How To Make Shopify Good For SEO

Data has shown that more and more people are using the Shopify platform. It is gaining too much of popularity, with statistics indicating that the usage of CMS has increased by 200% since July of 2017. In fact,Shopify is currently used by the top 4.47% of 10,000 websites.

Is Shopify good for SEO? To make it so, you have to obtain proper know-how about how to make SEO improvements for the platform. Below is a guide about the common modifications that you should do to make Shopify good for SEO. As a Shopify SEO agency we have a lot of tips for you!

Know What Shopify SEO Is

What is Shopify SEO? Simply put, these are the SEO improvements that are particularly designed for Shopify to optimize it. Useful strategies for SEO for Shopify stores such as the blog and its capacity to redirect may be implemented, for instance, but it may also give way to certain SEO problems such as duplicate content. So what are the common SEO recommendations for Shopify to counter this issue? They may be the following:

Duplicate Content

By far, duplicate or identical content is the most predominant issue encountered in Shopify (see our Shopify SEO services). By duplicate content, it means similar content has been published and they are carried by two different URLs. Search engines may end up having an issue with this, mainly because they would be unable to determine which from among these two pages ought to be the canonical version. More than this, link signals tend to be split between these couple of pages.

What are the different ways in which Shopify produces duplicate content?

• Through product pages that are identical
• Collection pages that are identical by way of pagination.

Duplicate Product Pages

Shopify is inclined to create a duplication of their product pages. As a default setting, stores in Shopify permits their /products/ pages to perform at two varied URL paths, namely:

/products/ as canonical URL path
/collections/*/products/ as non-canonical URL path

To account for this, Shopify ensures that every /collections/*/products/ pages cover a canonical tag to the related /products/ page. It would be noticeable in what way the URL in the address is dissimilar to the canonical field.

Through this, Google would be able to merge the duplicate content, but a more startling issue would ensue when the internal linking structure is examined. Inevitably, Shopify would link to the non-canonical version of every one of your product pages.

The entirety of your website architecture, as created by Shopify will be, by default, throughout non-canonical links. Why is this a salient SEO issue? It’s because diverging signal will be sent by the website to Google.

Google generally respects canonical tags, but it also regards these as hints rather than directives. In this sense, you leave it to Google to judge if the content is indeed duplicate every time it crawls on such pages. But basically, you should not leave it to chance, when in particular, you are dealing with the extent of the content.

Duplicate Collection Pages

Duplicate content can also be created by Shopify through the pagination of the website. In detail, the first collections page is duplicated in a certain series. Linking to the first page will indicate “?page=1”: whenever you go to a paginated URL contained in a series.

Then again, this will be categorized as a duplicate page for most of the time. When a URL contains “?page=1”:, it will, have the tendency to include an identical content as the primary non-parameterized URL. Under this circumstance, it makes sense to let a developer modify the internal linking structure to enable the initial paginated result to direct to the canonical page.

Product Variant Pages

Technically, you could regard this section as a continuation of the Shopify issue of duplicate content (above). However, this concern warrants a completely different discussion because this is not always an issue about SEO.

It happens a lot of times when Shopify stores with several product URLs are produced for the same products but with modest modifications. Since the core product is one and the same, duplicate content issues can arise, but a negligible characteristic of it is merely changed, such as the color. It can be thus surmised that various pages can exist that contain similar or duplicate product images and descriptions.

If not remedied, this will give way to an issue of duplicate content. Then again, URLs of variants would not necessarily be an SEO problem. Some sites can actually find these URLs advantageous because they give way to you having indexable pages that are optimizable for very definite terms. The advantages and disadvantages of these depend on each site. Key questions that you should ask are:

• Do customers do searches or make queries according to the variant phrases?
• Are your resources sufficient in terms of creating unique content about all the variants of your products?
• Are your contents unique enough so that they are able to stand on their own?

If your Shopify store includes different variants for your products, you should determine- from the very beginning- if they ought to exist at a different URL. If you think that they should be, then every one of them should be described in unique contents and have each of them optimized for their target keywords.

Structured Data

Product Structured Data

Basically, Shopify is efficient when it comes to structured data. A good number of Shopify themes include extraordinary “Product” markup that in turn provides key information to Google, like the price, description, and name of your product, among others. This ought to be the best priority of structured data to utilize on every e-commerce site, and many themes are able to make this possible for you.

Your Shopify site might likewise find it beneficial to expand the product structured data towards the collections pages, too. You do this by incorporating the product structured data so that it defines every one of your individual product link within a product listing page.

Article Structured Data

Utilizing the blog feature of Shopify entails that you work on the Article structured data. This sends the message to Google that the content of your blog is more editorial, above anything else. Google is inclined to draw content with Article structured data towards certain platforms that include Google Discover along with the Interesting Finds aspect of SERPs. See to it that your content comprises this structured data so that it will be covered in these sections.

BreadcrumbList Structured Data

Breadcrumb internal links with BreadcrumbList structured data is one addition that is routinely incorporated to Shopify websites. Why are breadcrumbs essential to an e-commerce website? It’s because these features offer users convenient internal links that determine where they stand in terms of a website’s hierarchy. Through breadcrumbs, Google would be better able to understand the structure of your website. It’s well worth it to add breadcrumb sites to a Shopify website and mark them up with BreadcrumbList structured data so that Google could better recognize those internal links.

Wrap Up

There’s no doubt that Shopify will continue to grow, and to decipher the question “Is Shopify good for SEO” depends on how well you utilize and understand the SEO conditions that go with the platform.