- 30-second summary: While Shopify is one of the most popular platforms for ecommerce services, the CMS has a number of issues that can be troublesome for SEO
- Finest SEO practices generally use to all CMS platforms, however Shopify has a number of inbuilt functions that can not be personalized, meaning some items require more unique workarounds
- Edward Coram-James discusses issues such as restricted URL structure and duplicate content, offering recommendations on how to fight Shopify’s imperfections in these locations
Shopify is the most widely-used ecommerce platform, making it much easier than ever before for businesses to sell their stock online. Its user friendly CMS has made it particularly advantageous for smaller sized sellers throughout the pandemic, permitting them to claw back around 94% of what would have otherwise been lost sales.
As with any new website, a fresh Shopify store will require a great deal of effort on the part of its webmaster to develop the necessary visibility for users to find the site, not to mention transform into consumers. And as with any CMS, there are a few SEO difficulties that keep owners will require to clear to make sure that their website discovers its audience effectively. A few of these obstacles are more deep-rooted than others, so we’ve broken down 4 of the most common SEO issues on Shopify and how you can fix them for your webstore.
1. Restricted URL structure
In similar manner in which WordPress splits material in between pages and posts, Shopify’s CMS allows you to divide your product listings into 2 main categories– items and collections– together with more general posts, pages, and blog sites. Creating a new item on Shopify enables you to note the individual products you have for sale, while collections give you the chances to bring your diverse products together and sort them into easily-searched categories.
The issue many people have actually with this enforced system of arranging material is that Shopify also imposes a predetermined hierarchical structure with minimal modification choices. The subfolders/ item and/ collection must be consisted of in the URL of every brand-new product or collection you submit.
Despite it being a big bone of contention with its users, Shopify has yet to resolve this and there is no option presently. As a result, you will need to be extremely cautious with the URLs slug (the only part that can be personalized). Ensure you are using the right keywords in the slug and categorize your posts smartly to give your products the best opportunity of being found.
2. Instantly created duplicate content
Another frustrating issue users have with categorizing their material as an item or collection takes place when they add a particular product into a collection. This is because, although there will already be a URL in location for the product page, connecting an item to a collection automatically produces an additional URL for it within that collection. Shopify automatically treats the collection URL as the canonical one for internal links, instead of the item one, which can make things incredibly difficult when it comes to making sure that the ideal pages are indexed.
In this circumstances, however, Shopify has actually permitted repairs, though it does include editing code in the back end of your shop’s style. Following these directions will advise your Shopify site’s collections pages to internally connect just to the canonical/ product/ URLs.
3. No tracking slash redirect
Another of Shopify’s duplicate content issues connects to the tracking slash, which is generally a ‘/’ at the end of the URL utilized to mark a directory. Google deals with URLs with and without a trailing slash as special pages. By default, Shopify instantly ends URLs without a trailing slash, but variations of the very same URL with a routing slash are accessible to both users and search engines. This can typically be prevented by enforcing a site-wide tracking slash redirect via the website’s htaccess file, but Shopify does not permit access to the htaccess file.
Shopify instead recommends that web designers utilize canonical tags to notify Google which variation of each page is preferred for indexing. As the only fix available up until now, it will have to do, but it’s far from perfect and typically results in data attribution problems in Google Analytics and other tracking software application.
4. No control over the website’s robots.txt file
Beyond the CMS requiring users to develop replicate versions of pages versus their will, Shopify also avoids web designers from being able to make manual edits to their shop’s robots.txt file. Obviously, Shopify sees this as a perk, taking care of the pesky technical SEO problems in your place. However, when items head out of stock or collections get pulled, you can neither noindex nor nofollow the redundant pages left behind.
In this circumstances, you have the ability to modify the theme of your shop, incorporating meta robots tags into the < area of each appropriate page. Shopify has developed a step-by-step guide on how to conceal redundant pages from search here.
Are there any unique obstacles your Shopify webstore is dealing with? Share them in the comments.
Edward Coram James is an SEO expert and the Chief Executive of Go Up Ltd, an international company committed to assisting its clients browse the intricacies of worldwide SEO and the technical elements of delivering location-specific pages to target market.