Good Shopify SEO follows a checklist of best practices to help your store appear at the top of Google. This guide is your map to grow your store’s organic search. I have used it on the websites of billion-dollar companies. We use it for Shopify SEO clients. Shopify staff pass it around their offices and recommend it to store owners.

You need to use the many tips and strategies shared. The freedom to search for (nearly) anything at anytime has changed how we think, speak, and live. 84% of people search Google 3+ times per day leading to 8.5 billion daily searches. Particular to commerce, almost half of all product searches begin on Google.

Shopify has a large piece of the search pie being the largest provider of ecommerce software. According to BuiltWith data, thousands of new merchants every year rely on Shopify to be their ecommerce platform. I’ve been doing Shopify SEO at Digital Darts for as long as we’ve been Shopify Marketing Expert since 2015, and a small business not on the platform violates the norm.

The guide is born out of what we see work for our clients so you too can begin to grow your brand without paying Zuckerberg or a Chinese company for every impression. Audit your Shopify’s SEO by following the guide every six months, when you notice a drop in organic visitors, or when you are unsure of what to do next to get more buyers from search at no cost.

How Your Position in Google Impacts Sales

Let’s begin by understanding how rankings in Google exponentially skews sales. Advanced Web Ranking’s click-through rate analysis of search results estimates a second position receives 15.54% of traffic for that search query:

Here is a tabular breakdown of the exact figures for calculations I’m about to do:

If you receive 400 visitors a month in second position, first position will see your store receive 848 visitors. That is double the results from one improvement in position.

Now translate this increase of visitors into sales. Grab the Shopify revenue and number of sessions in the past 90 days from Shopify Analytics. Divide revenue by sessions to get a dollar value per session. Multiple this figure by the increase in visitors. If the dollar value per session is $1.5, 448 visitors per month is estimated to add $672 in revenue per month.

You are unlikely to experience one ranking improvement for one search term—other search terms are likely to increase traffic. It’s not unusual for good SEO to boost whole categories of pages in Google for their optimised search terms. Rand Fiskin describes the outcome as a “rising tide that lifts all boats”.

A ten-degree adjustment can deviate a large store to unseen profit by next year. Each page, collection, product, and blog post opens a new chance to get traffic from Google.

What Growth Can You Expect?

If you weigh as much as a small car, your health has more room for improvement than the average person of average weight. If your Shopify has poor SEO, you have more space for growth. Should the audit show poor SEO health, you are more likely to grow from SEO than another store who passes 90% of the audit.

A second factor of rapid SEO growth involves content, or the quality and quantity of pages. Each good piece of content is a ranking opportunity. A store with 1000 SKUs has more potential to benefit from SEO, generally speaking, than a store with 1 product.

Another piece of content aside from products that performs really well for stores that anyone can use is articles. I see articles worthy of SEO as detailed guides filled with images, videos, and information you can’t anywhere else that genuinely solves a problem. An article with 4 tips for fashion is not going to see the light of top search results. If you produce a guide better than anything else online about the topic (like this Shopify SEO tutorial), you have further potential to grow from SEO.

SEO is viewed by start-up stores as an affordable bootstrap way to grow a store. It can be, but not if you are a one-man show with a few dropship products. I’m not here to bull you with false hopes. You will not dominate Google with some keyword optimisations or links that come from an hour of work per week. Good Shopify SEO is a grind overtime. A general and reasonable hope, which I base on the results of past clients, is to get 10% growth from organic search each month.

Is Shopify SEO Friendly?

As a Shopify Marketing Expert with 11 years SEO experience across many platforms like WordPress and WooCommerce, BigCommerce, SilverStripe, and Magento, I get asked a lot if Shopify is good for SEO.

Well, Shopify is great for SEO. We’ve got incredible results for Shopify clients, including businesses that have been doing millions for years before they engaged with us in SEO to then double organic traffic.

I hear a lot of people in the industry say Shopify has SEO limitations. Shopify will not limit the organic performance of 99% of businesses; performance will be limited by your ability to follow the SEO tips and best practice optimisations in the guide.

What makes Shopify so good for SEO? Shopify automatically handles the following SEO best practices that can be ignored in the audit:

“You’ve got to have some issues with Shopify?”

I do. What are my biggest annoyances with Shopify from an SEO perspective? SEO is a field that incorporates hundreds of factors. These points are me being brutal.

Multi-Store Hreflang Tags and Canonicalisation

The hreflang tag tells Google what version of the page—in this case, from what store—Google should serve to users. Canonicalisation usage for multi-lingual stores across multiple domains, can be managed with manual hreflang and rel="canonical" tags when the URL structure across all websites is the exact same. Usability and SEO problems are painful when one of the stores does not have all of the same pages, products, and collections. hreflang tags point to non-existent pages to produce 404s.

