Shopify sites might also benefit from expanding the Product structured data to collections pages as well. This involves adding the Product structured data to define each individual product link in a product listing page. The good folks at Distilled recommend including this structured data on category pages.

Article structured data

As well, if you use Shopify’s blog functionality, you should use “Article” structured data. This is a fantastic schema type that lets Google know that your blog content is more editorial in nature. Of all of the informational content schema, “Article” seems to be the one that Google may prefer since that’s what’s referenced in their official documentation. However, “BlogPosting” schema is also another type of structured data you could add to your Shopify blog

BreadcrumbList structured data

One addition that we routinely add to Shopify sites are breadcrumb internal links with BreadcrumbList structured data. We believe breadcrumbs are crucial to any e-commerce site, as they provide users with easy-to-use internal links that indicate where they’re at within the hierarchy of a website. As well, these breadcrumbs can help Google better understand the website’s structure. We typically suggest adding site breadcrumbs to Shopify sites and marking those up with BreadcrumbList structured data to help Google better understand those internal links.

Implementing structured data on Shopify

If you want to implement structured data and have a developer on hand, it can be good to have them add the above structured data types. This ensures that these schema elements will always be present on your site.

However, if your development resources are more limited, we find that Schema App Total Schema Markup is a great option. This will incorporate structured data types such as Product and BlogPosting schema on the proper pages of the site. As well, it will even add OfferCatalog schema to mark up every single product within a category page. Their support is also fantastic as they’re team helps you with any technical issues you might encounter.

Improving Shopify site speed

One of the biggest complaints we hear about Shopify is that it suffers from slower speeds. However, compared to other e-commerce platforms, we find that Shopify performs quite well. Out of the box, Shopify uses the Fastly CDN and leverages browser caching which gives you a solid performance foundation. In the past, we’ve actually benchmarked the average speed metrics of 400+ Shopify sites. Below are the average performance metrics of the Shopify sites we tested in our dataset.

First Contentful Paint: 3.8 seconds

Time To Interactive: 22.1 seconds

Total Page Size: 4.41 MB

Total Image Assets: 2.1 MB

Requests: 171

In terms of improving performance, below are the things we’ll generally advise our clients to do:

Lazy load images with the lazysizes library

Automatically compress images using Crush.pics

Eliminate any low usage Shopify apps

Manually resize and compress large images on high priority pages

Migrate tracking codes to Google Tag Manager

Keyword research

Performing keyword research for Shopify stores will be very similar to the research you would perform for other e-commerce stores.

Some general ways to generate keywords are:

Export your keyword data from Google AdWords. Track and optimize for those that generate the most revenue for the site.

Research your AdWords keywords that have high conversion rates. Even if the volume is lower, a high conversion rate indicates that this keyword is more transactional.

Review the keywords the site currently gets clicks/impressions for in Google Search Console.

Research your high priority keywords and generate new ideas using Moz’s Keyword Explorer.

Run your competitors through tools like Ahrefs. Using the “Content Gap” report, you can find keyword opportunities where competitor sites are ranking but yours is not.

If you have keywords that use similar modifiers, you can use MergeWords to automatically generate a large variety of keyword variations.

Keyword optimization

Similar to Yoast SEO, Shopify does allow you to optimize key elements such as your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs. Where possible, you should be using your target keywords in these elements.

To adjust these elements, you simply need to navigate to the page you wish to adjust and scroll down to “Search Engine Listing Preview”:

Adding content to product pages

If you decide that each individual product should be indexed, ideally you’ll want to add unique content to each page. Initially, your Shopify products may not have unique on-page content associated with them. This is a common issue for Shopify stores, as oftentimes the same descriptions are used across multiple products or no descriptions are present. Adding product descriptions with on-page best practices will give your products the best chance of ranking in the SERPs.

However, we understand that it’s time-consuming to create unique content for every product that you offer. With clients in the past, we’ve taken a targeted approach as to which products to optimize first. We like to use the “Sales By Product” report which can help prioritize which are the most important products to start adding content to. You can find this report in Analytics > Dashboard > Top Products By Units Sold.

By taking this approach, we can quickly identify some of the highest priority pages in the store to optimize. We can then work with a copywriter to start creating content for each individual product. Also, keep in mind that your product descriptions should always be written from a user-focused view. Writing about the features of the product they care about the most will give your site the best chance at improving both conversions and SEO.

Shopify blog

Shopify does include the ability to create a blog, but we often see this missing from a large number of Shopify stores. It makes sense, as revenue is the primary goal of an e-commerce site, so the initial build of the site is product-focused.

However, we live in an era where it’s getting harder and harder to rank product pages in Google. For instance, the below screenshot illustrates the top 3 organic results for the term “cloth diapers”:

While many would assume that this is primarily a transactional query, we’re seeing Google is ranking two articles and a single product listing page in the top three results. This is just one instance of a major trend we’ve seen where Google is starting to prefer to rank more informational content above transactional.

By excluding a blog from a Shopify store, we think this results in a huge missed opportunity for many businesses. The inclusion of a blog allows you to have a natural place where you can create this informational content. If you’re seeing that Google is ranking more blog/article types of content for the keywords mapped to your Shopify store, your best bet is to go out and create that content yourself.

If you run a Shopify store (or any e-commerce site), we would urge you to take the following few steps:

Identify your highest priority keywords

Manually perform a Google query for each one

Make note of the types of content Google is ranking on the first page. Is it primarily informational, transactional, or a mix of both?

If you’re seeing primarily mixed or informational content, evaluate your own content to see if you have any that matches the user intent. If so, improve the quality and optimize.

