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The 10 Best Shopify SEO Apps & Tools 2024

Chris Long — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 12:00:43 +0000

At Go Fish Digital, we work with a lot of Shopify clients and have developed our own internal framework for how we perform SEO on Shopify. As a result, over the years we’ve started to really get a feel for the tools and apps that we prefer working with. While Shopify’s app marketplace might not contain as many options as WordPress plugins, there are still plenty of Shopify SEO tools that are at your disposal to make your life easier/

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In this post, we’ll talk about some of our favorite tools to use with the platform. This includes some Shopify tools and apps that are native to their ecosystem as well as general SEO tools that we find ourselves using with our clients over and over again.

What Are The Best Shopify SEO Tools?

The best Shopify SEO tools are:

Ahrefs
Schema App Total Schema Markup
Crush.pics
Lazysizes Library
Shopify Redirection
Search Console
Screaming Frog
STAT
Google Analytics
Rewind Backups

Below, we’ll take a deeper dive into each one.

1. Ahrefs

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Keyword research, backlink analysis, competitive research

Of all the Shopify SEO tools we couldn’t live without, Ahrefs is certainly up there. Ahrefs provides a great suite of SEO tools that includes keyword research, backlink analysis, rank tracking, competitive research, content gap analysis and much more. This is a tool that we use daily for our Shopify clients at Go Fish Digital.

One of the strongest components of Ahrefs is in its keyword research functionality. Let’s say we’re doing keyword research for a client in the apparel industry and they’ve identified Bombas as a competitor. Since we’re most interested in our Shopify site’s category pages, we want to find keyword opportunities where Bombas’s category pages rank well. Finding these keywords could be highly beneficial as they are more likely to convert since Google has identified the keywords as transactional.

Using Ahrefs, we can perform a search for “bombas.com/collections/” to show us all of the queries their category pages rank well for. Note how the “Prefix” option is selected here.

Then by looking at the “Organic Keywords” report, we can see the keywords that drive the most traffic to their category pages. This will then show us all of the different category page keywords where Bombas is ranking well.

These are great opportunities as these are keywords where a /collections/ page is ranking, thus more likely to drive site conversions. If these keywords are relevant to our site’s products, we can then start to add them to our tracking tools.

Ahrefs also has great backlink analysis tools. One of my favorites is the “Best By Links” report, which shows you a domain’s most linked-to pages. If you filter this report to show the 404 pages with the most backlinks, you might be able to find link reclamation opportunities. This is especially powerful if you’ve migrated to Shopify from another platform and might not have redirected all of your backlinks.

For instance, in this example we can see how Dress Barn migrated from another platform (possibly Magento) to Shopify. However, they could redirect some of these old URLs to reclaim lost link equity.

Overall, Ahrefs provides a fantastic suite of tools for Shopify owners. While it is a paid solution, it provides one of the best values in terms for how many tools you get for the price. With an Ahrefs subscription, you’ll have a lot of what you need to start SEO on Shopify sites.

2. Schema App Total Schema Markup

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Structured Data

Structured data on Shopify can actually be quite the headache. One of the issues with structured data is that there are many fragmented sources that will try to implement structured data on your store. Oftentimes, both the theme and various third party apps will add schema to the site. For instance, both your theme and Yotpo could be adding “Product” structured data like the example below:

This isn’t the ideal way to implement structured data. Ideally, your structured data will be consolidated so that only a single instance of each schema type is available. This helps better outline exactly what the content of your page is about.

Fortunately, the Schema App Total Schema Markup is a great Shopify SEO tool and makes adding structured data very easy. Once you install the app, it should automatically add the following structured data to your site:

Organization: Home page
OfferCatalog: Category pages
Product: Product pages
BlogPosting: Blog posts

The OfferCatalog schema is a really nice touch as it allows for markup to exist on your category pages which most sites don’t really have. This marks up every single product on your category pages and gives Google additional information such as their name, price and availability.

As well, Schema App can also be configured to filter out duplicate schema from Shopify’s themes via the “Microdata Filtering” section. This can make it even easier to clean up the redundant schema.

Overall, we really love this app for adding structured data to Shopify sites. One thing that you might consider if you have a developer is to have them implement structured data instead of doing it through an app. This will help save you from paying a monthly service fee just to have structured data on the site. However, if you don’t have these resources, this app is the way to go.

3. Crush.pics

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Image compression

It’s no secret that Shopify stores are going to use a lot of images. In general, the more SKUs you offer on the store, the more images there are going to be. Of course, a common recommendation to improve site speed is to optimize images. However, when you’re dealing with larger Shopify stores, this can be quite difficult to do at scale.

Crush.pics is a great Shopify SEO tool that automatically compress all of your site’s images. Simply install the app and Crush.pics should start compressing all of your Shopify domain’s images. It will also automatically compress all new images that are uploaded to the store. Using this app is a great way to apply at least some level compression to all images that are used on the site.

4. Lazysizes Library

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Lazy loading

Another way that you can further optimize the images on your Shopify site is by implementing lazy loading. Lazy loading occurs when images of a page only load once a user has scrolled to them in the viewport. This helps save a user’s browser bandwidth as all of a page’s images don’t load immediately, so they’re only served what they need to see.

Instead of using an app to implement lazy loading, we really like to use the lazysizes library. This library works extremely well with Shopify and is generally very straightforward for a developer to implement. By using lazysizes, you can easily implement lazy loading functionality on your Shopify store.

5. Shopify URL Redirects

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Redirects

Shopify makes redirecting URLs really easy out of the box. In order to implement redirects, you don’t need to download any special app to do so. Instead, you can do this natively in Shopify by navigating to Online Store > Navigation > View URL Redirects

In this tool, you’ll be able to see all of the redirects that have been implemented on Shopify. As well, you can easily add new ones by selecting “Create URL redirect”:

This is fantastic for cleaning up old and outdated URLs. For instance, if you have recently migrated from another platform, you might consider using the URL redirects tool to ensure that your old URLs are properly mapping to your new ones. You can even bulk upload URLs to redirect using a CSV file.

Please note that in order to implement redirects on Shopify, you must completely delete the URL first. This means that if the page is still active on Shopify (even if it isn’t published), you cannot implement the redirect. You must first delete the page.

6. Google Search Console

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Crawl analysis, Keyword research

Throughout the years, Google Search Console has been a tried and true tool for SEOs everywhere. Search Console offers a wide variety of reports that can be useful for both technical and contextual SEO. Since store owners will gain value from all of its different reports, Search Console is an essential Shopify SEO tool.

One of the most popular reports in Search Console is the “Performance” report. This report shows you what keywords users are using to find your site and how many clicks/impressions each keyword is getting. This can be really valuable information to have, especially for revenue-generating pages. For instance, in the Performance report, you can filter down to URLs that contain “/products/” in the URL slug. This will show you the top keywords where you product pages are generating the most clicks and impressions:

Very quickly, you’re able to see potentially valuable keywords that are mapped to your pages that generate revenue for your site. As well, you can pull a similar report for category pages by filtering down to see pages with “/collections/” in the URL. These are fantastic keywords that you can then track and optimize for.

Another report of Search Console that’s worth pointing out is the “Coverage” report. This is a fantastic section of Search Console that shows you which URLs Google is crawling and whether or not it is including them in the index.

If the URL is not getting indexed, Google will give you some level of detail as to why it’s excluding it such as “Alternate page with proper canonical tag” or the infamous “Crawled – currently not indexed“. By using this report you can start to check for some technical SEO issues around crawling and indexing:

Are URLs that should be indexed getting excluded?
Is Google able to crawl URLs that it shouldn’t be crawling?
Are low quality pages getting included in the index?

We recommend that Shopify store owners dig into this report to analyze how you site is being handled, especially if you have a large store. The insights you pull from Search Console’s Coverage report can be really valuable to understanding how Google is processing your site’s content.

7. Screaming Frog

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Technical SEO analysis

What “best SEO tool” list is complete without Screaming Frog? It’s a go-to in the arsenal of the vast majority of SEOs. However, there’s a very good reason for it. It can really help identify technical SEO issues and opportunities in so many different ways.

Why is Screaming Frog such a great Shopify SEO tool? Here are some of the ways we use it:

Perform a site crawl to identify duplicate content created by Shopify such as product pages that use the /collections/.*/products/ URL path. Identify if there are any internal links to these duplicate pages and work with a developer on eliminating them.
Analyze the crawl to see how many internal links are pointing to key pages such as your site’s products pages. Consider implementing elements such as “Related Products” internal links if you’re not finding a lot of internal links.
Connect Screaming Frog to PageSpeed Insights to get benchmark site speed data. After you’ve made changes, compare your benchmark metrics to the new ones.
Analyze the anchor text used to link to key pages such as your product and category pages. Sometimes category pages might not be using descriptive text to reference product pages.
If you’ve migrated to Shopify, use Screaming Frog to confirm that all of your old URLs correctly 301 redirect to the new ones.
Crawl Shopify’s sitemap.xml file. Identify pages that are non-indexable and consider deleting and redirecting any outdated ones.

For instance, here’s an example of some of the duplicate /collections/.*/products/ pages on The Economist’s Shopify site. We can easily find them with a Screaming Frog crawl:

And that’s only scratching the surface. There’s a whole host of ways you can use Screaming Frog with Shopify sites. If you plan on doing any technical SEO analysis for Shopify (or eComm in general), this is a must-have. Of course, Screaming Frog can also be used for other eCommerce platforms, such as improving Magento SEO.

