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Shopify eCommerce SEO – 5 Unique Site Technical Optimization Tasks

Louis Lu

Clients who use Shopify CMS have been rising significantly in the past 3 years. What’s more, we are seeing the momentum going up. In Shopify’s contribution margin table, paid, automation, display, and so on paid advertising’s contribution is a big role. However, return on investment might be a challenge and sellers are always discussing how to optimize better. On the other hand, Shopify eCommerce SEO is a key player in contributing to sales with a high proportion and ROI. However, Shopify’s SEO technical work is getting a little bit tricky.

In this article, I will share 5 things we must start to do in terms of eCommerce SEO technical. These experiences are summarized by serving clients and operating in-house business teams. By the end of this piece, you are able to understand the reasons, learn the techniques, and find useful tools to use in the process.

eCommerce SEO – Duplicate Product Pages

Shopify page product URL structure basically has two types, which are listed below. These two pages actually are showing the same product listing content on the website.

Shopify by default sets all /collection/.*/products/abc pages to have a canonical tag to the associated /products/abc. This is the canonical tag field by using Chrome inspect.

https://www.buyfromlo.com/collections/mi-smart-home/products/xiaomi-mi-2s-air-purifier-for-formaldehyde-cleaning-intelligent-household-hepa-filter-smartphone-app-control-wifi-rc

https://www.buyfromlo.com/products/xiaomi-mi-2s-air-purifier-for-formaldehyde-cleaning-intelligent-household-hepa-filter-smartphone-app-control-wifi-rc

This certainly helps de-duplicate content. However, the other issue occurs when we look at the internal linking structure because Shopify links to the non-canonical version of all of the product pages. Below is an example of a collection page. Whichever product you click through, you will be directed to non-canonical versions of the product pages, which include variant pages.

https://www.buyfromlo.com/collections/mi-smart-home

Shopify creates an entire site architecture with non-canonical link issues by default. This creates a high-priority SEO issue because the website is sending Google conflicting signals. The first one is these pages we internally link to the most often. The other is the pages we link to most often are not the URLs we actually want to be ranking in Google.

For fixing this, we need to adjust the internal linking structure. The two steps are listed as below:

Step 1: Go to Online store – edit the code – snippet – product.card.grid.liquid

Step 2: Find this code: <a class="grid-view-item__link grid-view-item__image-container full-width-link" href="{{ product.url | within: collection }}">

Then, just remove | within: collection and this is the changed code

<a class="grid-view-item__link grid-view-item__image-container full-width-link" href="{{ product.url}}">

Duplicate Product Variant Pages

Product URLs with variant parameters do not have to be an SEO issue. It’s because the canonical tag is directing all variants to the original product page created in Shopify. Although only one product page will be indexed by the search engine, it doesn’t create duplicate content issues.

However, some Shopify sellers create new pages for each variant of the same product. This might be a big issue if you don’t have differentiated content to separate two pages. For example, if it’s just the color or the size is different, it creates duplicate content issues. So, before creating and listing products on the Shopify website, please ask if it’s necessary to separate variants by URL pages from a product. Particularly when you might have limited resources to create a unique content set, or the customer rarely queries regarding the specific variant.

If you are interested in an air purifier, please check out this article

Air Purifier Matters for Sleep Quality and Work Efficiency, Xiaomi MI 2S vs Levoit Vital 100

Shopify Editable Robot.txt and Customizable sitemap.xml

In the past, Shopify by default disallowed sellers to edit robot.txt and XML sitemap. However, since June 2021, Shopify finally allows sellers to modify the robot.txt. Also, I shared before there is a way to create a customized XML sitemap. For the topic and related workaround tactics, I’m not going to dive into the details, because I had released the other article regarding it. Please check it out as listed below

How To Create A Custom Shopify XML Sitemap for your eCommerce Website

Having said that, it does have an alternative way to exclude some pages which you don’t want them to show in SERP. The method is adding the “no index” tag, and below is the instruction:

Step 1: Go to the online store – edit the code – theme. liquid

Step 2: Past the code here and fill in the specific keyword in the URL path, or a specific URL path you want to exclude

Option 1

{% if template contains 'search' %}

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

{% endif %}

Option 2

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

{% if handle contains 'page-handle-you-want-to-exclude' %}

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

{% endif %}

eCommerce SEO – Product Structured Data

Many Shopify themes do contain product markup that provides Google with key information such as your product’s name, description, price, tax, SKU, barcode, etc. This is probably the highest priority structured data to have on any eCommerce CMS platform.

However, things are always not perfect. We still come across sometimes some product structure data that is missing, which reflects in the search console. It might depend on your theme, but it does exist. 

if your development resources are more limited, I would recommend Schema App Total Schema Markup, which is one of the great options. This will incorporate structured data types such as Product, blog, 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 their team helps you with any technical issues you might encounter.