If you do not have this content, consider creating new blog content around informational topics that seems to fulfill the user intent

As an example, we have a client that was interested in ranking for the term “CRM software,” an extremely competitive keyword. When analyzing the SERPs, we found that Google was ranking primarily informational pages about “What Is CRM Software?” Since they only had a product page that highlighted their specific CRM, we suggested the client create a more informational page that talked generally about what CRM software is and the benefits it provides. After creating and optimizing the page, we soon saw a significant increase in organic traffic (credit to Ally Mickler):

The issue that we see on many Shopify sites is that there is very little focus on informational pages despite the fact that those perform well in the search engines. Most Shopify sites should be using the blogging platform, as this will provide an avenue to create informational content that will result in organic traffic and revenue.

Apps

Similar to WordPress’s plugins, Shopify offers “Apps” that allow you to add advanced functionality to your site without having to manually adjust the code. However, unlike WordPress, most of the Shopify Apps you’ll find are paid. This will require either a one-time or monthly fee.

Shopify apps for SEO

While your best bet is likely teaming up with a developer who's comfortable with Shopify, here are some Shopify apps that can help improve the SEO of your site.

Crush.pics: A great automated way of compressing large image files. Crucial for most Shopify sites as many of these sites are heavily image-based.

Schema App Total Schema Markup: This app may be used if you do not have a Shopify developer who is able to add custom structured data to your site.

Smart SEO: An app that can add meta tags, alt tags, & JSON-LD

Yotpo Reviews: This app can help you add product reviews to your site, making your content eligible for rich review stars in the SERPs.

Rewind Backups: Creates backups of your site. Great to implement before making development changes or adding redirects.

Is Yoast SEO available for Shopify?

Yoast SEO is exclusively a WordPress plugin. There is currently no Yoast SEO Shopify App.

Limiting your Shopify apps

Similar to WordPress plugins, Shopify apps will inject additional code onto your site. This means that adding a large number of apps can slow down the site. Shopify sites are especially susceptible to bloat, as many apps are focused on improving conversions. Often times, these apps will add more JavaScript and CSS files which can hurt page load times. You’ll want to be sure that you regularly audit the apps you’re using and remove any that are not adding value or being utilized by the site.

Client results

We’ve seen pretty good success in our clients that use Shopify stores. Below you can find some of the results we’ve been able to achieve for them. However, please note that these case studies do not just include the recommendations above. For these clients, we have used a combination of some of the recommendations outlined above as well as other SEO initiatives.

In one example, we worked with a Shopify store that was interested in ranking for very competitive terms surrounding the main product their store focused on. We evaluated their top performing products in the “Sales by product” report. This resulted in a large effort to work with the client to add new content to their product pages as they were not initially optimized. This combined with other initiatives has helped improve their first page rankings by 113 keywords (credit to Jennifer Wright & LaRhonda Sparrow).

In another instance, a client came to us with an issue that they were not ranking for their branded keywords. Instead, third-party retailers that also carried their products were often outranking them. We worked with them to adjust their internal linking structure to point to the canonical pages instead of the duplicate pages created by Shopify. We also optimized their content to better utilize the branded terminology on relevant pages. As a result, they’ve seen a nice increase in overall rankings in just several months time.

Moving forward

As Shopify usage continues to grow, it will be increasingly important to understand the SEO implications that come with the platform. Hopefully, this guide has provided you with additional knowledge that will help make your Shopify store stronger in the search engines. If you’re interested in learning more about Shopify, you can also check out our Shopify SEO Learning Center.

[nutrifami]

Shopify SEO: The Guide to Optimizing Shopify [Updated for 2022]

 A trend we’ve been noticing at Go Fish Digital is that more and more of our clients have been using the Shopify platform. While we initially thought this was just a coincidence, we can see that the data tells a different story:

The Shopify platform has been steadily rising in popularity throughout the years. Looking at BuiltWith usage statistics, we can see that usage of the CMS has more than doubled since October 2017. Currently, 4.24 of the top 10,000 sites and 3.02% of the top 100,000 are using Shopify.

Since we’ve worked with a good amount of Shopify stores, we wanted to share our process for common SEO improvements we help our clients with. The guide below should outline some common adjustments we make on Shopify stores.

What is Shopify SEO?

Shopify SEO is a set of  SEO adjustments that are unique to the Shopify platform. While Shopify stores come with some useful things for SEO, such as a blog and the ability to redirect, it can also create SEO issues such as duplicate content. 

Some of the most common Shopify SEO recommendations are:

Remove duplicate URLs from internal linking architecture

Remove duplicate paginated URLs

Create blog content for keywords with informational intent

Add “Product,” “Article,” & “BreadcrumbList” structured data

Determine how to handle product variant pages

Compress images using crush.pics

Remove unnecessary Shopify apps

We’ll go into how we handle each of these recommendations below:

Duplicate content

In terms of SEO, duplicate content is the highest priority issue we’ve seen created by Shopify. Duplicate content occurs when either duplicate or similar content exists on two separate URLs. This creates issues for search engines as they might not be able to determine which of the two pages should be the canonical version. On top of this, often times link signals are split between the pages.

We’ve seen Shopify create duplicate content in several different ways:

Duplicate product pages

Duplicate collections pages through pagination

Duplicate product pages

Shopify creates this issue within their product pages. By default, Shopify stores allow their /products/ pages to render at two different URL paths:

Canonical URL path: /products/

Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/

Shopify accounts for this by ensuring that all /collections/.*/products/ pages include a canonical tag to the associated /products/ page. Notice how the URL in the address differs from the “canonical” field:

While this certainly helps Google consolidate the duplicate content, a more alarming issue occurs when you look at the internal linking structure. By default, Shopify will link to the non-canonical version of all of your product pages.

