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Shopify SEO Faq

Is Shopify good for SEO?

Like most questions in digital marketing, it depends. If you correctly implement some Shopify SEO best practices Shopify can rank for very competitive search terms. Shopify promotes the SEO benefits of the platform but without some planning and customization you are almost guaranteed to have some issues with duplicate content, non canonical pages being indexed, poor site structure etc.

Shopify has some limiting factors to what you can control compared to a platform like Magento so if you need complete control for your SEO strategy to work then Shopify might not be the solution for you. However, for the majority of stores Shopify will work great and with the right strategy you can rank well and rank often.

Is Shopify bad for SEO?

​See above but no it isn’t bad for SEO if you take the time to do it right.

How can I improve my Shopify SEO?

After a few Shopify specific items improving your SEO for your Shopify store is going to be the same as it is for any other eCommerce site.

  • Creating a site structure that provides the appropriate level of internal linking and unique collection and product pages.

  • Keyword research and targeting of those keywords throughout your site.

  • Creating optimized onsite elements like title tags, headings, images, image alt tags.

  • Implementing Schema markup.

  • Creating unique, engaging content across all of your page types: homepage, collections, products, pages and blog posts.

  • Increase authority through the acquisition of links that are hopefully natural.

Are product tags good for SEO?

If you are using them to create separate collection of filter collections into “subcategories” then yes they can be beneficial. But just putting a tag onto a product is going to have absolutely no positive impact on your SEO. If anything having a lot of tags and not correctly no indexing the pages created from those tags will likely negatively impact you.
 

What are Shopify canonical URL’s?

First here is an explanation of what canonical tags are and why you should use them in certain circumstances. Out of the box Shopify uses canonical tags to reduce the duplicate content created by how they structure the URL’s.

Be default is you have one product: Blue Unisex T-Shirt the canonical URL for that product is going to be yourstore.com/products/blue-unisex-t-shirt. Now when you start creating collections in Shopify and merchandising your products you may end up with a collection for Men’s T-Shirts and Women’s T-Shirts. Because your product is a unisex shirt it makes sense that you would want it in both collections.

Now you have two more product URL’s for your Blue Unisex T-Shirt

  • yourstore.com/collections/mens-shirts/products/blue-unisex-t-shirt

  • yourstore.com/collections/womens-shirts/products/blue-unisex-t-shirt

 

This is in addition to the original URL yourstore.com/products/blue-unisex-t-shirt. If Shopify didn’t use canonical tags you would have a huge duplicate content issue because there would be three distinct URL’s that have the same exact content. By default Shopify uses /products/blue-unisex-t-shirt as the canonical URL and every other URL for that product that includes /collections in it will have a canonical tag pointing to the original version.

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