The more impacting part of the problem arises with a change of language in URLs. Part of healthy usability and SEO is keeping URL usage consistent throughout a website. This means not alternating between “http” and “https” or “www” and “non-www” or never linking to mobile versions of the store on the desktop version. In this case, not having English URLs for non-English stores. When non-English URLs are used, canonicalisation management becomes impossible for a store with large SKUs. 404s occur and link juice gets diluted across pages.

However, after years of frustration with this for clients and seeing many other Shopify stores lose rankings and sales from bad hreflang tags, we created a Shopify app called “Multi-Store Hreflang Tags“. All of your Shopify stores can now have perfect hreflang tags to increase sales from organic search.

Without the app, your customers may be taken to the wrong store when coming from Google or Bing search, which can lead to confusion in international shipping and poorer conversion rates. By using the app, organic conversion rates may increase as visitors are served the correct store for their region and language in search results.

If you’ve previously used a universal language in your URLs across stores to deal with hreflang tags, you can now catapult SEO and improve the user experience with URL handles in the same language as the store. This is the first app ever in Shopify to let everyone have perfect hreflang tags.

Faceted Navigation

Faceted navigation can occur on collection pages to let users filter products by color, size, brand, price, or other attributes. It is a best practice method to help people find what they want. However, the SEO implications are hard. It is the biggest challenge to solve in Shopify SEO today.

Let’s look at a collection of one Shopify store, French Connection, so you can see the problem. Observation the description and h1 tag that has the text “MIDI DRESSES”. The title is “Midi Dresses for Women | Mid-Length Dresses | French Connection UK” and meta description is “Explore our collection of elegant midi dresses. From long sleeve floral midis to cold shoulder midi dresses, we have got you covered. FREE UK delivery over £50.”

When I select the color filter then choose “Black”, I get a great experience of seeing all black midi dresses:

However, SEO problems arise from unoptimised content since “black midi dresses” gets good search volume French Connection can capture. The filtered collection page has the same title, meta description, h1 tag, and collection description as the parent collection. Furthermore, it canonicalizes to the parent collection. These are all signals that tell Google to point traffic to the parent collection, which is not optimized for search variants containing color.

You can edit your theme to optimize the title, meta description, and h1 tag with unique content using liquid. I’d also recommend French Connection remove the on-page description on filtered pages to minimize duplicate content since writing and maintaining loads of unique descriptions has a high cost. All of these changes can be done to create an SEO friendly navigation. It just requires expert knowledge of SEO and knowing what Shopify, or the filtering app, is capable of to make it work well.

Sub-folders Versus Sub-domains

Sub-folders are preferred over sub-domains. Google says the two are equal, but data from tests and professional SEOs like Rand Fishkin, say sub-folders are far stronger. SEO efforts like link building are dissipated from a sub-domain structure.

If third-party software like WordPress or Zendesk could be setup in a sub-folder, that would give companies more chance to rank their content in search results.

Shopify Markets lets you launch with a sub-folder structure for different regions and languages. Separate top-level domains with hreflang tags solves any SEO concern for businesses with multiple Shopify accounts.

Indexation From Sitemaps

Shopify submits one image per product in the products sitemap. This leads to a lot of unindexed images that can capture organic traffic, especially if you have unique product imagery.

To solve this, I recommend the Image Sitemap app. The app developer has a good article on Medium about why you should not rely on Shopify for image indexation.

Image File Name Changes

The URL name structure of images helps Google understand the contents of the image. It helps SEO for overall page performance and in Google image search.

It would be good to have control over renaming product image name URLs located on the Shopify CDN. The only way to control these names is to upload the image with the name you intend to use. If an image is not ideal for SEO, it has to be deleted then uploaded.

URL Content Type Prefixes

The most common frustration I hear with Shopify’s SEO is the use of /collections, /products, /blogs, and /pages in URLs. I am mixed about this being an SEO problem. From a usability perspective in looking at URLs, it is easy to see where you are at with the current URL structure.

The unavoidable, multiple blog folder structure of /blogs/blog-name is undesirable. It would be nice to have the option to alter folder structures to slightly boost content authority from reduced folders and improve its URL appearance.

Each of these listed issues do not affect the organic ranking performance of most stores. The SEO upside of being on Shopify far outweigh the downside.

As a Shopify Expert Marketer in SEO and a Shopify Partner, Shopify have consulted with me on these issues. As an example, there use to be a blog id that gets pre-pended in the URL of every post, but Shopify updated this. What they’ve changed over the years is proof they listen. Shopify staff read this guide all the time. The good news is they are aware of these downsides so we can hope for improvements in the future.