As well, we’ve also seen Shopify link to the non-canonical versions of URLs when websites utilize “swatch” internal links that point to other color variants.

Thus, Shopify creates your entire site architecture around non-canonical links by default. This creates a high-priority SEO issue because the website is sending Google conflicting signals:

“Here are the pages we internally link to the most often”

“However, the pages we link to the most often are not the URLs we actually want to be ranking in Google. Please index these other URLs with few internal links”

While canonical tags are usually respected, remember Google does treat these as hints instead of directives. This means that you’re relying on Google to make a judgement about whether or not the content is duplicate each time that it crawls these pages. We prefer not to leave this up to chance, especially when dealing with content at scale.

Adjusting internal linking structure

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix for this. We’ve been able to work with our dev team to adjust the code in the product.grid-item.liquid file. Following those instructions will allow your Shopify site’s collections pages to point to the canonical /product/ URLs.

Duplicate collections pages

As well, we’ve seen many Shopify sites that create duplicate content through the site’s pagination. More specifically, a duplicate is created of the first collections page in a particular series. This is because once you're on a paginated URL in a series, the link to the first page will contain “?page=1”:

However, this will almost always be a duplicate page. A URL with “?page=1” will almost always contain the same content as the original non-parameterized URL. Once again, we recommend having a developer adjust the internal linking structure so that the first paginated result points to the canonical page.

Product variant pages

While this is technically an extension of Shopify’s duplicate content from above, we thought this warranted its own section because this isn’t necessarily always an SEO issue.

It’s not uncommon to see Shopify stores where multiple product URLs are created for the same product with slight variations. In this case, this can create duplicate content issues as often times the core product is the same, but only a slight attribute (color for instance) changes. This means that multiple pages can exist with duplicate/similar product descriptions and images. Here is an example of duplicate pages created by a variant: https://recordit.co/x6YRPkCDqG

If left alone, this once again creates an instance of duplicate content. However, variant URLs do not have to be an SEO issue. In fact, some sites could benefit from these URLs as they allow you to have indexable pages that could be optimized for very specific terms. Whether or not these are beneficial is going to differ on every site. Some key questions to ask yourself are:

Do your customers perform queries based on variant phrases?

Do you have the resources to create unique content for all of your product variants?

Is this content unique enough to stand on its own?

For a more in-depth guide, Jenny Halasz wrote a great article on determining the best course of action for product variations. If your Shopify store contains product variants, than it’s worth determining early on whether or not these pages should exist at a separate URL. If they should, then you should create unique content for every one and optimize each for that variant’s target keywords.

Crawling and indexing

After analyzing quite a few Shopify stores, we’ve found some SEO items that are unique to Shopify when it comes to crawling and indexing. Since this is very often an important component of e-commerce SEO, we thought it would be good to share the ones that apply to Shopify.

Robots.txt file

By default, Shopify creates a robots.txt file for your store with quite a few prewritten “Disallow” commands. We find that in most cases, Shopify’s default robots.txt rules are good enough for most store owners. You can see an example of Shopify’s default robots.txt rules here:

Here are some sections of the site that Shopify will disallow crawling in:

Admin area

Checkout

Orders

Shopping cart

Internal search

Policies page

However, as Shopify stores get bigger and more customized, there’s a greater chance that you might need to adjust the robots.txt file. Fortunately, as of June 2021, Shopify now let’s you update the robots.txt file. 

In order to edit the Shopify robots.txt file, store owners must create a robots.txt.liquid file and then create custom rules to specify any changes.

In order to create a robots.txt.liquid file, store owners can perform the following steps:

Login to your Shopify admin area

In the left sidebar, go to Online Store > Themes

Choose Actions > Edit code

In “Templates”, select the “Add a new template” link

Find the left-most dropdown and choose “robots.txt”

Choose “Create template”

This should create your Shopify robots.txt.liquid file. You can then add rules to your robots.txt.liquid file by adding liquid code. Fortunately, this code isn’t too difficult to add, and Shopify does a good job of highlighting how to do it in their official documentation. Following these steps should allow you to have much more control over which URLs are crawled in your Shopify site.

Sitemap.xml

By default, Shopify will generate a sitemap.xml index file at the URL path “domain.com/sitemap.xml”. Shopify’s sitemap.xml index file will automatically create links to child sitemaps that contain URLs of the following page types:

Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)

Collection Pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)

Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)

Marketing Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)

This sitemap.xml file will dynamically update as new pages are added/removed from to the site. Generally, the Shopify sitemap.xml is good to go out of the box and doesn’t need to be adjusted.

One thing to be aware of is that Shopify will include any published pages in the sitemap.xml file. The most common issue we see is that legacy pages that are published but no longer linked to on the site get included in the sitemap.xml file. It’s worth crawling your sitemap.xml to find any instances of published pages that are included in the sitemap but are not important for search engines to crawl.

Adding the “noindex” tag

While you cannot adjust the robots.txt, Shopify does allow you to add the “noindex” tag. You can exclude a specific page from the index by adding the following code to your theme.liquid file.

As well, if you want to exclude an entire template, you can use this code:

Redirects

Shopify does allow you to implement redirects out-of-the-box, which is great. You can use this for consolidating old/expired pages or any other content that no longer exists. You can do this by going to:

Online Store

Navigation

URL Redirects

The big thing to keep in mind is that you will need to delete a page before you can implement a redirect on Shopify. This means that you’ll want to be really sure you’re not going to use the page in the future. To make this process a little less stressful, we recommend implementing the “Rewind Backups” app.