8. STAT

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Rank tracking

In terms of a rank tracking solution, STAT is one of the best on the market. STAT is unparalleled in terms of the ranking data that it collects. STAT will track your keywords daily, which gives you a lot more insight in to how your rankings are trending over time. Additionally, you can use keyword segmentation, to isolate your rankings by different groups of keywords.

For example, with a Shopify site, you might create keyword segments within STAT that track your different categories of products over time. If your store sells running shoes, you might set up keyword segments for categories such as “womens running shoes”, “mens runnings shoes” and “trail running shoes”.

Using STAT, you could then see ranking trends over time for those specific categories. Here’s what our “women’s running shoes” segment might look like. We can see that in general, rankings for these keywords have been trending upwards.

However, looking at our “men’s running shoes” segment, we can see that rankings appear to be trending downward. We might want to look at optimizations that we can apply to those specific pages:

STAT is definitely more of an enterprise-level tool so it comes at a bit of a cost. If you’re a smaller business, you might consider using another rank tracking solution such as Moz Pro, Ahrefs, or SEMRush. You may also be able to access STAT data through an agency partner (we use STAT at Go Fish Digital for example).

9. Google Analytics

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Website analytics

Of course, you’re going to want to track more than rankings. Both organic traffic and organic revenue should serve as core KPIs for your Shopify SEO campaign. In general, there’s no easier way to track this data than by using Google Analytics. As the most popular Web analytics platform, Google Analytics provides you with robust data that you can use to measure the success of your campaign. As well, Google Analytics is completely free to install and use.

One of our favorite KPIs to track is YoY organic traffic. For instance, if you want to see how your store performed the week of Black Friday as compared to the previous year, you can easily do so using Google Analytics. Simply create a segment for “Organic Traffic” and then use a comparison timeline to compare organic traffic to the previous year. Using an example, we can see how this website generated a lot more organic revenue as compared to the week of Black Friday during the previous year.

This is just one of the many insights to your site’s data you’ll be able to get with Google Analytics. Google Analytics is an absolutely must-have Shopify SEO tool for any store.

10. Rewind Backups

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Website backups

As we all know, SEO isn’t just changing words on a page anywhere. It requires coordination with multiple teams from design to developers. When new functionality is added to your site such as schema, UX changes, or new page designs, things don’t always go as planned. This is why it’s essential that you have some sort of backup solution. Even just knowing that you have this will make implementations feel like much less pressure as you can always revert the site back to its previous state. While it’s not strictly an “SEO” tool, this Shopify app will make your life a whole lot easier and much more stress free.

Once installed, Rewind Backups is pretty easy to use. You can choose the different types of pages you wish to restore including blogs, pages and images. Overall the existence of this app on your store will give you a peace of mind that’s well worth it.

Conclusion

Using the Shopify SEO tools and apps above, you should be well equipped with the technology you need to start improving rankings on your site. While no single tool can immediately improve your SEO without research and implementation from an analyst, they can help give you insights that you might not have had otherwise. If you have any questions on the best tools or our Shopify SEO services, feel free to reach out to us!

Other Shopify SEO Resources

The 10 Best Shopify SEO Apps & Tools 2024 is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

A 17-Step Shopify SEO Checklist

Chris Long — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 13:00:38 +0000

At Go Fish Digital, we work with a large number of Shopify stores and provide guidance on improving their SEO strategies. When starting a Shopify SEO project, it can be difficult to know where to begin. With all of the possible areas of SEO (technical, contextual, off-page) it can be overwhelming to know what to prioritize.

For this reason, we developed our own Shopify SEO checklist. This checklist will walk you through some of the basic things that we look for when optimizing Shopify stores to improve their SEO. To best use this checklist, go through each item and ensure that you’ve reviewed it at least once. It’s even best practice to review some of these items multiple times (such as On-Page SEO). Hopefully, this checklist provides you with more clarity on some of the most important things we review on Shopify sites.

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You can find our Shopify SEO checklist below!

Basic Setup

1. Install Google Analytics

The very first thing to do on your Shopify store is to install Google Analytics. Google Analytics is most SEOs analytics tool of choice as it will allow you to measure core KPIs such as the amount of traffic and revenue that come from organic. As well, Google Analytics will give you a huge amount of data that allows you to see information on traffic sources, user devices, engagement metrics and much more.

Once you have created a Google Analytics account, you can connect it to Shopify by going to Online Store > Preferences > Google Analytics and adding your Google Analytics account ID.

2. Set Up Google Search Console

Like Google Analytics, Search Console is another foundational tool that most SEOs use every day. By using Search Console, you’ll get access to a lot of great data for SEO such as queries used to find your site, crawl & indexation issues, Core Web Vitals performance and much more.

Head over to Search Console’s website and create an account. If you already have Google Analytics set up you should be able to gain access to your Search Console data by using Google Analytics as a verification method.

3. Submit Your Sitemap.xml To Search Console

While you’re in Google Search Console, you should submit your sitemap.xml. Doing this will allow Google to have direct access to your site’s sitemap.xml file so it can more easily find key content.

To submit your sitemap.xml in Search Console, go to Index > Sitemaps > Add a new sitemap. There you should be able to add your sitemap.xml URL path which should always be “sitemap.xml” on Shopify sites.

4. Perform Keyword Research

Another thing you’ll need to do before starting your SEO campaign is understanding your site’s core keywords. Without doing this, you won’t know which terms to focus on optimizing your site for. Obviously, you’ll want to focus on keywords that have the highest chance at driving revenue for your store.

There are many ways to approach keyword research such as:

Writing down what terms you think people would be using to search for your products
Reviewing competitor sites to see what keywords they’re using
Using Google Ads data to find what keywords already drive revenue for your store
Analyzing the “Search Results” report in Search Console to see what queries already drive traffic to your store

Whatever method you choose, I’d recommend gathering as much data as you can and then cutting the list down to 100-300 of your highest priority keywords. Of course, bigger Shopify stores will require bigger keyword lists.

5. Track Your Keywords

While Google Analytics & Search Console will provide traffic/click data, they won’t provide you with great insights on how your keywords are ranking over time. Now that you’ve identified the keywords that you want to rank for, you’ll want to go ahead and use a solution to track those keywords.

Tracking keywords will provide you with two different types of insights:

How individual keywords are ranking over time
How your site as a whole is ranking over time

There are plenty of different rank tracking tools out there that you can use. We use STAT at our agency but below are some other very popular options:

Shopify On-Page SEO Checklist

6. Optimize Your Category & Product Page Title Tags

One of the easiest things you can do to quickly improve your Shopify store’s optimization is to simply go through your store’s title tags and ensure they’re optimized. Since you’ll generally want to focus on key pages first, it’s best to review your collection and product pages immediately. These are the pages that are most tied to site revenue so they’re the most important to start with.

When optimizing your title tags, you’ll want to ensure that you’re using the target keywords for that particular page directly in the title tag. This sends strong on-page signals to Google about what the topic of the page is about.

7. Ensure URLs Have A Clean Structure

While Shopify has some limitations on how your URLs are structured, I recommend ensuring any new paths you create are well-optimized. A well optimized URL is generally:

Short and readable
Contains core keywords
Easy for users to understand the content of the page

Below are some example of how URLs for a collection of “Mens Dress Pants” could look:

OK:/collections/the-best-mens-dress-pants-23/

Good:/collections/best-mens-dress-pants/

Great:/collections/mens-dress-pants/

I much prefer the shorter and cleaner URLs that are easy to read while still using your primary keywords. Fortunately, the nature of how Shopify prompts you to create collection pages does generally result in more optimized URLs on the platform.

8. Identify Internal Linking Opportunities

Internal linking is another great way to improve the SEO of your Shopify store. Internal links help Google find content that’s deeper in your site architecture much easier. As well, it helps better distribute authority and improves the overall user experience of your customers.

The best place to start looking for internal link opportunities is on your Shopify blog. Start by identifying blogs that reference key collections or products on your store and add internal links to those relevant pages. This will help optimize the destination pages as well as make your blog posts have stronger calls to action for transactions.

For example, you can see how Gymshark links to this collection page in this blog post.

Of course, there are many other ways to find internal linking opportunities. Other ways to improve the internal linking of your store could be:

Adding “Related Products” sections on product pages
Linking to subcollection pages from collection pages
Linking to related collections from collection pages

9. Improve Your Website Navigation

Another high priority initiative to look at right away is reviewing your site’s navigation and looking for opportunities to improve it. Your site navigation is one of the primary ways that Google and users navigate through your site. For this reason, it’s one of the key components of your site. When reviewing your navigation you can ask yourself:

Are users able to get the information that they’re most likely looking for?
Are all my key collections & products easy to get to by using the navigation?
Are competitors structuring their navigation differently?
Does my navigation function well on mobile devices?

Shopify Technical SEO Checklist

10. Perform A Crawl Of Your Site

From a technical perspective, one of the first things you should be doing is performing a crawl of your Shopify store. A crawl will emulate how Google and other search engines navigate through your site and can be used to identify any high priority issues. At Go Fish Digital, Screaming Frog is our tool of choice for performing site crawls.

When performing these crawls, I primarily look for things such as:

Unoptimized title tags on key pages
Large amounts of 4xx & 3xx status codes
Canonical tag issues
Non-indexable URLs that may contribute to crawl waste

Cleaning up these things can improve Google’s efficiency when it crawls and indexes your website. As well, based on your site crawl, you can then start to prioritize more of these technical SEO items later down the Shopify checklist.

11. Check Your Robots.txt File

The next thing to check is your Shopify’s robots.txt file. By default, your store will have a robots.txt at the URL path “domain.com/robots.txt”. This file comes with commands that give Google instructions about what it can and cannot crawl. By default, things such as your checkout, cart and internal search are all blocked.