If you use a Shopify blog, 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. In the app, blog posting schema is also another type of structured data you could add to your Shopify blog

The other addition that we recommend adding to Shopify sites is 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 reduce the crawlability budget and help Google faster and better understand the website’s structure

Redirect and Canonicalization

301 redirect canonicalization is the two most popular approaches to de-duplicate content and removes error pages. If you are not deduplicating, it causes page crawlability and indexation efficiency. Eventually, it affects your site’s search engine rankings

On a domain level, any Shopify store can have from three to four versions as listed below

  1. http://buyfromlo.com
  2. http://www.buyfromlo.com
  3. https://buyfromlo.com
  4. https://www.buyfromlo.com

In your Shopify store, head to Online Store > Domains. Choose a domain in the dropdown, then select ‘Redirect all traffic to this domain

Fixing canonicalization on a page level involves setting canonical tags. In fact, it’s not complex. But just it can work a little differently on Shopify then it does on other sites.

Steps to add a canonical tag:

1 – In your Shopify admin, click Online Store and then click Themes.

2 – Find the theme you want to edit, click Actions, and then click Edit code.

3 – Under Layout, click a theme. liquid.

4 – Paste the following code on the line above the closing </head> tag:

<title>

{{ page_title }}{% if current_tags %} &ndash; tagged "{{ current_tags | join: ', ' }}"{% endif %}{% if current_page != 1 %} &ndash; Page {{ current_page }}{% endif %}{% unless page_title contains shop.name %} &ndash; {{ shop.name }}{% endunless %}

</title>

{% if page_description %}

<meta name="description" content="{{ page_description | escape }}" />

{% endif %}

<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" />

So easy, right? I hope you enjoy reading Shopify eCommerce SEO – 5 Unique Site Technical Optimization Tasks. If you did, please support us by doing one of the things listed below, because it always helps out our channel.

FAQ:

Q1: What is Shopify eCommerce SEO?

A: Shopify eCommerce SEO refers to the process of optimizing an online store on the Shopify platform to improve its visibility and rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). It involves various strategies and techniques to increase organic traffic and attract potential customers to the store.

Q2: Why is SEO important for Shopify eCommerce?

A: SEO is important for Shopify eCommerce because it helps drive organic traffic to the online store, increases visibility in search engines, improves rankings, and ultimately leads to higher sales and revenue. It allows businesses to reach their target audience and compete effectively in the online marketplace.

Q3: What are some basic SEO techniques for Shopify eCommerce?

A: Some basic SEO techniques for Shopify eCommerce include optimizing product titles and descriptions, using relevant keywords, creating unique and informative content, improving site speed and mobile-friendliness, obtaining quality backlinks, and optimizing meta tags and URLs.

Q4: How can I optimize product titles and descriptions for SEO?

A: To optimize product titles and descriptions for SEO, you should use relevant keywords in the titles and descriptions, make them compelling and unique, avoid duplicate content, include product features and benefits, and ensure they are easy to read and understand.

Q5: What is the role of content in Shopify eCommerce SEO?

A: Content plays a crucial role in Shopify eCommerce SEO as it helps attract and engage potential customers, provides valuable information, improves rankings, and increases organic traffic. High-quality and relevant content can also help build brand authority and credibility.

Q6: How can I improve site speed and mobile-friendliness for SEO?

A: To improve site speed and mobile-friendliness for SEO, you should optimize images and videos, minify CSS and JavaScript files, enable browser caching, use a responsive design, ensure fast loading times, and regularly test the website on different devices and browsers.

Q7: What are backlinks and why are they important for Shopify eCommerce SEO?

A: Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your online store. They are important for Shopify eCommerce SEO because they help improve search engine rankings, increase domain authority, drive referral traffic, and indicate to search engines that your store is trustworthy and relevant.

Q8: How can I obtain quality backlinks for my Shopify eCommerce store?

A: To obtain quality backlinks for your Shopify eCommerce store, you can reach out to industry influencers and bloggers for collaborations and guest posting opportunities, create valuable and shareable content, participate in online forums and communities, and leverage social media platforms.

Q9: What are meta tags and how do they impact Shopify eCommerce SEO?

A: Meta tags are snippets of text that describe the content of a web page. They impact Shopify eCommerce SEO by providing search engines with information about the page’s content, improving click-through rates in search results, and influencing rankings. Important meta tags include the title tag, meta description, and meta keywords.

Q10: How can I optimize URLs for better Shopify eCommerce SEO?

A: To optimize URLs for better Shopify eCommerce SEO, you should keep them short and descriptive, use relevant keywords, separate words with hyphens, avoid unnecessary parameters and numbers, and ensure they are easily readable and user-friendly.
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