Log files

As of now, Shopify does not allow you to access log files directly through the platform. This has been confirmed by Shopify support.

Fast Simon implementation

Fast Simon is an enterprise solution that adds robust personalization features to your Shopify store, and is becoming increasingly popular. If your Shopify site is utilizing the Fast Simon technology, you’ll want to be sure that you’re taking steps to adjust any potential indexing issues from an improper implementation. 

Confirm that Fast Simon is pre-rendering your website’s content so that Google doesn’t run into crawling and indexing issues. This will give Googlebot a server-side, rendered version of your site that will make it easier for it to interpret the content. For more details, you can read our case study here. 

Structured data

Product structured data

Overall, Shopify does a pretty good job with structured data. Many Shopify themes should contain “Product” markup out-of-the-box that provides Google with key information such as your product’s name, description, price etc. This is probably the highest priority structured data to have on any e-commerce site, so it’s great that many themes do this for you.

Shopify sites might also benefit from expanding the Product structured data to collections pages as well. This involves adding the Product structured data to define each individual product link in a product listing page. The good folks at Distilled recommend including this structured data on category pages.

Article structured data

As well, if you use Shopify’s blog functionality, you should use “Article” structured data. This is a fantastic schema type that lets Google know that your blog content is more editorial in nature. Of all of the informational content schema, “Article” seems to be the one that Google may prefer since that’s what’s referenced in their official documentation. However, “BlogPosting” schema is also another type of structured data you could add to your Shopify blog

BreadcrumbList structured data

One addition that we routinely add to Shopify sites are breadcrumb internal links with BreadcrumbList structured data. We believe breadcrumbs are crucial to any e-commerce site, as they provide users with easy-to-use internal links that indicate where they’re at within the hierarchy of a website. As well, these breadcrumbs can help Google better understand the website’s structure. We typically suggest adding site breadcrumbs to Shopify sites and marking those up with BreadcrumbList structured data to help Google better understand those internal links.

Implementing structured data on Shopify

If you want to implement structured data and have a developer on hand, it can be good to have them add the above structured data types. This ensures that these schema elements will always be present on your site.

However, if your development resources are more limited, we find that Schema App Total Schema Markup is a great option. This will incorporate structured data types such as Product and BlogPosting schema on the proper pages of the site. As well, it will even add OfferCatalog schema to mark up every single product within a category page. Their support is also fantastic as they’re team helps you with any technical issues you might encounter.

Improving Shopify site speed

One of the biggest complaints we hear about Shopify is that it suffers from slower speeds. However, compared to other e-commerce platforms, we find that Shopify performs quite well. Out of the box, Shopify uses the Fastly CDN and leverages browser caching which gives you a solid performance foundation. In the past, we’ve actually benchmarked the average speed metrics of 400+ Shopify sites. Below are the average performance metrics of the Shopify sites we tested in our dataset.

First Contentful Paint: 3.8 seconds

Time To Interactive: 22.1 seconds

Total Page Size: 4.41 MB

Total Image Assets: 2.1 MB

Requests: 171

In terms of improving performance, below are the things we’ll generally advise our clients to do:

Lazy load images with the lazysizes library

Automatically compress images using Crush.pics

Eliminate any low usage Shopify apps

Manually resize and compress large images on high priority pages

Migrate tracking codes to Google Tag Manager

Keyword research

Performing keyword research for Shopify stores will be very similar to the research you would perform for other e-commerce stores.

Some general ways to generate keywords are:

Export your keyword data from Google AdWords. Track and optimize for those that generate the most revenue for the site.

Research your AdWords keywords that have high conversion rates. Even if the volume is lower, a high conversion rate indicates that this keyword is more transactional.

Review the keywords the site currently gets clicks/impressions for in Google Search Console.

Research your high priority keywords and generate new ideas using Moz’s Keyword Explorer.

Run your competitors through tools like Ahrefs. Using the “Content Gap” report, you can find keyword opportunities where competitor sites are ranking but yours is not.

If you have keywords that use similar modifiers, you can use MergeWords to automatically generate a large variety of keyword variations.

Keyword optimization

Similar to Yoast SEO, Shopify does allow you to optimize key elements such as your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs. Where possible, you should be using your target keywords in these elements.

To adjust these elements, you simply need to navigate to the page you wish to adjust and scroll down to “Search Engine Listing Preview”:

Adding content to product pages

If you decide that each individual product should be indexed, ideally you’ll want to add unique content to each page. Initially, your Shopify products may not have unique on-page content associated with them. This is a common issue for Shopify stores, as oftentimes the same descriptions are used across multiple products or no descriptions are present. Adding product descriptions with on-page best practices will give your products the best chance of ranking in the SERPs.

However, we understand that it’s time-consuming to create unique content for every product that you offer. With clients in the past, we’ve taken a targeted approach as to which products to optimize first. We like to use the “Sales By Product” report which can help prioritize which are the most important products to start adding content to. You can find this report in Analytics > Dashboard > Top Products By Units Sold.

By taking this approach, we can quickly identify some of the highest priority pages in the store to optimize. We can then work with a copywriter to start creating content for each individual product. Also, keep in mind that your product descriptions should always be written from a user-focused view. Writing about the features of the product they care about the most will give your site the best chance at improving both conversions and SEO.

Shopify blog

Shopify does include the ability to create a blog, but we often see this missing from a large number of Shopify stores. It makes sense, as revenue is the primary goal of an e-commerce site, so the initial build of the site is product-focused.