For the vast majority of stores, Shopify’s default robots.txt rules are enough to ensure Google stays away from problem areas.

However, this isn’t always the case. Stores that have had more customization done to them may need to add additional rules. Common situations to adjust the robots.txt include when a store has a faceted navigation or uses different internal search URLs than the default. For more information, you can check out our guide on optimizing the Shopify robots.txt file.

12. Crawl Your Sitemap.xml File

It’s also best practice to crawl your Shopify’s sitemap.xml to ensure that everything looks good. The sitemap.xml is a file that tells Google and other search engines what the key pages of your site are. Similar to the robots.txt file, Shopify creates this out of the box which is great! Shopify will create a sitemap.xml index file with child sitemaps for:

Marketing pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)
Collection pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)
Product pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)
Blog posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)

With Screaming Frog, you can change the crawler to “List” mode and then select Upload > Download XML Sitemap. This will start a crawl of the sitemap.xml. I’ll generally look for any pages that are returning 404/3xx status codes or low quality pages.

Generally Shopify’s sitemap.xml is pretty good and there’s no need for adjustments. However, sometimes I’ll find low quality pages contained in the sitemap.xml as the page might be published in the Shopify admin but not linked to on the site.

13. Ensure Category Pages Link To Canonical Products

One of the big technical SEO issues that Shopify presents out of the box is duplicate content. On many Shopify stores, collection pages will link to duplicate product pages by default. If you navigate to your product pages and they have /collections/ & /products/ in the URL, this is a duplicate page. These duplicate pages often contain canonical tags that reference the actual rankings page.

Here’s an example you can see on Tilly’s Brimmed Hat category page:

Category Page: https://www.tilley.com/collections/brimmed

First Product Link: https://www.tilley.com/collections/brimmed/products/ltm6-airflo-hat

Canonical: https://www.tilley.com/products/ltm6-airflo-hat

This means that every product link on all category pages are duplicate.

Fortunately, you can fix this by making adjustments to the product-grid-item.liquid file (note this might not be the same in all Shopify setups).

In the left sidebar, select Online Store > Themes
Select Actions > Edit Code
Find the “Snippets” folder, and select “product-grid-item.liquid”
Adjust the following code:

FROM:

TO:

Learn more about fixing this by reading our guide on Shopify duplicate content issues.

14. Review Your Structured Data Implementation

Another extremely important technical SEO element of your Shopify store is your site’s structured data. Structured data is simply code that you can add to your site that gives Google and other search engines more information about the content of your page. The crawler will have to do less “interpreting” to understand a page’s content.

We recommend checking how your structured data looks on your different page types within Shopify. You can do this by running each page type through the Schema Markup Validator.

Below is our ideal structured data mapping by page type:

Home: Organization
Collection: CollectionPage / OfferCatalog
Product: Product
Blog: Article

Ideally, these different page types all contain one element of each type of markup. Of course, you’ll also want to ensure that key properties (such as “aggregateRating” on “Product” schema) are populated correctly. For more information, check out our guide to Shopify structured data.

15. Implement Lazy Loading

When looking to speed up Shopify sites, it’s good to check if images on your collection page are lazy loading. Lazy loading occurs when images only render after a user scrolls to them in the viewport. This ensures that users are only served the resources that they’re actually interacting with.

For Shopify sites, we love to use the lazysizes library in order to implement lazy loading. We find that this works really well with Shopify and is fairly straightforward for developers to implement. If you’re finding that your Shopify collection pages aren’t using lazy loading, this is a great resource to implement on your store.

16. Check For Indexation Issues From JavaScript

Depending on the complexity of your Shopify store, your content might be reliant on JavaScript in order to render for both Google and users. Especially if you have elements that utilize client-side JavaScript, we recommend auditing how Google is indexing the content. It’s possible that your website’s content could be under-indexed if Google is able to render all of the JavaScript on their end.

For instance, here’s an example of Lord & Taylor’s Boot Heels collection page.

Now here’s that exact same page with JavaScript turned off.

It’s possible that if this JavaScript is served client-side that Google might not be getting a complete picture of the content of the page. By performing the following checks, you can get a better idea of how completely Google is able to index the content:

Using the Developer extension for Chrome, turn off JavaScript and note which site elements are reliant on it to load
Perform a “site:” search for individual pages and look for example text on the page
Run the page through Google’s Mobile Friendly Testing Tool to see what content Google is able to index

My colleague Pierce Brelinsky wrote a fantastic article on how to diagnose JavaScript SEO issues if you’re interested in reading more.

17. Review The Index Coverage Report

Another great report for Shopify store owners to review is Search Console’s Index Coverage report. This report gives you details on how Google is crawling and indexing your website. For instance, Google might be refusing to index some of your URLs and you might not even know about it! For each URL Google crawls, it assigns statuses such as “Blocked by robots.txt”, “Submitted and indexed” and the mysterious “Crawled – currently not indexed”

As part of your Shopify SEO checklist, I recommend reviewing this report to ensure that Google is crawling and indexing your content correctly. I’ll generally look for things such as:

Are there URLs that should be indexed that aren’t?
Is Google crawling low quality URLs?
Are we blocking key content via the robots.txt
Is Google ignoring our site’s canonical tags

This can help give you more insights as to possible indexation issues your Shopify store might have. The larger your store, the more crucial this step is in the process.

Conclusion

With this Shopify SEO checklist in hand, you should be in a better position to understand the key items that you need to work on with your site. This checklist will work best if you return to it from time to time to ensure that you’re able to work through all of the different steps. While SEO can certainly be overwhelming, breaking it down into smaller steps can make your campaign feel even more achievable. If you have any questions about this checklist or our Shopify SEO agency services, feel free to reach out to us!

Other Shopify SEO Resources

A 17-Step Shopify SEO Checklist is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Shopify Robots.txt Guide: How To Edit The Robots.txt.liquid

Chris Long — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 13:00:19 +0000

If you’re working on an eCommerce site, the robots.txt file is one of the biggest foundational elements of your site’s SEO. Ecommerce sites are generally much bigger than most sites on the Web and also contain features such as faceted navigation that can exponentially increase the size of the site. This means that these sites need to be able to more tightly control how Google crawls their site. This helps these sites manage crawl budget and prevent low quality pages from getting crawled by Googlebot.

Related Content:

However, when it comes to Shopify, the robots.txt has long been a gripe of the SEO community. For many years, one of the biggest frustrations for Shopify SEO has been a lack of control of the robots.txt. This made the platform more difficult to work with as compared to others such as SEO for Magento, where users have always been able to easily edit the robots.txt. While the default robots.txt does a great job of blocking crawlers, some sites require adjustments to this file. As more sites start to use the platform, we’re now seeing sites using Shopify get larger and more robust, requiring more crawl intervention by using the robots.txt.

Fortunately, Shopify has been doing a great job of improving the experience of their platform. As of June 2021, Shopify announced that you will now be able to customize the robots.txt file for your site:

User-agent: everyone
Allow: /
Starting today, you have complete control over how search engine bots see your store. #shopifyseo https://t.co/Hz9Ijj5h1y

— Tobi Lutke (@tobi) June 18, 2021

This is huge news for SEOs and Shopify store owners who have been begging for years to adjust the file. It also shows that Shopify listens to the feedback that SEOs give them and are taking steps to improve the platform from a search standpoint.

So now that we know you can edit the file, let’s talk about how to make those adjustments and situations where you might consider doing so.

What Is The Shopify Robots.txt?

The Shopify robots.txt is a file that instructs search engines as to what URLs they can crawl on your site. Most commonly, the robots.txt file can block search engines from finding low quality pages that shouldn’t be crawled. The Shopify robots.txt is generated by using a file called robots.txt.liquid.

What Does Shopify’s Default Robots.txt Block?

When looking at your out of the box Shopify site, you might notice that a robots.txt file is already configured. You can find this file by navigating to:

domain.com/robots.txt

In this robots.txt file, you’ll see that there are already a good number of preconfigured rules.

The vast majority of these rules are useful to keep search engines from crawling unnecessary pages. Below are some of the most important rules in the default Shopify robots.txt file:

Disallow: /search – Blocks internal site search
Disallow: /cart – Blocks the Shopping Cart page
Disallow: /checkout – Blocks the Checkout page
Disallow: /account – Blocks the account page
Disallow: /collections/*+* – Blocks duplicate category pages generated by the faceted navigation
Sitemap: [Sitemap Links] – References the sitemap.xml link

Overall, Shopify’s default rules do a pretty good job of blocking the crawl of lower quality Web pages for most sites. In fact, it’s likely that the majority of Shopify store owners don’t need to make any adjustments to their robots.txt file. The default configuration should be enough to handle most cases. Most Shopify sites generally tend to be smaller in size and crawl control isn’t a huge issue for many of them.

Of course, as more and more sites adopt the Shopify platform, this means that the websites are getting larger and larger. As well, we’re seeing more sites with custom configurations where the default robots.txt rules aren’t enough.

While Shopify’s existing rules do a good job of accounting for most cases, sometimes store owners might need to create additional rules in order to tailor the robots.txt to their site. This can be done by creating and editing a robots.txt.liquid file.

How Do You Create The Shopify Robots.txt.liquid?

You can create the Shopify robots.txt.liquid file by performing the following steps in your store:

In the left sidebar of your Shopify admin page, navigate to Online Store > Themes
Select Actions > Edit code
Under “Templates”, click the “Add a new template” link
Click the left-most dropdown and choose “robots.txt”
Select “Create template”

You should then see the Shopify robots.txt.liquid file open in the editor:

How Do You Edit The Shopify Robots.txt File?

