If you've compared a few eCommerce platforms, like Magento and Shopify, before landing on the latter, you probably know that SEO is not Shopify's strongest point. Nonetheless, it does offer you a few critical SEO features.
You should know how to leverage them to get indexed by Google and other search engines to drive more organic traffic.
Today, we'll cover all the default Shopify SEO options and determine whether they're enough to rank at the top of the search results page (SERP).
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XML Sitemap
Shopify sitemap is the first communication Google and other search engines ever have with your store. It's a directory they use to discover your website pages, crawl and index them. Shopify generates and updates an XML sitemap for you automatically. But unfortunately, you can't edit or add any custom sitemap.
You can find your sitemap by adding the "/sitemap.xml" to your domain, like in:
e.g. domain.com/sitemap.xml
Robot.txt File
Robots.txt is another automatically generated file Shopify offers. It provides directives for the web crawlers on pages you want to be crawled or ignored. Same as with the XML sitemap, just add the "robots.txt" to your domain name to find this file:
e.g. domain.com/robots.txt
However, unlike the XML sitemap, you can edit the robot.txt file to allow or block some URLs from crawling. This requires editing the theme liquid file so you might need a developer to help you.
Ability to Edit URL Handles
When it comes to the URL structure in Shopify, it's kind of limited. Directories like /products/, /collections/ and /blogs/ can't be removed from product, collection and blog page URLs. So basically, they will look like:
e.g. domain.com/products/product-name
domain.com/collections/collection-name
domain.com/blogs/blog-homepage-name
The only thing that you can do is edit the URL handle and create an automatic redirect to a new URL.
301 Redirects
To continue on the previous point, Shopify allows you to avoid 404 pages either from deleted or disabled pages through URL redirects. But again, that's the only case when you can create redirects since Shopify doesn't allow you to redirect from URLs that:
- begin with the following prefixes: /application, /apps, /cart, /carts, /orders, or /services.
- use fixed Shopify paths: /products, /collections, /collections/all.
Meta Tags
The next important Shopify SEO feature is the ability to edit the title and description tags, a.k.a. meta tags. They are extremely important for SEO since they drive clicks to your store from the search engines. That's the title and description searchers see in the SERP.
You might create a stunning piece of content. But if your meta title and description are not "actionable" enough people are not going to click through.
You can edit meta tags for products, collections, blogs, homepages and other pages.
Canonical Tags
If you have a product with multiple variants or a product that belongs to different collections, you might be facing duplicate content issues. While people won't see a difference search crawlers will. They scan URLs and consider each one to be a unique page (though the content is the same).
e.g. domain.com/products/product-name
domain.com/products/product-name?variant=43824702521540
domain.com/collection/one-time-collection/products/product-name
Canonical tags fix that, but pointing out the "main" version of the page, so all the "variants" are just ignored.
Shopify automatically generates canonical tags in the theme.liquid file. You don't have to do anything unless you want to customize the canonical tags for some pages.
Structured Data
Similar to the meta tags, structured data or schema markup helps your website stand out in search. However, there's more. Its goal is to provide search engines with more details about your page. So they can determine who to show it to and whether to include it in the rich results.
Structured data you can usually see in search is reviews, pricing, availability, rating, etc.
However, unlike with the meta tags, you can't add structured data in Shopify that easily. You should have some knowledge of Shopify Liquid, HTML and other features to add schema markup successfully.
Blog
The blog is a free marketing tool that allows you to drive more organic traffic, improve user engagement and promote your products. Shopify offers you to do that by default. You can create content, edit meta titles and descriptions, add the author, tags and featured images to a blog post. But that's it.
You can't add the navigation sidebar to the blog homepage, add related products or posts or change the blog URL structure.
So to make the most of your content marketing efforts you might need to resort to the .
Mobile-friendliness
Configuring Google is taking a mobile-first indexing approach having a mobile-friendly store is a must. Shopify reports that around 79% of the Shopify stores' traffic comes from mobile devices. That's why they take responsiveness very seriously.
However, it also depends on the theme you choose. Thus, make sure you choose a mobile-friendly theme to maintain a better SEO picture for your Shopify website,
Google Analytics 4
Although Google Analytics 4 (GA4) has nothing to do with SEO ranking, it provides insights into your store performance. Therefore, you can use that data to understand users' behaviour better and tweak your strategies accordingly.
Since Shopify offers built-in GA4 integration we count it in as one of the default Shopify SEO features.
So all you need to do is set up the Google Analytics 4 property and add it to your Shopify under Online Store > Preferences. Once you do that, some events will be tracked automatically:
- page_view
- search
- view_item
- add_to_cart
- begin_checkout
- add_payment_info
- purchase
Shopify SEO: What's Next?
From a technical point of view, Shopify is well-equipped to help you get indexed. However, other features contributing to the on-page SEO are quite limiting.
This brings us to the main question — are these default features enough to rank on Google? Yes, but not in the highest positions. That's why you should consider optimizing your Shopify SEO in the right way.