However, we live in an era where it’s getting harder and harder to rank product pages in Google. For instance, the below screenshot illustrates the top 3 organic results for the term “cloth diapers”:

While many would assume that this is primarily a transactional query, we’re seeing Google is ranking two articles and a single product listing page in the top three results. This is just one instance of a major trend we’ve seen where Google is starting to prefer to rank more informational content above transactional.

By excluding a blog from a Shopify store, we think this results in a huge missed opportunity for many businesses. The inclusion of a blog allows you to have a natural place where you can create this informational content. If you’re seeing that Google is ranking more blog/article types of content for the keywords mapped to your Shopify store, your best bet is to go out and create that content yourself.

If you run a Shopify store (or any e-commerce site), we would urge you to take the following few steps:

Identify your highest priority keywords

Manually perform a Google query for each one

Make note of the types of content Google is ranking on the first page. Is it primarily informational, transactional, or a mix of both?

If you’re seeing primarily mixed or informational content, evaluate your own content to see if you have any that matches the user intent. If so, improve the quality and optimize.

If you do not have this content, consider creating new blog content around informational topics that seems to fulfill the user intent

As an example, we have a client that was interested in ranking for the term “CRM software,” an extremely competitive keyword. When analyzing the SERPs, we found that Google was ranking primarily informational pages about “What Is CRM Software?” Since they only had a product page that highlighted their specific CRM, we suggested the client create a more informational page that talked generally about what CRM software is and the benefits it provides. After creating and optimizing the page, we soon saw a significant increase in organic traffic (credit to Ally Mickler):

The issue that we see on many Shopify sites is that there is very little focus on informational pages despite the fact that those perform well in the search engines. Most Shopify sites should be using the blogging platform, as this will provide an avenue to create informational content that will result in organic traffic and revenue.

Apps

Similar to WordPress’s plugins, Shopify offers “Apps” that allow you to add advanced functionality to your site without having to manually adjust the code. However, unlike WordPress, most of the Shopify Apps you’ll find are paid. This will require either a one-time or monthly fee.

Shopify apps for SEO

While your best bet is likely teaming up with a developer who's comfortable with Shopify, here are some Shopify apps that can help improve the SEO of your site.

Crush.pics: A great automated way of compressing large image files. Crucial for most Shopify sites as many of these sites are heavily image-based.

Schema App Total Schema Markup: This app may be used if you do not have a Shopify developer who is able to add custom structured data to your site.

Smart SEO: An app that can add meta tags, alt tags, & JSON-LD

Yotpo Reviews: This app can help you add product reviews to your site, making your content eligible for rich review stars in the SERPs.

Rewind Backups: Creates backups of your site. Great to implement before making development changes or adding redirects.

Is Yoast SEO available for Shopify?

Yoast SEO is exclusively a WordPress plugin. There is currently no Yoast SEO Shopify App.

Limiting your Shopify apps

Similar to WordPress plugins, Shopify apps will inject additional code onto your site. This means that adding a large number of apps can slow down the site. Shopify sites are especially susceptible to bloat, as many apps are focused on improving conversions. Often times, these apps will add more JavaScript and CSS files which can hurt page load times. You’ll want to be sure that you regularly audit the apps you’re using and remove any that are not adding value or being utilized by the site.

Client results

We’ve seen pretty good success in our clients that use Shopify stores. Below you can find some of the results we’ve been able to achieve for them. However, please note that these case studies do not just include the recommendations above. For these clients, we have used a combination of some of the recommendations outlined above as well as other SEO initiatives.

In one example, we worked with a Shopify store that was interested in ranking for very competitive terms surrounding the main product their store focused on. We evaluated their top performing products in the “Sales by product” report. This resulted in a large effort to work with the client to add new content to their product pages as they were not initially optimized. This combined with other initiatives has helped improve their first page rankings by 113 keywords (credit to Jennifer Wright & LaRhonda Sparrow).

In another instance, a client came to us with an issue that they were not ranking for their branded keywords. Instead, third-party retailers that also carried their products were often outranking them. We worked with them to adjust their internal linking structure to point to the canonical pages instead of the duplicate pages created by Shopify. We also optimized their content to better utilize the branded terminology on relevant pages. As a result, they’ve seen a nice increase in overall rankings in just several months time.

Moving forward

As Shopify usage continues to grow, it will be increasingly important to understand the SEO implications that come with the platform. Hopefully, this guide has provided you with additional knowledge that will help make your Shopify store stronger in the search engines. If you’re interested in learning more about Shopify, you can also check out our Shopify SEO Learning Center.

[camerasieunhovn]

Shopify SEO: The Guide to Optimizing Shopify [Updated for 2022]

 A trend we’ve been noticing at Go Fish Digital is that more and more of our clients have been using the Shopify platform. While we initially thought this was just a coincidence, we can see that the data tells a different story:

The Shopify platform has been steadily rising in popularity throughout the years. Looking at BuiltWith usage statistics, we can see that usage of the CMS has more than doubled since October 2017. Currently, 4.24 of the top 10,000 sites and 3.02% of the top 100,000 are using Shopify.

Since we’ve worked with a good amount of Shopify stores, we wanted to share our process for common SEO improvements we help our clients with. The guide below should outline some common adjustments we make on Shopify stores.

What is Shopify SEO?

Shopify SEO is a set of  SEO adjustments that are unique to the Shopify platform. While Shopify stores come with some useful things for SEO, such as a blog and the ability to redirect, it can also create SEO issues such as duplicate content. 