Adding A Rule

If you want to add a rule to the Shopify robots.txt, you can do so by adding additional blocks of code to the robots.txt.liquid file.

{%- if group.user_agent.value == ‘*’ -%}

{{ ‘Disallow: [URLPath]‘ }}

{%- endif -%}

For instance, if your Shopify site uses /search-results/ for the internal search function and you want to block it with the robots.txt, you could add the following command:

{%- if group.user_agent.value == ‘*’ -%}

{{ ‘Disallow: /search-results/.*’ }}

{%- endif -%}

If you wanted to block the multiples directories (/search-results/ & /private/) you would add the following two blocks to the file:

{%- if group.user_agent.value == ‘*’ -%}

{{ ‘Disallow: /search-results/.*’ }}

{%- endif -%}

{%- if group.user_agent.value == ‘*’ -%}

{{ ‘Disallow: /private/.*’ }}

{%- endif -%}

This should allow these lines to populate in your Shopify robots.txt file:

Potential Use Cases For A Shopify Robots.txt File

So knowing that the standard robots.txt is generally sufficient for most sites, in what situations would your site benefit from editing Shopify’s robots.txt.liquid file? Below are some of the more common situations when you might want to consider adjusting yours:

Internal Site Search

A general best practice for SEO is to block a site’s internal search via the robots.txt. This is because there are an infinite number of queries that users could enter into a search bar. If Google is able to start crawling these pages, it could lead to a lot of low quality search result pages appearing in the index.

Fortunately, Shopify’s default robots.txt blocks the standard internal search with the following command:

Disallow: /search

However, many Shopify sites don’t use Shopify’s default internal search. We find that many Shopify sites end up using apps or other internal search technologies. This frequently changes the URL of the internal search. When this happens, your site is no longer protected by Shopify’s default rules.

For instance, on this site the internal search results render at URLs with /pages/search in the path:

This means that these internal search URLs are allowed to be crawled by Google:

This website might want to consider editing Shopify’s robots.txt rules to add custom commands that block Google from crawling the /pages/search directory.

Faceted Navigations

If your site has a faceted navigation, you might want to consider adjusting your Shopify robots.txt file. Faceted navigation are the filtering options you can apply on category pages. They’re generally found on the left-hand side of the page. For example, this Shopify site let’s users filter products by color, size, product type, and more:

When we select the “Black” and “Yellow” color filters, we can see that a URL with the “?color” parameter is loaded:

While Shopify’s default robots.txt does a good job of blocking page paths that a faceted navigation might create, unfortunately it can’t account for every single use case. In this instance, “color” is not blocked which will allow Google to crawl the page.

This might be another instance, where we might want to consider blocking pages with the robots.txt in Shopify. Since a large number of these faceted navigation URLs could be crawled, we might want to consider blocking many of them to reduce the crawl of lower quality/similar pages. This site could determine all of the parameters in the faceted navigation that they would like to block (size, color) and then create rules in the robots.txt to block their crawl.

Sorting Navigation

Similar to faceted navigation functionalities, many eCommerce sites include sorting on their category pages. These pages let users see the products offered on category pages in a different order (Price: low to high, Most relevant, Alphabetically, etc).

The issue this creates is that these pages contain duplicate/similar content as they are simply variations of the original category page but with the products in a different order. Below you can see how when selecting “Alphabetically, A-Z”, a parameterized URL is created that sorts products alphabetically. This URL uses the “?q” parameter appended to the end of it:

Of course this isn’t a unique URL that should be crawled and indexed as it’s simply the same products as the original category page sorted in a different order. This Shopify site might want to consider adding a robots.txt rule that blocks the crawl of all “?q” URLs.

Conclusion

Shopify’s robots.txt.liquid file allows SEOs to have much greater control over the crawl of their site then they once did before. While for most sites Shopify’s default robots.txt should be sufficient at keeping search engines out of undesirable areas, you might want to consider adjustments to it if you notice that an edge case applies to you. Generally, the larger your store is and the more customization you’ve done to it, the more likely it is you’ll want to make adjustments to the robots.txt file. If you have any questions about the robots.txt or Shopify SEO agency services, feel free to reach out!

Other Shopify SEO Resources

Shopify Robots.txt Guide: How To Edit The Robots.txt.liquid is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

A Guide To Shopify Plus SEO

Chris Long — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 11:00:51 +0000

At Go Fish Digital we work with a large number of eCommerce sites across a variety of different platforms. Since we started providing SEO services, we’ve had clients come to us on Commerce Cloud, WooCommerce, Magento, custom builds, and many more. However, there is one platform that’s stood out in recent years.

It’s no surprise that we’re seeing more and more websites utilizing Shopify and Shopify Plus. While it’s easy to point to the pandemic as the event that has triggered this “eCommerce renaissance”, the data shows that it’s been going on well before that. Looking at Shopify Plus usage statistics on BuiltWith, we can see that the platform has been gaining popularity since 2017.

While we’ve previously written about our best practices for general Shopify SEO, we wanted to write a more specific guide for Shopify Plus SEO. While the underlying technology is largely the same, we generally see different types of clients adopting the Shopify Plus platform. These are generally larger brands with bigger marketing teams.

What Is Shopify Plus SEO?

Shopify Plus SEO is a set of search engine optimization adjustments to Shopify Plus sites. Shopify Plus SEO initiatives include removing duplicate product page links, reducing JavaScript-dependent content, faceted navigation adjustments and more.

Related Content:

Shopify Plus sites tend to have larger inventories, more customization, and utilize more complex marketing technologies. With this in mind, we wanted to detail our best practices for when working with these types from an SEO perspective and the common issues a Shopify Plus store might encounter.

1. Duplicate Product Pages

One of the biggest SEO issues we find on Shopify Plus websites is the existence of duplicate content. Duplicate content occurs when the same content can be accessed at two or more unique URLs. Shopify Plus sites have a variety of ways in which they create duplicate content.

The first is duplicate product pages. Oftentimes, category pages on Shopify Plus will link to duplicate product pages.

For example, let’s take a look at the Untuckit website. We can notice that navigating to one of their product pages from a category page, we find the “Flannel Manning Shirt” (now discontinued). We can see that the URL has both /collections/ and /products/ in the URL path:

https://www.untuckit.com/collections/flannels/products/manning

However, when we check the canonical tag of that particular page, we can see it points to another URL altogether. This URL only has /products/ the path: https://www.untuckit.com/products/manning

When we navigate to this page, we can see that it’s actually an exact duplicate of the URL listed above.

This creates an issue for Shopify Plus SEO. This means that the page that’s getting linked to from the category page is not the canonical URL. Instead, the category page is linking to a duplicate page that’s also capable of getting crawled/indexed.

As well, the larger issue is that this set up creates duplicate content at scale. Every single product linked to from category pages is a duplicate page. This means that Shopify Plus sites create a lot of potential duplicate content for important pages for SEO.

While the canonical tag is helpful to give Google consolidation signals for indexation, canonical tags are hints and not directives. This means that Google can ignore canonical tags and index the duplicate anyway.

Fortunately, there is a way to ensure that your Shopify Plus website’s category pages link to the correct product pages. By making an adjustment to the product-grid-item.liquid file, you can ensure that Shopify links to the correct product URLs on all of your site’s category pages. To learn more about how to fix this, you can read our guide on Shopify duplicate content.

2. JavaScript Rendered Content

Another major SEO consideration for Shopify Plus sites is JavaScript rendered content. Websites using Shopify Plus are more prone to having JavaScript crawling and indexing issues. This is because these stores generally carry larger inventories and are used by bigger brands. As a result, it’s more likely that developers have made adjustments or implemented JavaScript frameworks to deliver the content over the lifetime of the site.

While Google has gotten much better at crawling and indexing JavaScript over the years, this process still isn’t perfect. JavaScript SEO best practices still need to be followed for any site using the technology. If JavaScript hinders or outright hides content from getting crawled and indexed by Googlebot, this can have a deterrent effect on rankings.

For example, let’s take a look at Motherhood Maternity’s Nursing Bras category page. We can see that when we navigate to the URL, a standard category page is loaded. Here we can see the navigation, banner image, and product listings.

However, when turn off JavaScript, we see that the banner image and product listings are nowhere to be found:

In order to further inspect this, we can use “View Source” to see the raw HTML of the page. This will show us the content of the page that’s accessible to search engines before any JavaScript is executed. When searching around for products such as the “Average Busted Seamless Maternity And Nursing Bra”, we can see that it cannot be found on the page:

This shows us that JavaScript is required in order to properly load key content of the page as isn’t accessible in the raw HTML. This is an indication that we’ll want to further review if Google is able to properly index our product listings.

When looking at Motherhood Maternity’s organic traffic, we can see that it has sharply declined over the past couple of years.

It’s possible that Google is having trouble indexing the JavaScript content which could be a source of the traffic drops. Since they use the FastSimon technology, they might want to test if pre-rendering the content helps improve organic rankings.

If your site is on Shopify Plus, you definitely want to be auditing your usage of JavaScript and testing to see if Google can properly index any JS rendered content. My colleague Pierce Brelinsky has written a fantastic JavaScript SEO guide that will help walk you through the process.

3. Faceted Navigation

Another major SEO consideration for Shopify Plus sites is faceted navigation. As Shopify Plus sites are likely to have larger inventories, they’re more likely to have implemented a faceted navigation. This functionality allows users to easily sort and filter category pages across different criteria (Size, Price, Material) to find the products most relevant to them. Faceted navigation can be great for users who are trying to browse through a large variety of products.

