4 common SEO problems with Shopify and how to repair them
30-second summary:
While Shopify is one of the most popular platforms for ecommerce companies, the CMS has a variety of problems that can be troublesome for SEO
Best SEO practices typically use to all CMS platforms, however Shopify has a number of built-in features that can not be tailored, meaning some items require more special workarounds
Edward Coram-James discusses concerns such as limited URL structure and duplicate content, offering advice on how to fight Shopify's imperfections in these locations
Shopify is the most widely-used ecommerce platform, making it much easier than ever prior to for organizations to sell their stock online. Its user friendly CMS has actually made it particularly advantageous for smaller merchants during the pandemic, allowing them to claw back around 94% of what would have otherwise been lost sales.
As with any new site, a fresh Shopify store will need a good deal of effort on the part of its webmaster to establish the necessary exposure for users to discover the website, not to mention transform into clients. And similar to any CMS, there are a couple of SEO difficulties that keep owners will require to clear to make sure that their site discovers its audience effectively. Some of these hurdles are more deep-rooted than others, so we have actually broken down 4 of the most typical SEO issues on Shopify and how you can fix them for your webstore.
1. Limited URL structure
In much the same manner in which WordPress divides material between posts and pages, Shopify's CMS allows you to divide your item listings into 2 main classifications-- items and collections-- together with more general posts, pages, and blog sites. Producing a new product on Shopify enables you to list the private items you have for sale, while collections provide you the chances to bring your diverse items together and sort them into easily-searched classifications.
The issue many people have actually with this imposed system of organizing content 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 publish.
Despite it being a substantial bone of contention with its users, Shopify has yet to address this and there is no service presently. As a result, you will need to be very mindful with the URLs slug (the only part that can be customized). Guarantee you are using the ideal keywords in the slug and classify your posts sensibly to provide your items the best possibility of being found.
2. Automatically generated replicate content
Another aggravating issue users have with categorizing their content as an item or collection occurs when they include a particular item into a collection. This is because, although there will currently be a URL in location for the product page, connecting a product to a collection immediately produces an additional URL for it within that collection. Shopify instantly deals with the collection URL as the canonical one for internal links, rather than the item one, which can make things exceptionally difficult when it pertains to ensuring that the best pages are indexed.
In this circumstances, nevertheless, Shopify has enabled repairs, though it does involve modifying code in the back end of your shop's theme. Following these guidelines will advise your Shopify site's collections pages https://247creative.com.au/ to internally connect just to the canonical/ item/ URLs.
3. No trailing slash redirect
Another of Shopify's replicate content issues associates with the routing slash, which is generally a '/' at the end of the URL used to mark a directory site. Google deals with URLs with and without a trailing slash as distinct pages. By default, Shopify immediately ends URLs without a routing slash, however variations of the exact same URL with a routing slash are available to both users and search engines. This can normally be prevented by implementing a site-wide tracking slash redirect by means of the website's htaccess file, but Shopify does not enable access to the htaccess file
Shopify rather recommends that web designers utilize canonical tags to inform Google which version of each page is chosen for indexing. As the only fix readily available up until now, it will need to do, however it's far from ideal and typically causes information attribution problems in Google Analytics and other tracking software application.
4. No control over the website's robots.txt file.
Beyond the CMS forcing users to create replicate variations of pages versus their will, Shopify likewise prevents web designers from being able to make manual edits to their store's robots.txt file. Obviously, Shopify sees this as a perk, taking care of the pesky technical SEO concerns on your behalf. However, when items go 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 edit the theme of your shop, including meta robots tags into the area of each relevant page. Shopify has developed a step-by-step guide on how to hide redundant pages from search here.