Some of the most common Shopify SEO recommendations are:

Remove duplicate URLs from internal linking architecture

Remove duplicate paginated URLs

Create blog content for keywords with informational intent

Add “Product,” “Article,” & “BreadcrumbList” structured data

Determine how to handle product variant pages

Compress images using crush.pics

Remove unnecessary Shopify apps

We’ll go into how we handle each of these recommendations below:

Duplicate content

In terms of SEO, duplicate content is the highest priority issue we’ve seen created by Shopify. Duplicate content occurs when either duplicate or similar content exists on two separate URLs. This creates issues for search engines as they might not be able to determine which of the two pages should be the canonical version. On top of this, often times link signals are split between the pages.

We’ve seen Shopify create duplicate content in several different ways:

Duplicate product pages

Duplicate collections pages through pagination

Duplicate product pages

Shopify creates this issue within their product pages. By default, Shopify stores allow their /products/ pages to render at two different URL paths:

Canonical URL path: /products/

Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/

Shopify accounts for this by ensuring that all /collections/.*/products/ pages include a canonical tag to the associated /products/ page. Notice how the URL in the address differs from the “canonical” field:

While this certainly helps Google consolidate the duplicate content, a more alarming issue occurs when you look at the internal linking structure. By default, Shopify will link to the non-canonical version of all of your product pages.

As well, we’ve also seen Shopify link to the non-canonical versions of URLs when websites utilize “swatch” internal links that point to other color variants.

Thus, Shopify creates your entire site architecture around non-canonical links by default. This creates a high-priority SEO issue because the website is sending Google conflicting signals:

“Here are the pages we internally link to the most often”

“However, the pages we link to the most often are not the URLs we actually want to be ranking in Google. Please index these other URLs with few internal links”

While canonical tags are usually respected, remember Google does treat these as hints instead of directives. This means that you’re relying on Google to make a judgement about whether or not the content is duplicate each time that it crawls these pages. We prefer not to leave this up to chance, especially when dealing with content at scale.

Adjusting internal linking structure

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix for this. We’ve been able to work with our dev team to adjust the code in the product.grid-item.liquid file. Following those instructions will allow your Shopify site’s collections pages to point to the canonical /product/ URLs.

Duplicate collections pages

As well, we’ve seen many Shopify sites that create duplicate content through the site’s pagination. More specifically, a duplicate is created of the first collections page in a particular series. This is because once you're on a paginated URL in a series, the link to the first page will contain “?page=1”:

However, this will almost always be a duplicate page. A URL with “?page=1” will almost always contain the same content as the original non-parameterized URL. Once again, we recommend having a developer adjust the internal linking structure so that the first paginated result points to the canonical page.

Product variant pages

While this is technically an extension of Shopify’s duplicate content from above, we thought this warranted its own section because this isn’t necessarily always an SEO issue.

It’s not uncommon to see Shopify stores where multiple product URLs are created for the same product with slight variations. In this case, this can create duplicate content issues as often times the core product is the same, but only a slight attribute (color for instance) changes. This means that multiple pages can exist with duplicate/similar product descriptions and images. Here is an example of duplicate pages created by a variant: https://recordit.co/x6YRPkCDqG

If left alone, this once again creates an instance of duplicate content. However, variant URLs do not have to be an SEO issue. In fact, some sites could benefit from these URLs as they allow you to have indexable pages that could be optimized for very specific terms. Whether or not these are beneficial is going to differ on every site. Some key questions to ask yourself are:

Do your customers perform queries based on variant phrases?

Do you have the resources to create unique content for all of your product variants?

Is this content unique enough to stand on its own?

For a more in-depth guide, Jenny Halasz wrote a great article on determining the best course of action for product variations. If your Shopify store contains product variants, than it’s worth determining early on whether or not these pages should exist at a separate URL. If they should, then you should create unique content for every one and optimize each for that variant’s target keywords.

Crawling and indexing

After analyzing quite a few Shopify stores, we’ve found some SEO items that are unique to Shopify when it comes to crawling and indexing. Since this is very often an important component of e-commerce SEO, we thought it would be good to share the ones that apply to Shopify.

Robots.txt file

By default, Shopify creates a robots.txt file for your store with quite a few prewritten “Disallow” commands. We find that in most cases, Shopify’s default robots.txt rules are good enough for most store owners. You can see an example of Shopify’s default robots.txt rules here:

Here are some sections of the site that Shopify will disallow crawling in:

Admin area

Checkout

Orders

Shopping cart

Internal search

Policies page

However, as Shopify stores get bigger and more customized, there’s a greater chance that you might need to adjust the robots.txt file. Fortunately, as of June 2021, Shopify now let’s you update the robots.txt file. 

In order to edit the Shopify robots.txt file, store owners must create a robots.txt.liquid file and then create custom rules to specify any changes.

In order to create a robots.txt.liquid file, store owners can perform the following steps:

Login to your Shopify admin area

In the left sidebar, go to Online Store > Themes

Choose Actions > Edit code

In “Templates”, select the “Add a new template” link

Find the left-most dropdown and choose “robots.txt”

Choose “Create template”

This should create your Shopify robots.txt.liquid file. You can then add rules to your robots.txt.liquid file by adding liquid code. Fortunately, this code isn’t too difficult to add, and Shopify does a good job of highlighting how to do it in their official documentation. Following these steps should allow you to have much more control over which URLs are crawled in your Shopify site.

Sitemap.xml

By default, Shopify will generate a sitemap.xml index file at the URL path “domain.com/sitemap.xml”. Shopify’s sitemap.xml index file will automatically create links to child sitemaps that contain URLs of the following page types:

Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)

Collection Pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)

Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)

Marketing Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)

This sitemap.xml file will dynamically update as new pages are added/removed from to the site. Generally, the Shopify sitemap.xml is good to go out of the box and doesn’t need to be adjusted.