How to Use the Expert Guide for a Shopify SEO Audit

Work from top-to-bottom making note of what needs improvement. Use your notes to create an SEO plan of what needs further analysis, tweaks, or an immediate overhaul.

If you have limited time and can’t do everything, I recommend the health check, content, and value analysis sections. These have the greatest affect on SEO.

Back in 2016 I emailed Digital Darts subscribers an offer to complete an SEO audit of their store for the first person who replied. Josh from BrickellMensProducts.com put his hand up. Since then, Brickell has become one of America’s fastest growing companies. Listen to their story.

Following the first publication, to keep the Shopify SEO guide fresh and accurate, I’ve also applied the expert guide to MyCityPlants.com who’ve been a Google Ads client for over 5 years. Jack, My City Plants co-owner, happily gave permission to audit his store. Thanks to Jack and Josh, you get to watch me walk through the SEO of real stores, which makes the analysis more useful.

If you want to save yourself headaches working with freelancers and agencies who don’t understand Shopify, and instead partner with a Shopify SEO expert work who will work with you on a clear step-by-step plan for organic search growth, get in contact about our Shopify SEO service.

Let’s begin the audit:

Health Check

A good doctor works on a health problem after deep analysis. The doctor might look at the problematic area or order a blood report.

Good SEO begins with a check of your store’s SEO performance. It lets you set a benchmark for performance and identify major health problems. The best surgical operation is useless—even harmful—if the wrong location is operated.

1. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools Setup

Are each setup? Google Search Console (abbreviated to GSC and formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) and Bing Webmaster Tools is how each search engine shares critical information about a website. You’ll come back to these throughout the audit.

GSC is one of the best tools to monitor areas of SEO like rankings in search, crawlability, mobile usability, page speed issues, and schema markup.

2. Google Analytics Setup

Check sales in Google Analytics are attribute to the right sources. The purpose of ecommerce SEO is to get sales. Good data can help good decisions.

In Google Analytics 4, sales can be confirmed from Reports > Monetization > Ecommerce purchases. Check for revenue.

Secondly, confirm payment gateways aren’t receiving credit for the sale. Go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition. From the “Event count” dropdown, select “purchase” then sort from high to low purchases. Lastly change the primary dimension to “Session source / medium”. Confirm no revenue is attributed to payment platforms.

If sales come from a payment processor, the solution is to add the domain like paypal.com into the unwanted referrals.

For everything you need with GA4, run through my up-to-date Google Analytics setup guide.

3. Total Pages Indexed

Google must first find a page on your store before it can be suggested to people in search results. “Crawling” is this process where Google follows links across the Internet then discovers what is on a page. When a page is crawled, Google may or may not present the page to people in search results, which is referred to as “indexing” much like a librarian indexes books to organise a library.

Search in Google “site:yourstore.com”. The number of search results is the number of indexed pages. Note the number of results. MyCityPlants.com has 1,030 pages indexed. BrickellMensProducts.com has 765 pages indexed:

Download Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider. It is the ultimate tool to audit technical SEO.

Run a crawl of your website. Once the crawl is 100% complete, select “HTML” from the top dropdown.

How does the summary number from “Total Internal Indexable URLs” compare to Google’s index? Investigate the difference to spot large issues.

The scan will most likely have more URLs. The robots.txt file deters Google from crawling then indexing a lot of URLs. Another reason may be that Google is unable to discover all pages from poor website architecture. A page can be 5 clicks away from the homepage making it hard for Google to discover.

If it’s a small store under 1000 URLs, you can eye ball every page. See what is indexed that should not be and what is missed.

If your website is large, seek a sample of each page type to explain the major discrepancy. You may find it helpful to sort by the “Indexability” column to see what can be indexed. You can also search a specific page in Google with the “inurl:[url]” search like “inurl:mycityplants.com/blogs/office-plants-blog/tagged/plant-guide” to see if a page is indexed.

1. mycityplants.com/collections/extra-large-4-8?page=2: The second page inside a collection. I searched this page in Google with the “inurl:” prefix and no result came up.  I searched the crawled pages in the crawl stats report with the filter “page=” and found only 18 pages have been crawled. Google is not crawling pagination well.
2. mycityplants.com/collections/bright-light-plants/plants-in-self-watering-planters: A tagged collection that shows self watering planters in the “Bright Light Plants” collection. This comes from faceted navigation, which is one of the hardest parts of technical SEO to manage in Shopify. Navigation is addressed in the website architecture and usability sections of the guide. I looked at a larger sample of tagged collections then reviewed in GSC if any generate good rankings or rank for unique terms. The only tagged collections getting traffic is the collection /collections/plants-in-self-watering-planters. The tag collections do not help someone searching in Google any better than primary collections, so my recommendation with this will be to noindex tagged collections.
3. mycityplants.com/blogs/office-plants-blog/tagged/plant-guide: Tags on the blog are used a lot. Unless you have a strong reason to use tags on blogs, delete and avoid them. Most Shopify themes are designed to have them indexed.