However, faceted navigations can cause significant SEO issues by creating a large amount of duplicate content. In many setups, every facet that’s selected creates a new URL. These URLs can quickly add up to a huge number of pages. In a case study from Google, they found that their store with 158 products created 380,000 URLs! URLs created by the faceted navigation are generally duplicate or similar to the source page as they only contain sorted and filtered views of the root category page. This can create large duplicate content issues.

Using an example, we can see that very thing on the Women’s Eyeglasses category page on Bonlook.

This category page contains a faceted navigation that allows users to filter by different parameters such as Size, Gender, Shape, and more:

When selecting options from the faceted navigation, we can see that this changes the URL, creating a unique path for Google to crawl. When selecting the “Black”, “Female”, and “Cat Eye” options, we can see that this loads the following URL:

Notice how this content is very similar to the root category page. This could definitely be considered similar or duplicate content. If Google is able to index all of the parameterized pages created by the faceted navigation, this could lead to massive duplicate content issues.

Fortunately, this content is blocked by Shopify’s default rules in the robots.txt file. This prevents Google from crawling the many duplicate pages created by the faceted navigation.

However, if your Shopify Plus store uses faceted navigation, you’ll want to be sure to analyze if Google is able to crawl and index the large number of URLs that could be created. Oftentimes, we see that faceted navigations are not blocked by Shopify’s default robots.txt rules. This could lead to a large amount of crawl budget focused on low quality and duplicate pages.

4. Internal Site Search

Internal site search is another important part of Shopify Plus sites. As these sites have a large number of SKUs, it becomes critical for users to be able to use this functionality in order to quickly access the products they’re looking for on the store. If your store doesn’t have internal site search, we’d highly recommend adding it in a prominent location. Our data has shown that users who utilize internal site search can be much more likely to convert than users who don’t use it.

With internal site search, you need to be testing it to make sure that it’s not causing any SEO problems. The most common issue we find is that some Shopify stores can allow their internal search page to be crawled and potentially indexed. This could result in low quality pages in Google’s index that could impact the quality assessment of the rest of the site.

When looking at the Lord & Taylor website, we can see that they allow their internal search to be crawled. For instance, below we can see an internal search result page when looking for “Tote Bags.”

While this page is useful for users looking for Tote Bags, this is not a page that we would want to be crawled or indexed. Lord & Taylor already has created a Tote Bags category page that should be the primary ranking page for SEO.

However, when looking at their robots.txt file, we can see that Lord & Taylor does not block this page from being crawled by Googlebot:

As a result, Lord & Taylor might want to take steps to adjust their Shopify robots.txt file to block the crawling of their internal search pages. This will ensure that Google is not able to crawl through these low quality pages and potentially index them.

If you’re using internal site search, we recommend that you perform tests to ensure that Google cannot crawl your internal site search pages. If it can, we recommend creating rules in the Shopify robots.txt.liquid file to block Google from crawling them.

5. Structured Data

When working with any eCommerce site, structured data is an absolute must to consider. Structured data is a code that you can add to your website’s pages that makes it easier for search engines to understand the content of your page. Structured data can more directly tell search engines what the overall topic of a page is about as opposed to them having to interpret the content.

When working with Shopify Plus sites, we’ve found that many sites have inconsistent structured data. In most cases, elements such as the theme and Shopify apps automatically add structured data to the site. Unfortunately, most of the time we see that these technologies result in incorrect, incomplete, or duplicate structured data on the site.

For instance, here’s an example of a product page on Huel.com that doesn’t contain any structured data.

Overall, we recommend that Shopify Plus sites use the following structured data mappings. Please note that every page on your site should only have a single instance of each schema element:

Home Page: Organization
Category Pages: CollectionPage or OfferCatalog
Product Pages: Product
Blog Posts: Article

When it comes to implementation, you first need to check what structured data exists on each of your different page types. You can use tools like the Schema Validator to test this. You’ll then need to create a plan to ensure that the structured data mappings above get applied to each page type. This might involve working with a developer to remove some of the existing schema and then adding the proper mapped structured data.

If you don’t have developer resources, we highly recommend using Schema App Total Schema Markup to add schema to your Shopify site. This app does a fantastic job of implementing the mappings above and can also help you remove structured data added by the theme without the help of a developer.

For a deeper dive on Shopify Plus schema, you can read our Guide To Shopify Structured Data.

6. Site Speed

Performance is always something that’s top of mind for enterprise sites. Generally speaking, bigger brands that have larger marketing teams will have websites that end up getting slower over the long run. This is often because these sites are more prone to have different functionalities and technologies added to them over time. Analytics teams will add more tracking scripts and marketing teams request functionalities such as chatbots and animations. As a result, this can lead to slower performance on enterprise sites.

Data from HTTP Archive

The good news for Shopify Plus sites is that the Shopify is already pretty fast out of the box. Recent data shows that the Shopify platform generally has some of the best Core Web Vitals of any other popular CMS (WordPress, Drupal, Wix, etc). This sets up Shopify store owners in a great position for site performance.

Of course, there are always initiatives that can be done to improve site performance. A study from Walmart discovered that every one second improvement in site performance can result in a +2% conversion rate for your site. For this reason, Shopify Plus sites need to keep performance top of mind.

From our years of working with Shopify sites, we’ve started to develop frameworks to help speed up Shopify stores. Below are some of the techniques and thought processes we use to help improve Shopify Plus performance:

Audit Shopify apps and remove any unused or unnecessary ones.
Implement lazy loading using the lasysizes.js library
Ensure images are only uploaded at their display size
Use Crush.pics to automatically compress Shopify images
If starting a new store, find a lightweight Shopify theme

If you want more details on how to improve your store’s performance, you can read our Shopify Speed Optimization Guide.

Conclusion

While the SEO basics are the same between Shopify and Shopify Plus, the types of brands on Shopify Plus will most likely face more complex challenges. Larger inventories to manage, JavaScript frameworks, and increased technologies are all challenges that Shopify Plus stores are likely to face and store owners need to be aware of how these elements impact SEO. Hopefully this guide serves as a good starting point to helping improve your Shopify Plus store from an SEO perspective. If you have any questions about our Shopify Plus SEO services, please reach out to us!

Other Shopify SEO Resources

A Guide To Shopify Plus SEO is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

A Guide To Shopify Sitemaps

Chris Long — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 13:00:55 +0000

There are a lot of elements that can impact your Shopify site’s SEO. One of these elements is the Shopify sitemap. Sitemap.xml files can be a bit confusing to Shopify site owners because they’re really not meant for their site’s users, only for the search engines that crawl and index their content.

Essentially, sitemap.xml files make it easier for Google, and other search engines, to discover your site’s content. Instead of having to rely on confusing site architecture, the sitemap.xml provides search engines with another avenue to find your site’s content. All things being equal, URLs within your sitemap.xml will get crawled more often and will provide canonical signals to Google so, ideally, your most important pages will be included in the sitemap.xml.

Related Content:

At Go Fish Digital, we work with quite a few Shopify sites and are familiar with how sitemap.xml files are generated by the CMS. To give you a better understanding of what they are and how to use them, we wanted to provide a reference guide for all Shopify sitemap.xml questions you might have.

Let’s begin!

What Is A Shopify Sitemap?

A Shopify sitemap is an XML file that search engines use to find your website’s URLs. The Shopify sitemap is automatically generated and creates links to your product, category, blog, and marketing pages. The Shopify sitemap.xml cannot be manually adjusted.

Where Can I Find My Shopify Sitemap?

You can find your sitemap.xml by simply appending the text “/sitemap.xml” to the end of your root domain. Below you can see an example of how to access the sitemap for the domain “example.com”

https://example.com/sitemap.xml

What’s in the Sitemap?

Sitemap Index File

Once you’ve navigated here, you’ll be able to see your Shopify site’s sitemap index file. A sitemap.xml index file is a parent sitemap that contains links to all of your website’s sitemaps. These links are called child sitemaps and are generally categorized by page type.

In the screenshot below, there are four child sitemap links:

An example of a Shopify sitemap index file

Generally, Shopify will create four child sitemaps for the following page types:

Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)
Collection Pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)
Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)
Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)

This helps categorize your sitemap.xml into logical page groupings. If your site has a large selection of products, you may see Shopify create other child sitemaps in the index file. These additional child sitemaps will auto-generate once the initial child sitemap has reached over 5,000 URLs*:

*This has been adjusted from 10,000 to 5,000 after clarification from Shopify’s International Growth SEO Lead, Jackson Lo

sitemap_products_1 is close to 10,000 URLs. This creates a new child sitemap.

Sitemap.xml files cannot be larger than 50,000 URLs. Creating these additional child sitemaps is Shopify’s way of staying under that limit.

Child Sitemap File

When navigating to a particular child sitemap link, you will see a list of URLs that belongs to that particular page type. This provides Google and other search engines with a large list of all of the URLs in that particular category. This helps them easily discover all of your site’s content without having to rely on your site’s architecture to do so.

When analyzing your Shopify child sitemaps, you’ll find that each entry may contain a few different elements:

: The URL of that particular page
: The last modification date of the page
: An estimate of how often the page is likely to change
: The featured image of that page
: The title of the page the image is on

An example child sitemap entry

All of these individual entries in the child sitemaps should contain all of your site’s content.

Can You Edit Your Sitemap or Upload Your Own Custom One?

