Shopify SEO Essentials That You Need to Know

SEO is just SEO, right?! Well, no; especially when it comes to e-commerce. Every e-commerce platform has its own nuances – perhaps none more so than Shopify. So, if you run your own Shopify store and want to get to grips with its SEO, this guide from Quirky Digital is for you…

Avoid the Shopify simplicity curse

Shopify makes it easy to add new pages to your website, tweak the design, alter navigation and more.

And, that’s a good thing!

This empowers entrepreneurs and in-house marketers to proactively manage and change their websites.

After all, you shouldn’t have to commission a developer just to add a new page to your site.

However, this simplicity can also be a curse from an SEO perspective.

If it takes only mere minutes to set up and publish a new collection page, the temptation is to set up every conceivable collection variation you (or your team) can think of.

Picture the scene, you run an e-commerce business that specialises in luxury candles. It would be tempting to set up reams and reams of collection pages in the following vein:

• /collections/luxury-candles
• /collections/luxury-cream-candles
• /collections/luxury-yellow-candles

Ad infinitum…

Before you know it, you could have 500+ collection pages – all targeting very semantically similar pages (trust us – in our 5+ years of doing Shopify SEO, we’ve encountered this more times than is healthy).

The result? Google wastes its time crawling hundreds of pages that are so similar they will A) never rank, and B) cannibalise each other if they do rank.

You’ll also end up with sizeable technical debt to sort it all out.

So, our first Shopify SEO tip is to avoid the ‘simplicity curse’ and put some thought and SEO knowledge behind your website changes.

The hierarchy headache

Our second Shopify SEO tip focuses on Shopify’s hierarchy – or lack of it – to be precise.

Out of the box, Shopify has a ‘flat’ URL hierarchy.

All /collections are equal – if you will.

Thus, it can be a challenge to communicate to crawler-agents the parent-child relationship between pages (especially collection pages).

So, how do you get around this?

The first solution harks back to our initial point; try and avoid ultra-complex parent-child hierarchies in the first place.

But, the second way of solving this quandary is to implement breadcrumbs (both in the raw HTML of the page, and on the front end of the theme).

This not only provides a hierarchy for crawler agents to parse and understand, but its great for user experience in general.

Tip: don’t be tempted to ‘concrete’ hierarchy into your Shopify URLs – this will effectively disable your ability to alter your site hierarchy in the future without dissolving any SEO authority you will have accrued.

The sitemap trap

Out of the box, Shopify auto-generates both your site’s robots.txt file and sitemap files.

From a convenience point-of-view, this is great!

But, for optimal results, you’ll want to customise the robots.txt file to include the most-common AI crawler agents – ensuring you’re actively enticing visits from the major large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.

Accurate analytics

So, what next? Shopify comes with its own pretty comprehensive analytics suite – but, we’d strongly recommend setting up both GA4 and Google Search Console (GSC).

After all, if you want your site to be optimised for Google, you’ll want to see how that platform views your website (via its own analytics platforms).

Google Search Console is especially useful as it allows you to see how your site is performing in the search environment before people actually arrive on-site.

Theme frenzy

Another benefit of Shopify is the fact that it has a bountiful theme library.

Don’t like the way your site looks? Simple – you can just change the theme.

But, don’t!

Because of the varieties and vagaries of Shopify themes, you should treat a theme change in the same way you would treat a site migration.

Changing themes without proper due diligence could potentially nuke your SEO; yet another example of Shopify’s ‘simplicity curse’.

We’d also add that when selecting a theme, you should try and select a lightweight theme.

By that, we mean that many Shopify themes are heavily reliant on JavaScript to render key elements.

Despite Google’s protestations to the contrary, it still struggles to crawl and parse content that is rendered via JavaScript.

So, ensure you choose a theme that loads important page content via the raw HTML before JavaScript.

Also, look for themes that render content (e.g. hero images) in an efficient lightweight manner – as you’ll find that your site will fall foul of Google’s Largest Contentful Paint metric, otherwise.

Data, data, data

If you’re even vaguely familiar with Generative Engine Optimisation (optimising your website for AI platforms), then you’ll know that structured data is a more important optimisation strategy than ever before.

We’re talking specifically here about Schema markup.

Unfortunately, Shopify comes with the bare minimum of this structured data.

Explore the Schema website and you’ll see there’s a whole universe of Schema that you can potentially apply to your site – especially your product description pages (PDPs).

