4 common SEO issues with Shopify and how to fix them 48

Four common SEO issues with Shopify and how to repair them

30-second summary:

While Shopify is one of the most popular platforms for ecommerce businesses, the CMS has a variety of concerns that can be troublesome for SEO

Best SEO practices typically use to all CMS platforms, however Shopify has several inbuilt features that can not be tailored, meaning some items need more distinct workarounds

Edward Coram-James talks about issues such as restricted URL structure and duplicate material, supplying suggestions on how to fight Shopify's drawbacks in these areas

Shopify is the most widely-used ecommerce platform, making it easier than ever before for services to sell their stock online. Its user friendly CMS has made it particularly helpful for smaller sized retailers throughout the pandemic, permitting them to claw back around 94% of what would have otherwise been lost sales.

Similar to any new website, a fresh Shopify shop will need a great deal of effort on the part of its web designer to establish the needed presence for users to find the website, not to mention convert into consumers. And as with any CMS, there are a couple of SEO difficulties that store owners will need to clear to make sure that their site discovers its audience efficiently. Some of these obstacles are more deep-rooted than others, so we have actually broken down four of the most typical SEO problems on Shopify and how you can fix them for your webstore.

1. Restricted URL structure

In much the same manner in which WordPress splits content between posts and pages, Shopify's CMS permits you to divide your product listings into two main classifications-- items and collections-- along with more basic posts, pages, and blogs. Producing a brand-new product on Shopify permits you to note the individual items you have for sale, while collections offer you the opportunities to bring your diverse items together and arrange them into easily-searched categories.

The problem the majority of people have actually with this enforced system of arranging content is that Shopify likewise imposes an established hierarchical structure with restricted customization options. The subfolders/ item and/ collection needs to be consisted of in the URL of every brand-new product or collection you publish.

Regardless of it being a huge bone of contention with its users, Shopify has yet to address this and there is no solution presently. As a result, you will need to be exceptionally cautious with the URLs slug (the only part that can be customized). Ensure you are utilizing the best keywords in the slug and categorize your posts smartly to provide your products the best opportunity of being found.

2. Automatically produced duplicate content

Another discouraging problem users have with categorizing their content as an item or collection happens when they add a particular item into a collection. This is because, although there will currently be a URL in place for the item page, linking a product to a collection immediately produces an extra URL for gold coast seo specialists it within that collection. Shopify immediately treats the collection URL as the canonical one for internal links, rather than the item one, which can make things exceptionally tough when it pertains to making sure that the best pages are indexed.

In this circumstances, however, Shopify has permitted repairs, though it does involve editing code in the back end of your shop's style. Following these instructions will instruct your Shopify website's collections pages to internally link just to the canonical/ item/ URLs.

3. No trailing slash redirect

Another of Shopify's duplicate content concerns associates with the routing slash, which is essentially a '/' at the end of the URL used to mark a directory site. Google deals with URLs with and without a tracking slash as distinct pages. By default, Shopify automatically ends URLs without a trailing slash, however variations of the same URL with a routing slash are accessible to both users and online search engine. This can usually be avoided by enforcing a site-wide routing slash redirect by means of the site's htaccess file, but Shopify does not enable access to the htaccess file

Shopify instead advises that webmasters utilize canonical tags to notify Google which version of each page is preferred for indexing. As the only fix available so far, it will need to do, but it's far from perfect and often causes information attribution problems in Google Analytics and other tracking software application.

4. No control over the site's robots.txt file.

Beyond the CMS forcing users to produce replicate variations of pages versus their will, Shopify likewise prevents webmasters from being able to make manual edits to their shop's robots.txt file. Apparently, Shopify sees this as a perk, taking care of the pesky technical SEO concerns in your place. But, when items go out of stock or collections get pulled, you can neither noindex nor nofollow the redundant pages left.

In this instance, you have the ability to modify the theme of your shop, incorporating meta robots tags into the area of each appropriate page. Shopify has actually developed a step-by-step guide on how to hide redundant pages from search here.