Fixing Ecommerce SEO in Shopify

What Shopify decides for you

Some parts of a Shopify store cannot be changed, and it saves time to accept them early rather than fight them.

What you do control is the theme, the apps, the content and the settings. That is where the Ecommerce Audit findings on Shopify stores usually trace back to.

Collection-path product links

Every Shopify product has one main URL, /products/harbour-sofa, but it is also reachable through each collection it belongs to, such as /collections/garden-sofas/products/harbour-sofa. The canonical tag on the collection-path version points to the main URL, so this is not a disaster. The trouble is that many themes link to products from collection grids using the collection path, via the Liquid within filter:

{%- comment -%} Links through the collection path {%- endcomment -%}
<a href="{{ product.url | within: collection }}">{{ product.title }}</a>

{%- comment -%} Links to the main product URL {%- endcomment -%}
<a href="{{ product.url }}">{{ product.title }}</a>

With the first version, your own internal links point search engines at thousands of non-canonical URLs, while the canonical tag says to use a different one. Crawlers spend time on the duplicates and have to reconcile mixed signals. Removing | within: collection from product card snippets, usually in files named something like card-product.liquid or product-grid-item.liquid, makes every internal link agree with the canonical.

The trade-off is that the breadcrumb on the product page may no longer know which collection the shopper came from. Most shops handle this by showing the product's main collection in the breadcrumb, set with a metafield, which is clearer anyway. The duplicate product URLs guide explains the general principle.

Search listing fields and handles

Each product, collection, page and blog post in the Shopify admin has a "Search engine listing" section at the bottom of its edit screen. It holds three things:

• Page title, used for the title tag. If left empty, the theme falls back to the product or collection name, often followed by the shop name.
• Meta description. If left empty, many themes use the start of the description, which on imported products is often a line of specification or supplier text.
• URL handle, the part after /products/ or /collections/.

For a large catalogue, editing these one by one is slow. Shopify's product CSV export and import includes SEO title and SEO description columns, so you can write them in a spreadsheet and import them back. Collections do not have the same CSV route in the standard admin, but there are far fewer of them.

Changing handles

When you change a handle, Shopify offers a "Create a URL redirect" checkbox. Leave it ticked; it adds a permanent redirect from the old address. Only change handles where there is a clear gain, such as replacing hbr-3s-gry-2 with harbour-sofa, because every change creates a redirect and internal links should be updated to the new URL too. Existing redirects can be reviewed and exported from the URL redirects screen in the admin.

Room for real content: metafields and sections

Shopify's default product and collection templates give you one rich text description each. That pushes shops into cramming specifications, sizing, care and delivery notes into a single block, and leaves collections with nowhere to put buying help below the product grid.

Metafields solve this. You define them once in Settings under custom data, for example:

In an Online Store 2.0 theme you can then connect these to blocks in the theme editor without code, using the dynamic source button, or output them in Liquid:

{%- if product.metafields.custom.dimensions != blank -%}
  <tr><th scope="row">Dimensions</th>
  <td>{{ product.metafields.custom.dimensions }}</td></tr>
{%- endif -%}

Because the values live in structured fields, the same data can feed filters in the Search & Discovery app, specification tables and, if your theme or app builds it from them, Product markup. The product page guide and the category page guide explain what to put in them.

Apps that help, and apps that leave a mess

Apps are where Shopify stores gain features and lose control. For SEO, the common problems are:

• Duplicate structured data. The theme outputs Product JSON-LD, a review app adds another Product block with ratings, and an SEO app adds a third. Search engines then see conflicting prices or ratings. Keep one complete block and switch off the others; the Shopify JSON-LD guide covers this in detail.
• Content that only exists in scripts. Reviews, size guides and FAQ tabs rendered by an app after load may be invisible in the page HTML. Check with View Source and prefer apps that render server-side or through theme app blocks.
• Leftover code. Older apps inserted snippets directly into theme files. Uninstalling the app does not always remove them, so the store keeps loading scripts, or broken references, for an app you no longer use.
• Page builder templates. Landing page apps can create pages with their own templates that ignore your title, canonical or heading conventions.

Newer apps usually use app embeds and app blocks, which you can switch off in the theme editor without touching code. That is a good reason to prefer them when choosing between apps.

Tag pages, vendor pages and other thin views

Shopify generates a number of listing views automatically. Most are useful to shoppers but thin as search landing pages:

• Collection tag views, such as /collections/garden-sofas/grey, used by older themes for filtering.
• Vendor and type listings at /collections/vendors?q=Fernbrook and /collections/types?q=Sofa.
• Blog tag archives at /blogs/news/tagged/garden-ideas.
• /collections/all, which lists every product.

A common approach is to add a noindex robots meta tag to tag views in theme.liquid, while leaving them usable:

{%- if current_tags -%}
  <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">
{%- endif -%}

Where a tag view matches something people genuinely search for, such as grey garden sofas, a dedicated collection with its own description is a better landing page than the tag URL. The faceted navigation guide covers choosing those. For robots.txt changes and crawl patterns on Shopify, see Shopify crawl fixes.

The fix, step by step

Markets, speed and other Shopify specifics

• International stores. Shopify Markets can serve different countries on subfolders or separate domains and adds hreflang tags for them. Check that each market has translated content and correct prices rather than duplicate English pages, and see Shopify hreflang fixes.
• Speed. Shopify hosting is fast; slow Shopify stores are usually slowed by apps, large theme scripts and oversized images. Removing unused app code in step five often helps more than any other change.
• Variant URLs. Selecting a variant adds ?variant= to the product URL. The canonical points to the main product, which is usually what you want.
• Blog. Shopify's blog is basic but perfectly usable for buying guides; link from articles to the relevant collections and products using their main URLs.