This may sound like a boring, unglamorous, piece of work, but it’s one that can definitely give you a competitive advantage within the search landscape (especially Organic Shopping and AI),

Appy days

Shopify claims to have the largest e-commerce app ecosystem in the world – and I certainly won’t argue with that.

It’s an emphatically good thing, as it allows merchants to easily plug new features and capabilities into their websites.

However, here’s another of those Shopify nuances.

Certain Shopify apps can be guilty of acting as render-blocking resources – slowing down the loading of pages.

Furthermore, some apps have a tendency of injecting JavaScript and CSS pages, further diminishing page performance from an SEO perspective.

Some apps also conflict with on-site Schema. A classic example of this being review apps that tend to push out the aggregateReview schema – disqualifying your site’s PDPs from rich results in the SERPs.

By the way, we’re emphatically not saying you shouldn’t install and use apps on your Shopify site. But, get some SEO advice before installing every single app under the sun.

Filter fun

Depending on how you set up your Shopify store (and the theme you choose), you may have the ability to set up a faceted navigation on your collection pages. This will allow users to hone down their searches based on a variety of characteristics. These could include:

• Price
• Colour
• Size
• Weight
• Brand

The thing is, filter options can generate their own URLs.

Our advice is to treat the majority of filter URLs as non-canonical and non-indexable.

Otherwise, you’ll end up with hundreds of thousands of URLs of middling to little SEO value that waste your crawl budget.

Our advice is to follow this filtering heuristic:

Getting this right can be tricky. That’s why, if you’re grappling with this issue, we’d recommend speaking to some Shopify SEO experts.

The tag explosion problem

Shopify gives you (as the store owner), the ability to use tags to help organise products.

These tags can cover characteristics such as:

The problem is, every time you add a tag, Shopify generates a URL.

Here are some examples:

• /collections/shoes/mens
• /collections/shoes/black
• /collections/shoes/waterproof

And, if you apply multiple tags to products, you can make the problem even worse. For example:

• /collections/shoes/black+leather
• /collections/shoes/mens+black
• /collections/shoes/mens+black+leather

It doesn’t take an SEO genius to recognise this could turn into hundreds of thousands of valueless URLs – all of which can waste your crawl budget and significantly dilute your SEO efforts.

Unfortunately, it can lead to:

• Important pages being crawled less frequently
• New products being discovered less often
• Delays to ranking improvements

So, what’s the solution? How do you avoid the Shopify tag explosion problem?

Here are our recommendations:

• Use collections for important categories instead of relying on tags
• Limit the number of tags applied to products as much as possible
• Avoid creating tags for minor attributes
• Prevent indexing of low-value tag URLs

You should focus your SEO efforts on:

• Collection pages
• Product pages
• Key filtered categories with search demand

Going global

Are you intending to sell your products internationally? Then, there’s another Shopify nuance you’ll need to pay attention to: hreflang tags.

These help search engines like Google to determine which page should be shown in which territory.

However, in our experience, Shopify rarely generates accurate, reliable hreflang tags out of the box.

If you want your international Shopify SEO to be on point, call in experts who can ensure your tags are correctly configured for your global SEO.

Collection curation

One of the most powerful SEO levers you can pull for your Shopify store is to optimise your collection pages.

In our 6+ years of working on Shopify stores, we’ve found that Google rewards well-optimised collection pages over and above any other part of a Shopify store (naturally, exceptions apply to certain high-value, brand-equity rich product pages).

As a minimum your collection pages should be optimised in the following ways:

• Write a unique, keyword-infused collection title
• Place introductory content above the product grid
• Add supporting content and an FAQ section below the product grid
• Include internal links to closely related collections
• Optimise each collection’s meta title and description
• Avoid creating collection pages that have very few products (or where products are shared across multiple collection pages)
• Use structured data e.g. FAQ schema for FAQ sections on collection pages
• Ensure pagination is logical and doesn’t create thin pages
• Make sure you have built high-value links pointing to your priority collection pages

Need Shopify SEO advice?

Running Shopify at scale comes with real SEO challenges. Site architecture, faceted navigation, duplicate content, and international setups can all limit organic growth if they are not handled properly.

At Quirky Digital, we work with brands navigating exactly these issues. From technical SEO foundations to content strategy and authority building, we focus on what actually drives revenue, not just rankings.

If you want a clearer view of what is holding your Shopify store back, speak to our eCommmerce SEO experts.