One thing to be aware of is that Shopify will include any published pages in the sitemap.xml file. The most common issue we see is that legacy pages that are published but no longer linked to on the site get included in the sitemap.xml file. It’s worth crawling your sitemap.xml to find any instances of published pages that are included in the sitemap but are not important for search engines to crawl.

Adding the “noindex” tag

While you cannot adjust the robots.txt, Shopify does allow you to add the “noindex” tag. You can exclude a specific page from the index by adding the following code to your theme.liquid file.

As well, if you want to exclude an entire template, you can use this code:

Redirects

Shopify does allow you to implement redirects out-of-the-box, which is great. You can use this for consolidating old/expired pages or any other content that no longer exists. You can do this by going to:

Online Store

Navigation

URL Redirects

The big thing to keep in mind is that you will need to delete a page before you can implement a redirect on Shopify. This means that you’ll want to be really sure you’re not going to use the page in the future. To make this process a little less stressful, we recommend implementing the “Rewind Backups” app.

Log files

As of now, Shopify does not allow you to access log files directly through the platform. This has been confirmed by Shopify support.

Fast Simon implementation

Fast Simon is an enterprise solution that adds robust personalization features to your Shopify store, and is becoming increasingly popular. If your Shopify site is utilizing the Fast Simon technology, you’ll want to be sure that you’re taking steps to adjust any potential indexing issues from an improper implementation. 

Confirm that Fast Simon is pre-rendering your website’s content so that Google doesn’t run into crawling and indexing issues. This will give Googlebot a server-side, rendered version of your site that will make it easier for it to interpret the content. For more details, you can read our case study here. 

Structured data

Product structured data

Overall, Shopify does a pretty good job with structured data. Many Shopify themes should contain “Product” markup out-of-the-box that provides Google with key information such as your product’s name, description, price etc. This is probably the highest priority structured data to have on any e-commerce site, so it’s great that many themes do this for you.

Shopify sites might also benefit from expanding the Product structured data to collections pages as well. This involves adding the Product structured data to define each individual product link in a product listing page. The good folks at Distilled recommend including this structured data on category pages.

Article structured data

As well, if you use Shopify’s blog functionality, you should use “Article” structured data. This is a fantastic schema type that lets Google know that your blog content is more editorial in nature. Of all of the informational content schema, “Article” seems to be the one that Google may prefer since that’s what’s referenced in their official documentation. However, “BlogPosting” schema is also another type of structured data you could add to your Shopify blog

BreadcrumbList structured data

One addition that we routinely add to Shopify sites are breadcrumb internal links with BreadcrumbList structured data. We believe breadcrumbs are crucial to any e-commerce site, as they provide users with easy-to-use internal links that indicate where they’re at within the hierarchy of a website. As well, these breadcrumbs can help Google better understand the website’s structure. We typically suggest adding site breadcrumbs to Shopify sites and marking those up with BreadcrumbList structured data to help Google better understand those internal links.

Implementing structured data on Shopify

If you want to implement structured data and have a developer on hand, it can be good to have them add the above structured data types. This ensures that these schema elements will always be present on your site.

However, if your development resources are more limited, we find that Schema App Total Schema Markup is a great option. This will incorporate structured data types such as Product and BlogPosting schema on the proper pages of the site. As well, it will even add OfferCatalog schema to mark up every single product within a category page. Their support is also fantastic as they’re team helps you with any technical issues you might encounter.

Improving Shopify site speed

One of the biggest complaints we hear about Shopify is that it suffers from slower speeds. However, compared to other e-commerce platforms, we find that Shopify performs quite well. Out of the box, Shopify uses the Fastly CDN and leverages browser caching which gives you a solid performance foundation. In the past, we’ve actually benchmarked the average speed metrics of 400+ Shopify sites. Below are the average performance metrics of the Shopify sites we tested in our dataset.

First Contentful Paint: 3.8 seconds

Time To Interactive: 22.1 seconds

Total Page Size: 4.41 MB

Total Image Assets: 2.1 MB

Requests: 171

In terms of improving performance, below are the things we’ll generally advise our clients to do:

Lazy load images with the lazysizes library

Automatically compress images using Crush.pics

Eliminate any low usage Shopify apps

Manually resize and compress large images on high priority pages

Migrate tracking codes to Google Tag Manager

Keyword research

Performing keyword research for Shopify stores will be very similar to the research you would perform for other e-commerce stores.

Some general ways to generate keywords are:

Export your keyword data from Google AdWords. Track and optimize for those that generate the most revenue for the site.

Research your AdWords keywords that have high conversion rates. Even if the volume is lower, a high conversion rate indicates that this keyword is more transactional.

Review the keywords the site currently gets clicks/impressions for in Google Search Console.

Research your high priority keywords and generate new ideas using Moz’s Keyword Explorer.

Run your competitors through tools like Ahrefs. Using the “Content Gap” report, you can find keyword opportunities where competitor sites are ranking but yours is not.

If you have keywords that use similar modifiers, you can use MergeWords to automatically generate a large variety of keyword variations.

Keyword optimization

Similar to Yoast SEO, Shopify does allow you to optimize key elements such as your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs. Where possible, you should be using your target keywords in these elements.