Unfortunately, as of the date of this post, you cannot upload your own sitemap.xml to Shopify and must use their autogenerated file. This has been confirmed by Shopify support.

While this can be a bit limiting, overall we prefer autogenerated options for sitemap.xml files. If you’re using a custom static solution, this might not update your sitemap as new pages are added and removed from your store. This could be a big issue as inventory is constantly changing in eCommerce stores. Overall, however, we’ve found that Shopify’s autogenerated sitemap.xml is a good solution for our clients.

Google Search Console

How Do You Submit Your Shopify Sitemap?

You can easily submit your Shopify sitemap to Google Search Console in the following ways:

Navigate To Google Search Console
In the left-side bar, navigate to “Sitemaps”
Find the “Add a new sitemap” form
Enter the text “sitemap.xml” in the “Enter sitemap URL” field
Click “Submit”

Google Search Console Couldn’t Fetch The Sitemap?

Unfortunately, this appears to be a known problem in the new Google Search Console that impacts users of CMS’s other than Shopify. It is commonly associated with a bug in Search Console and there aren’t any easy fixes that appear to be readily available.

If you do see this error occur when you submit your Shopify sitemap, be sure that your Search Console property is set up correctly. If you’ve set up Search Console using your myshopify.com subdomain, this might be the issue. Instead, create a Search Console property using your actual root domain.

“Indexed, not submitted in sitemap” In The Index Coverage Report?

If you use Google Search Console and any of its reporting, you may be familiar with the Index Coverage report. This is a fantastic tool that provides you actual data about how Google is crawling and indexing your URLs. This report provides you with great information about how Google is handling elements such as your canonical URLs, 404 errors, and URL parameters.

The Index Coverage Report also provides information about how Google is processing your sitemap.xml files. You can find this data in Search Console by going to Coverage > Valid > Index, not submitted in sitemap. For a few Shopify clients, we’ve found that Google will occasionally report URLs here:

Pages that are indexed but not in the sitemap.xml

Generally, we’ve found that URLs reported here aren’t high priority items to fix. Some common reasons we see Shopify reporting URLs as “Indexed, not submitted in sitemap” include:

False positives: Oftentimes we find that the URLs reported here are actually contained in the Shopify sitemap
/collections/all/ pages: Shopify doesn’t seem to include these and their paginated URLs in the sitemap.xml
Pagination: Oftentimes we’ll see examples of pagination excluded from your sitemap.xml

If this is something that you want to explore more, here’s how you can identify issues:

Export all of the “Indexed, not submitted in sitemap” URLs in Search Console to an Excel spreadsheet
Crawl these using Screaming Frog in “List Mode”
After the crawl is complete, navigate to “Crawl Analysis” and click “Start”
Navigate to the “Sitemaps” report in Screaming Frog and find “URLs not in Sitemap”. This will show you all of the URLs that are excluded from your sitemap.xml

This should provide you with additional insights on the URLs that are actually indexed but excluded from your sitemap.xml file. We definitely recommend leaning on the data provided in Screaming Frog as opposed to Search Console as it’s more likely to give an accurate view of what’s contained in your sitemap file.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you now feel like you have a better understanding of your Shopify store’s sitemap.xml file and what its primary function is. While it may be confusing for users, your sitemap.xml file’s primary goal is to make it easier for Google to crawl your website’s content. This is especially important for eCommerce sites because Google can have a harder time finding the content on larger sites if it’s only navigating through its standard architecture. A sitemap.xml file provides protection against that by giving search engines a “home base” list to crawl through.

If you have any questions about sitemap.xml files or our Shopify SEO services feel free to reach out and let us know!

Other Shopify SEO Resources

A Guide To Shopify Sitemaps is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

A Guide To Shopify Speed Optimization

Chris Long — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 15:00:44 +0000

One of the key considerations for Shopify store owners is site performance. Your website performance directly impacts your website’s ability to convert users. The faster your site is, the more users you are likely to convert. As well, if you’re looking to improve your Shopify store’s SEO, performance is a small ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.

Related Content:

Additionally, site performance impacts all of your other digital marketing initiatives. Whether it’s paid, email, online reputation management or social marketing, your website speed will impact users from all of these different channels. If you’re site is receiving a fair amount of traffic from these channels, then even just a small improvement in performance and can result in noticeable revenue improvements.

A one second improvement in site speed can result in +$8,000 in revenue for this site.

This is why ensuring that your Shopify site performs well is crucial to the success of your store. Speeding up your Shopify site can not only enhance your user’s experience but may also have a direct impact on your bottom line.

What Site Speed Optimizations Does Shopify Already Have?

One of the nice parts about Shopify is that your store does come with some speed optimizations out of the box. In general, Shopify sites are pretty fast as compared to other solutions. This is great news for Shopify store owners as the platform is generally faster than platforms such as Magento.

After creating a new Shopify site, you’ll find that the following performance features should already be implemented:

Leverage Browser Caching: Shopify should already cache your site’s internal resources by default. Caching allows some of your content such as images, JavaScript and CSS to be stored locally within users’ browsers. This means they will not have to re-download the content when view the same resource twice. This can speed up your store as users will be able to see some of your site’s content much faster than they were previously. Note, if you’re seeing third party resources get flagged for caching issues, there is nothing you can do to directly adjust the caching.
Utilize A CDN: Shopify utilizes the Fastly CDN. A CDN (Content Delivery Network) allows some of your site’s content to be stored on servers across the World. This reduces the physical distance between your users and your site’s content. Reducing the physical distance helps improve your site performance.

How To Optimize Shopify Site Speed:

Here are 8 steps to speed up a Shopify site:

1. Choose A Lightweight Shopify Theme (Original Data)

Choosing a fast Shopify theme can immediately put your website in a great position from a performance standpoint. Some themes might come with unnecessary bloat out of the box, putting your site at a performance disadvantage. Conversely, a more lightweight theme will set your site up for strong performance moving forward.

To give you an idea of some of the better performing themes, we tested 200+ templates that are available in the Shopify Theme store and logged their benchmark First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Time To Interactive (TTI) from Google PageSpeed Insights. Below you can find the top performing themes our tests identified:

Create Theme (1.1 FCP, 7.8 TTI)
Toy Theme (1.1 FCP, 7.7 TTI)
Warm Theme (1.9 FCP, 7.8 TTI)
Light Theme (1.1 FCP, 7.8 TTI)
Outdoors Theme (1.1 FCP, 8.1 TTI)

Of course this is not to say that high-performing themes cannot be made slower or that these are the best options for your site. However, if speed optimization is top of mind for you, these might be ones to consider choosing.

2. Reduce Large Image Sizes

Resizing large image assets can be one of the best ways to speed up a Shopify site. When evaluating a lot of Shopify sites, we’ve noticed that many businesses have a propensity to use large numbers of images. This makes sense since images are a staple of eCommerce stores. This is even more true in verticals such as retail where images are a necessity to highlight products.

While images are a fantastic way of improving the UX and branding of your store, they often come with a performance tradeoff. Image files are generally much larger in size than standard HTML or CSS. The result of using a large number of images on the page can be a very heavy page weight that takes users longer to download than a less image-intensive page:

This page uses 173 image requests with a total size of 14MB in image assets

As well, unoptimized images can make your site’s page even heavier. Images will often be uploaded at sizes much larger than their “render size”. This is the size that users actually see in the browser:

This page contains an actual size of almost 2x the render size

When images are uploaded at sizes much larger than the render size, this causes unnecessary performance issues. This means that users must download a larger image than is actually required for it to render. The result is that users must waste extra browser resources and data in order to actually see the content.

You can find larger images on a given page by using Chrome DevTools. Simply right click and select “Inspect”. Navigate to the “Network” tab and refresh the page. This will show you all of the resources used to load your page. You can then sort by “Size” to find the largest assets.

If you see any large images (100+ KB), find that image on your page and once again right click and choose “Inspect”. Hovering over the image link will show you the render size as compared to the actual (intrinsic) size.

3. Compress Images

Images can also be unoptimized when they are not compressed. It’s very common to see Shopify stores where no compression has been applied to uploaded images which leads to larger image sizes than are necessary.

By using compression, you can ensure that your image assets have much smaller file sizes than the original image. The smaller file size will allow browsers to load your website content faster.

When it comes to image compression, we prefer using a combination of these two methods:

Shopify Apps: Some apps will automatically compress images upon upload. We’ve had good experiences with Crush.pics.
Optimizilla: This allows you to manually compress large image assets before uploading to your site.

4. Replace GIFs With Static Images

An undeniable trend we’ve seen with slower Shopify stores is the utilization of GIFs. GIFs can be extremely valuable as they provide a more interactive experience for users. Once again, this can help improve your site from a UX and brand perspective.

However, GIF assets are extremely large. Using even just one GIF on a page can dramatically increase its size:

This single GIF asset accounts for 2.8MB

We’ve seen instances where just using two or three GIFs has accounted for 10MB+ of a single page. These files significantly add to page weight so we recommend trying to replace them with static images where possible. This can result in significant resource savings and improved Shopify speed optimization.

5. Lazy Load Images

When running our list of Shopify sites through PageSpeed Insights, one of the most common recommendations we found was “Defer offscreen images”. This is an indication that all of the site’s image assets are loading at once:

Since many Shopify sites use lots of images, looking into lazy loading makes sense in a large number of instances. This can speed up your Shopify website as all of your site’s images won’t load at once, only as a user scrolls down the page.

If you’re interested in implementing lazy loading, Shopify has pretty good help documentation around this. We’ve had the best success for our clients by working with our developers to implement the lazysizes library.