Are there pages indexed in Google that you do not want indexed? A verification step to spot pages you do not want indexed is to browse pages and collections in the Shopify admin, then look at the titles and description summaries. Scan the list of content then if something seems it may be useful to deindex, view the page to confirm it has no value appearing in search results. Doing this for My City Plants, I spotted many thank you pages and old pages that have no unique content.

I have seen too many developers deindex content the wrong way by editing their theme to include a nofollow and noindex rule for the page. The method is wrong because the page is still discoverable in the sitemap and from other links on the website, which may encourage the page to be indexed by Google. I’ll show you a special Shopify trick even the best Shopify Plus partners don’t use.

Use the free Metafields Guru app. Their Chrome extension makes editing metafields a breeze. Find the page or collection in the Shopify admin you do not want indexed. Load up the extension then use the following values for a metafield:

"namespace" : "seo"
"key" : "hidden"
"value" : 1
"value_type" : "integer"

The metafield will add nofollow and noindex to the page, remove the page from the sitemap.xml file, and remove the page from the storefront search. This is the proper way to de-index Shopify pages.

4. GSC Crawl Stats

The crawl stat report gives an overview of total pages seen by Google overtime. Access your report from GSC by clicking “Settings” at the bottom-left.

How Google crawls a website depends on many factors. Google will crawl a page that changes each week more than a page updated once a year. If a page has low value content like faceted navigation or duplicate content, Google will crawl it less.

The first check is to view the graph to look for large spikes, sharp drops, or a peak that exceed the total pages on the website. These require investigation. There are many possibilities an SEO expert can consider for crawl variability:

• An increase can come from new pages, products, or collections.
• Maybe a sitemap was submitted to Google that lead to better coverage.
• If a drop occurs, perhaps someone added a new robots.txt rule that blocked the Googlebot.
• The average response time increasing overtime can reduce the number of crawled pages. You may benefit from faster servers being on Shopify Plus.

My City Plant’s crawl stats show spider activity fluctuated by 1,600 pages on the highest day to the lowest:

There’s no large spikes or sharp drops, but the total per day is larger than what’s indexed. This will be due to the faceted navigation and many other low value pages spotted in the index analysis just before.

The second check with the crawl stats report in an SEO audit is the response codes:

Investigate bad response codes.

The third check with the crawl stats report in an SEO audit is the host status report:

The report looks at three factors:

1. Robots.txt fetch: The failure rate for robots.txt requests during a crawl.
2. DNS resolution: Shows when the DNS server didn’t recognize your host name or didn’t respond during crawling.
3. Server connectivity: Shows when your server was unresponsive or did not provide the full response for a URL during a crawl.

It can be challenging to diagnose issues in the past that no longer occur. For DNS issues, speak with person responsible for the domain. For robots.txt issues, check if the theme has a robots.txt file. If it does, the file has likely been customized so you can discuss changes with the theme developer. The one-time occurrence of a DNS issue for My City Plants should be reviewed a month later to see if further issues arise.

5. Lifetime Organic Traffic Drops

SEO is an unethical industry. A lot of freelancers and agencies do low-quality SEO work known as “black hat SEO“. Black hat work most times results in a Google penalty weeks or years later. A penalty is experienced by diminishing organic search. You’re left confused as to why sales died from organic search. Recovery from a Google penalty can take months.

A penalty is best spotted with a sudden drop in organic traffic. In Google Analytics 4, go to “Reports” > “Acquisition” > “Traffic Acquisition”. Click from the top-right the entire time period back to when your analytics was setup. Lastly, it’s cleaner to have a visual graph of only organic search so create a filter from the top of “Session default channel grouping” with a dimension value of “Organic Search”:

In Google Analytics 3 also known as “Universal Analytics”, go to “Acquisition” > “All Traffic” > “Source/Medium”. Click from the top-right the entire time period back to when your analytics was setup. Brickell’s organic traffic from the original audit years ago shows steady growth with no major drops:

If you have a drop, cross-reference the date of the drop against Google algorithm changes using two trusted sources that track algorithm updates. The most comprehensive source is Moz’s Google Algorithm Change History. A second, though less comprehensive, sourc