To adjust these elements, you simply need to navigate to the page you wish to adjust and scroll down to “Search Engine Listing Preview”:

Adding content to product pages

If you decide that each individual product should be indexed, ideally you’ll want to add unique content to each page. Initially, your Shopify products may not have unique on-page content associated with them. This is a common issue for Shopify stores, as oftentimes the same descriptions are used across multiple products or no descriptions are present. Adding product descriptions with on-page best practices will give your products the best chance of ranking in the SERPs.

However, we understand that it’s time-consuming to create unique content for every product that you offer. With clients in the past, we’ve taken a targeted approach as to which products to optimize first. We like to use the “Sales By Product” report which can help prioritize which are the most important products to start adding content to. You can find this report in Analytics > Dashboard > Top Products By Units Sold.

By taking this approach, we can quickly identify some of the highest priority pages in the store to optimize. We can then work with a copywriter to start creating content for each individual product. Also, keep in mind that your product descriptions should always be written from a user-focused view. Writing about the features of the product they care about the most will give your site the best chance at improving both conversions and SEO.

Shopify blog

Shopify does include the ability to create a blog, but we often see this missing from a large number of Shopify stores. It makes sense, as revenue is the primary goal of an e-commerce site, so the initial build of the site is product-focused.

However, we live in an era where it’s getting harder and harder to rank product pages in Google. For instance, the below screenshot illustrates the top 3 organic results for the term “cloth diapers”:

While many would assume that this is primarily a transactional query, we’re seeing Google is ranking two articles and a single product listing page in the top three results. This is just one instance of a major trend we’ve seen where Google is starting to prefer to rank more informational content above transactional.

By excluding a blog from a Shopify store, we think this results in a huge missed opportunity for many businesses. The inclusion of a blog allows you to have a natural place where you can create this informational content. If you’re seeing that Google is ranking more blog/article types of content for the keywords mapped to your Shopify store, your best bet is to go out and create that content yourself.

If you run a Shopify store (or any e-commerce site), we would urge you to take the following few steps:

Identify your highest priority keywords

Manually perform a Google query for each one

Make note of the types of content Google is ranking on the first page. Is it primarily informational, transactional, or a mix of both?

If you’re seeing primarily mixed or informational content, evaluate your own content to see if you have any that matches the user intent. If so, improve the quality and optimize.

If you do not have this content, consider creating new blog content around informational topics that seems to fulfill the user intent

As an example, we have a client that was interested in ranking for the term “CRM software,” an extremely competitive keyword. When analyzing the SERPs, we found that Google was ranking primarily informational pages about “What Is CRM Software?” Since they only had a product page that highlighted their specific CRM, we suggested the client create a more informational page that talked generally about what CRM software is and the benefits it provides. After creating and optimizing the page, we soon saw a significant increase in organic traffic (credit to Ally Mickler):

The issue that we see on many Shopify sites is that there is very little focus on informational pages despite the fact that those perform well in the search engines. Most Shopify sites should be using the blogging platform, as this will provide an avenue to create informational content that will result in organic traffic and revenue.

Apps

Similar to WordPress’s plugins, Shopify offers “Apps” that allow you to add advanced functionality to your site without having to manually adjust the code. However, unlike WordPress, most of the Shopify Apps you’ll find are paid. This will require either a one-time or monthly fee.

Shopify apps for SEO

While your best bet is likely teaming up with a developer who's comfortable with Shopify, here are some Shopify apps that can help improve the SEO of your site.

Crush.pics: A great automated way of compressing large image files. Crucial for most Shopify sites as many of these sites are heavily image-based.

Schema App Total Schema Markup: This app may be used if you do not have a Shopify developer who is able to add custom structured data to your site.

Smart SEO: An app that can add meta tags, alt tags, & JSON-LD

Yotpo Reviews: This app can help you add product reviews to your site, making your content eligible for rich review stars in the SERPs.

Rewind Backups: Creates backups of your site. Great to implement before making development changes or adding redirects.

Is Yoast SEO available for Shopify?

Yoast SEO is exclusively a WordPress plugin. There is currently no Yoast SEO Shopify App.

Limiting your Shopify apps

Similar to WordPress plugins, Shopify apps will inject additional code onto your site. This means that adding a large number of apps can slow down the site. Shopify sites are especially susceptible to bloat, as many apps are focused on improving conversions. Often times, these apps will add more JavaScript and CSS files which can hurt page load times. You’ll want to be sure that you regularly audit the apps you’re using and remove any that are not adding value or being utilized by the site.

Client results

We’ve seen pretty good success in our clients that use Shopify stores. Below you can find some of the results we’ve been able to achieve for them. However, please note that these case studies do not just include the recommendations above. For these clients, we have used a combination of some of the recommendations outlined above as well as other SEO initiatives.

In one example, we worked with a Shopify store that was interested in ranking for very competitive terms surrounding the main product their store focused on. We evaluated their top performing products in the “Sales by product” report. This resulted in a large effort to work with the client to add new content to their product pages as they were not initially optimized. This combined with other initiatives has helped improve their first page rankings by 113 keywords (credit to Jennifer Wright & LaRhonda Sparrow).

In another instance, a client came to us with an issue that they were not ranking for their branded keywords. Instead, third-party retailers that also carried their products were often outranking them. We worked with them to adjust their internal linking structure to point to the canonical pages instead of the duplicate pages created by Shopify. We also optimized their content to better utilize the branded terminology on relevant pages. As a result, they’ve seen a nice increase in overall rankings in just several months time.

Moving forward

As Shopify usage continues to grow, it will be increasingly important to understand the SEO implications that come with the platform. Hopefully, this guide has provided you with additional knowledge that will help make your Shopify store stronger in the search engines. If you’re interested in learning more about Shopify, you can also check out our Shopify SEO Learning Center.