6. Limit Third Party JavaScript & Shopify Apps

A Shopify store is using a huge number of apps and third party resources. This is resulting in a large number of requests the browser must make

Similar to WordPress plugins, Shopify has “Apps” that easily allow site owners to add functionality to their websites without the need for a developer background. Apps are a fantastic way to augment your site’s abilities. The same goes for any additional third party scripts.

However, remember that these additions come at a performance cost.

Every time you add apps or scripts to your website, this adds to the total number of requests your site is making. Additionally, the size of these scripts should be taken into consideration. Too many apps or third party codes can decrease the performance of your Shopify store.

An example of a Shopify store that utilizes a large number of third party tracking codes

Because these resources can hurt site performance, it’s important to regularly review all of the tracking code, Shopify Apps and any other third party resource you’re using. We find that it’s helpful to have an honest conversation with your marketing and development team. Asking these five questions about each resource can be helpful to make a decision on it:

How often do we actually use this feature?
Is this a “must-have” or “nice to have”?
Is there a lighter-weight option that we could use?
Is the benefit we get from this worth a performance trade-off?
Are there any metrics we can reference to see how often this feature is used by our users?

Of course the answers to these questions will certainly vary based on your store and business model. For instance, a chat feature might be crucial to some stores but nonessential for others. After answering these questions, we then recommend working with your development team to figure out which elements can be safely removed.

Not sure where to start? Here are some third party codes we’ve found Shopify stores utilizing that tend to have larger impacts on performance:

Of course, we are not advocating against any of these technologies. However, if you know you’re utilizing one of them, it’s good to be aware that it might be having an impact on the performance of your Shopify store. If your testing reveals that these could be causing issues, consider removing or replacing them to speed up your Shopify site.

7. Migrate Tracking Codes To Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager is a solution that allows you to easily add and remove tags from your website without ever having to touch the code. It is a fantastic way to manage all of your website’s tracking code in one place. As well, one of the great things about Google Tag Manager is that the all of the code loads asynchronously. This means that the code loaded through Google Tag Manager will not block the rendering of your site’s content. This means that you could consider going through a “tag migration” to move some of your tracking code to Google Tag Manager. You can do this by performing the following steps:

Add Google Tag Manager to your Shopify store
Navigate to Tags > New and look for built-in tags in “Tag Types” that you’re using on Shopify.
Implement these tags on Google Tag Manager
If you didn’t find any built-in tag, you can choose “Custom HTML” and add your tag
Set your triggering properly. Often times this is set to “All Pages”
Publish your Google Tag Manager changes
Navigate back to Shopify and remove any apps that you added via Google Tag Manager
Navigate to your store and test that your new tags are working properly. You can do this using Google Tag Manager’s “Preview” mode

Consider moving tracking pixels such as Google Analytics, Hotjar, Facebook and other third party codes to Google Tag Manager.

8. Run Your Store Through Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights is Google’s site speed testing tool. It analyzes your site and provides both metrics about how your site is performing as well as recommendations as to how you can improve your site’s speed. To run a test, simply navigate to the tool and enter the page you would like to see performance data for. You should see something like the following screenshot:

You can a good amount of data back and it can be fairly overwhelming. Let’s discuss the key data points that we look:

First Contentful Paint: How long it takes for the first bit of content to be rendered. This is important to show the user that content is starting to load.
Time To Interactive: How long it takes for the page to first become interactive to the user.

Generally, we’ll look at those two metrics first to get an idea of how a particular page is loading. This can provide great benchmark data that you can then go back and re-measure to see if your site speed improvements are having an impact.

Shopify Store Performance Tests (Original Data)

One thing that you might want to know is how your store compares to other Shopify sites. To give you a reference point, we performed an analysis on some of the most prominent Shopify stores to benchmark their performance.

Methodology:

To collect this data, we measured the homepage performance of 400+ Shopify sites. We collected data points such as First Contentful Paint, Time to Interactive, Page Size, Image Size and Total Requests. All performance data is for the mobile version of the site. We then compared the top and bottom 20% of pages based on the Google PageSpeed score.

Top 20%:

First Contentful Paint: 2.78 seconds
Time To Interactive: 8.98 seconds
Total Page Size: 2.01 MB
Total Image Assets: 1.11 MB
Requests: 72

Average:

First Contentful Paint: 3.8 seconds
Time To Interactive: 22.1 seconds
Total Page Size: 4.41 MB
Total Image Assets: 2.1 MB
Requests: 171

Bottom 20%:

First Contentful Paint: 5.89 seconds
Time To Interactive: 30.37 seconds
Total Page Size: 5.54 MB
Total Image Assets: 2.59 MB
Requests: 235

Additional Resources

As well, if you’re looking for some additional ways that you can improve the performance of your Shopify site the resources below should help. We’ve aggregated our favorite site speed tools and resources that can be used to improve performance on Shopify sites and sites with other content management systems.

Page Speed Testing Tools:

Image Optimization:

If you’re looking to optimize your Shopify store’s speed, these can be great adjustments to make. Improving image optimization, reducing requests, and implementing lazy loading can be great ways to ensure your site loads faster. Hopefully the result is higher performance that improves the user experience for all your digital channels. If you’re looking to improve your Shopify store’s site performance or SEO, you can learn more about our Shopify SEO services.

A Guide To Shopify Speed Optimization is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Shopify Structured Data: Schema Markup For Shopify

Chris Long — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 14:00:56 +0000

At Go Fish Digital, our Shopify SEO agency works with a lot of sites using the platform. One of the most common things we get asked about is what structured data works best for Shopify. With all of the different structured data types that are available, it can feel very confusing as to which ones are the best for store owners.

Other Useful Articles:

While there’s never a singular answer to this question, over time we have built a general framework around how to implement structured data on Shopify sites. So if you’re interested in improving structured data for your Shopify site, read on and I’ll share that framework with you.

What Is Structured Data?

Structured data is a standardized code that tells search engines what the content of a Web page is about. Structured data can tell Google if a particular page is about a business, product, review, article, and much more. While there are different types of structured data, the most common and easiest to implement is JSON-LD.

Below you can see an example of what structured data in JSON-LD looks like:

In the above structured data, you can see how the code highlights key data on the page such as the name, author, description, and type of page. This is what structured data does. It easily highlights this key information in a format that is readable to search engines.

Which Structured Data Types Work The Best For Shopify?

One of the reasons structured data is such a big topic is because there are so many different types out there. Oftentimes, it can feel overwhelming to go through Schema.org and choose the structured data that’s most relevant for your site. While there generally isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution (there never is in SEO), there are general best practices for marking up Shopify sites.

Overall, we find these to be the best structured data mappings for Shopify sites:

Home Page: Organization
Collection Pages: CollectionPage / OfferCatalog, BreadcrumbList
Product Pages: Product, BreadcrumbList
Blog Posts: Article

Let’s dive a little deeper into each one and how they help:

Organization

Organization schema tells Google that your page represents some type of business. It then gives Google information about your business such as your business name, address, phone number, and URL. You can see an example of Organization schema below:

In general, the best practice for Organization schema is to place it on the site’s home page. However, many sites make the mistake of placing it on every page of the site. This isn’t best practice as it’s telling search engines that the primary focus of every page on your site is about your organization. Instead, you’ll want your schema to identify the most specific topic that your page is about.

Related Content:

In general, Organization schema will give Google just a little more information about your business as a whole and can help influence things such as a Knowledge Panel appearing. However, Organization schema is a bit lower priority overall since it only impacts a single page on the site.

CollectionPage / OfferCatalog

Category pages on eCommerce sites rarely get marked up with structured data. I believe this is a missed opportunity with many sites, as category pages have data on them that’s certainly worth marking up.

Enter CollectionPage and OfferCatalog schema types.

I first encountered these structured data types when reading an article by Distilled that suggested these schema types for eCommerce pages. When looking into them more, I thought that it was a really great idea. These structured data types allow you to markup key information about the product listings that appear on category pages such as the product name, URL, price, position on the page, etc. For instance, here’s an example of CollectionPage schema:

And here you can see an example of OfferCatalog schema that’s injected through the “Total Schema Markup App”

Which one you choose is up to you but be sure you’re implementing only one instance of CollectionPage or OfferCatalog schema per page. You don’t want to include both schema types on all of your collection pages.

BreadcrumbList

BreadcrumbList structured data is a schema type that highlights your breadcrumb internal links to Google. This structured data informs Google that those horizontal links are in fact part of a breadcrumb element. BreadcrumbList structured data can also give Google more information about the overall hierarchy of your site and the parent/child relationship between your category and subcategory pages. Since breadcrumb internal links generally appear on both collection and product pages, you’ll want to see if you can include them on both page types.

For example, here’s a set of breadcrumb internal links on Staples.ca, which uses Shopify:

When looking at their schema, we can see that this is marked up with BreadcrumbList structured data:

Since this site is larger, this BreadcrumbList structured data might help Google better understand the taxonomy of the site and how the categories and subcategories are all interrelated.

However, please note that sometimes implementing BreadcrumbList structured data on Shopify can be tricky. When products are associated with a very large number of collections, this can lead to extremely long breadcrumb strings. We’ve seen examples where 20+ breadcrumb links are added to a page since the product is associated with a lot of different collections. Therefore, you need to ensure that your products are all tightly taxonomized if you’re looking to integrate breadcrumbs and BreadcrumbList structured data on your site.

