Main Shopify SEO issues you should know about

Shopify becoming a key element of thousands of online businesses.

It is now a massive company with nearly 60B market cap. 😃

What about Shopify SEO? Is it easy to optimise your Shopify store for SEO?

Recently, I stumbled this thread in Twitter, where SEOs are discussing their frustration over Shopify SEO and lack of control over it.

I detest trying to optimise a @Shopify site for SEO.

-Can’t edit the robots.txt file which is automatically blocking some important pages.

-Control over faceted navigation and filters is terrible.

-The sitemaps it has created can’t be changed and are awful.

To name a few.

— Andy Chadwick (@digitalquokka) April 13, 2020

Oh and tracking… Enhanced e-commerce has to be implemented via their backend which means I have to set up separate event firing tags in GTM to track form submissions. So I am doubling up on code there.

— Andy Chadwick (@digitalquokka) April 13, 2020

SEOs also don’t like URLs structure and limited ability to edit them.

/collections/ 🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢

— Will Kennard (@WillKennard) April 13, 2020

And here are some suggestions how to solve these issues:

Shopify can be pretty challenging. Here’s things I’ve learned:
1. Change title tag content go best fit the faceted collection results page
2.. Use a nofollow on non-indexable links to save on crawl budget. Shopify have a of of non-indexable pages thanks to fixed robots.txt
1/3

— nikrangerseo (@nikrangerseo) April 13, 2020

4. Bulk edit tags by power tools can help consolidate and prevent bugs and conflicts.

You probably knew most of this but always happy to share notes. 😎

— nikrangerseo (@nikrangerseo) April 13, 2020

Yeah, at least with Sitemaps issue, you can easily add external sitemaps to Search Console. There are plenty of free tools which will generate a free Sitemap. For example, xml-sitemaps.com, free for under 500 pages.

Another suggestion is to use Cloudflare.

Agreed it’s a pain, but Cloudflare workers can let you access some of the parts of a Shopify site they lock down. This is the only way I’ve been able to edit a Robots.txt, you can do some neat stuff with canonicals and sitemaps toohttps://t.co/KygW4KpFnp

— BJ Enoch (@BJ_Enoch1) April 13, 2020

This advice is part of “edge SEO” framework, first described by Dan Taylor. According to him, with service workers, you can modify the DOM response. “Google renders the changes within the HTML it sees.” Read more here.

In my opinion, edge SEO is the future of Technical SEO, which allows to “inject” SEO changes, which wouldn’t be possible otherwise on some platforms, e.g. Shopify.

Here is another suggestion:

It’s so, so overkill but you can reverse proxy a @digitalocean or @linode box and manage it that way. https://t.co/w21JlqYhzI

— ˗ˏˋ jesse ˎˊ˗ (@jessethanley) April 13, 2020

Here is another research about SEO issues with Shopify webstores.

According to it:

• 82% of the top Shopify sites had poor page speeds. The average Google Page Speed Insights score of the sites was just 31/100;
• 87% of the Shopify stores lacked an effective internal linking structure;
• 74% of the websites had poor or average meta titles.

So, the main issues with Shopify SEO are:

• Can’t edit robots.txt (this file tells Google what to index or no index), which blocks important pages;
• Limited control over faceted navigation;
• No control over sitemaps (map of your website, which can be submitted to Webmaster tools either in Google or Bing);
• Issues with tracking;
• Poor page speed;
• Limited control over URLs.

You can ask, what can be an alternative to Shopify, which has better SEO options? Probably, WooCommerce is the best alternative.