Product

Product structured data is generally considered the highest priority structured data type on Shopify sites. This is because it marks up a lot of product data to Google. This includes information such as:

Product name
URL
Price
Availability
SKU
Description

Below, you can see an example of “Product” structured data appearing on a Shopify product page:

Product structured data should also include the aggregateRating property. This property will highlight data about the reviews contained on the page such as how many there are (reviewCount) and what the average rating of the product is (ratingValue)

This, of course, gives Google the ability to show rich review star results directly in the SERPs. Google will also often show other data about the product directly in the SERPs such as reviews and pricing information.

Article

The last structured data type that we generally recommend for Shopify sites is “Article” structured data. This type of schema can be used to markup informational content such as news stories, guides, or blogs.

Article schema highlights information such as:

headline
URL
datePublished
dateModified
description

For this reason, Article structured data is a perfect fit for Shopify blogs. You can find an example of “Article” schema here:

The reason we prefer Article schema to other types of schema that markup informational content (BlogPosting) is because Google provides direct guidance around “Article” schema, meaning that the search engine might place extra emphasis on it.

They also note that “Adding Article structured data to your news, blog, and sports article page can enhance your appearance in Google Search results.” This means that by using Article structured data, you might be setting your content up to receive rich results or special treatment from Google either now or at a later date.

Implementation

Of course, you might be thinking that all of this information is great to have in practice but how do you actually implement structured data on your site? With most of our clients, we find that there are generally two different ways to implement structured data on Shopify: using an app or having a developer implement it for you. Both of these methods have their advantages and disadvantages so we’ll go over each one below.

Using An App – Schema App Total Schema Markup

Pros: Easily to implement; Marks up category, product, and blog pages
Cons: Must pay a monthly fee for schema; Not as customizable

If you don’t have a developer on hand and don’t feel comfortable messing around too much with the liquid code, then implementing structured data via an app might be a good solution for you. Similar to WordPress plugins, Shopify apps allow you to easily add functionalities to your site without needing a developer to do so. However, the downside here is that Shopify’s app ecosystem is mostly paid. This means that by using an app, you’ll be charged on an ongoing basis to have structured data set up on your site.

If you plan on using an app to implement structured data on Shopify, then we highly recommend using the “Schema App Total Schema Markup” by Schema App. This app does a fantastic job of marking up the highest priority pages on your site out of the box. Once you add the Schema App, it should add different structured data to your various page types:

Home Page: Organization
Collection Pages: OfferCatalog
Product Pages: Product
Blog: BlogPosting

While typically category pages don’t get the same love as product pages in terms of markup, this is what makes OfferCatalog schema so great. This structured data marks up all of your product listings on category pages including information about each product name, URL, price, description, and more.

This is a fantastic way to easily provide Google with more information about what’s contained on your Shopify site’s category pages.

Schema App Total Schema Markup also adds “Product” structured data to your Shopify site’s product pages. As previously discussed, this is great as it will markup key information about your product to Google.

However, after implementing the Schema App on your site, you might notice that there are multiple instances of Product structured data on your pages:

This issue occurs because the Schema App is inserting structured data on top of another file or technology. While this can vary by site, we find that the biggest culprits are:

The Shopify theme
Other apps on the site

Generally, the first place to look is the Shopify theme. Many themes actually have microdata structured data built in an effort to give your site some “Product” schema. However, the issue is that this schema generally isn’t very robust and is now competing with your Schema App. Multiple instances of this schema might result in Google or other search engines having issues properly reading it.

Fortunately, Schema App has a solution. In the app, you can turn on a setting called “Microdata filtering is enabled.” This will tell the SchemaApp to remove any schema that’s generated by the Shopify theme.

The result should be that only a single “Product” structured data element appears on the site’s product pages.

Another cause of this duplication might be from other Shopify apps. For example, some review apps will automatically add “Product” structured data to their reviews widget. If this is the case, you’ll want to consider reaching out to that app’s support team. Oftentimes, they’ll be able to change settings on their end to remove the Product structured data that’s getting injected through the app.

Developer Implementation

Pros: No long term fee, completely customizable
Cons: Requires a developer to implement

If you have a developer on hand, you might want to consider having them implement structured data on your Shopify site. The great thing about this is that you won’t need to incur a monthly charge to maintain the site’s structured data. As well, you’ll be able to completely customize the structured data to how you see fit. If you want to use “Article” structured data on your blog posts as opposed to BlogPosting, a developer should easily be able to do that for you.

If you’re working with a developer, we’d highly suggest giving them very clear directions on the types of structured data you want added and to which page types. We find it very helpful to even create an example of what structured data should look like on the home page, collection pages, product pages, and the blog. For this, using a tool like Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator is invaluable.

Conclusion

Adding structured data to your Shopify store can help search engines improve their understanding of your website’s content. Shopify structured data is best implemented through the template level so the easiest way to think about it is in terms of home, category, product, and blog pages and which type of structured data should be mapped to those pages.

Of course, when implementing structured data on Shopify, you’ll need to be sure to remove any conflicting schema elements that are already present on the site from the theme or third party apps. However, once you do the upfront work and clean things up, structured data on Shopify should work in the background and do so seamlessly moving forward. If you have any questions above structured data or Shopify SEO services, you can reach out to us!

Other Shopify SEO Resources

Shopify Structured Data: Schema Markup For Shopify is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Ecommerce Product Page SEO: 10 Tips & 5 Mistakes to Avoid

Zila Sanchez — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 13:00:38 +0000

People are shopping online more than ever, so it’s essential to make sure your online store can compete with the endless stores available on search engine results pages. Optimizing user experience plays a role in how users interact with your site, but getting them to your pages from the search results is another challenge altogether.

Why is SEO important for your business? Going down the Ecommerce product page SEO checklist can not only drive traffic but help convert users into buyers, too. Beat out the competition and ensure your product pages are optimized for maximum exposure using our complete list of tips for optimizing Ecommerce pages below.

How To Improve Your Product Page SEO

1. Conduct Research & Implement a Keyword Strategy

Keyword research is one of the most important things you can do to set the foundation for strongly optimized pages. To align with Ecommerce product page SEO, make sure you choose product-focused keywords that your potential customers will likely search for.

During the keyword research phase, keep in mind the keyword you choose should be relevant and have a clear intent. Pursue keywords with a transactional intent so your audience can find you by placing you within their search scope, especially if their intent is to buy.

Also, be sure to consider the keyword ranking difficulty and search volume. Relevancy, though, is often more important. Approach your strategy with long-tail, descriptive keywords, which can help improve discoverability in search.

For example: If you sell arts and crafts kits, instead of pursuing “arts and crafts,” it can be beneficial to target keywords like “arts and craft kits for kids.” The longer-tail query indicates the searcher is looking for a specific product, while “arts and crafts” does not.

2. Optimize Product Page Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

After understanding the keywords that can help improve your product page SEO, it’s important to ensure your title tags and meta descriptions are optimized accordingly.

Title tags should include:

The name of the product
Brand information
Other relevant information

Usually, a product page contains tons of general information from dimensions, application instructions, and other important details. This is great for users already on the page. However, this isn’t enticing for users scanning the search results pages.

Meta descriptions should provide users with a brief overview of what’s offered in your product page, with important details and calls to action so they are more likely to click and visit your page.

Here’s an example of an enticing meta description:

This Best Buy meta description for their ink and toner cartridges highlights what users can expect upon clicking on the link. If users don’t know what kind of printer ink or toner they need, they can be inclined to click on this page to look at the range available at Best Buy.

3. Have Unique Product Page Descriptions

Not only does this help to describe your products in detail, but it’s also the source of many keyword opportunities throughout the page. Important information to include in your product description includes:

SKU numbers
Weight
Size
Uses
Instructions

Here is an example of a unique product description:

This L’ange dry shampoo product page highlights the uses and benefits of the dry shampoo in a manner that’s easy to read.

4. Include FAQ Content

If you want to rank high in the search results, your product pages should be full of high-quality content. If users don’t find your content useful, it’s likely you’ll see high bounce rates and low conversion rates.

Adding an FAQ section to your product pages allows users to become more familiar with what you’re selling and is great for users who would rather find the information themselves as opposed to chatting with a robot or calling customer service.

To identify keyword-rich questions for your FAQ section, consider looking through the questions you receive from your customers, your competitors’ websites, and Google auto-suggestions in the search bar. Your FAQs should include general questions about your product or industry, rather than just for your brand specifically.

5. Show Testimonials & Real Customer Reviews

While your product descriptions and photos may sound enticing to users, having real customer reviews displayed is equally important for product page SEO since it can help users figure out if they want to buy your product or service.

Additionally, reviews help build trust, as users are able to understand that your site is not a scam. Celebrity endorsements and reviews are great, too, and they can drive sales for you!

6. Add Structured Data To Product Pages

Having structured data can help your page show up as featured snippets on the results page.

Structured data feeds site crawlers more information about the products you sell and helps boost your brand authority, which is key to attaining snippets.

Product pages should include the following structure:

Product schema: This provides users with product information in a structured way, which makes product photos and information simpler to display on the search results pages.
Review schema: Structured data within the reviews sections provides site crawlers with informative results about your products that can boost your trustworthiness.
FAQ schema: Data within the FAQ section provides search engine crawlers more context and can boost trustworthiness and authority, as your page provides information important to users.

Websites can do this automatically, with plugins or through manual input. There are also plenty of Google resources to help you learn more or to validate your schema for manual input.

7. Have High-Quality Images & Videos With Alt Text Tags

Because you aren’t selling your products in a typical brick-and-mortar store, potential customers don’t get to get a feel for your products themselves. High-quality images and videos provide users with the visual context they need to understand your products. Showcase your unique packaging, bundles, and kits through attractive images and use them to support your brand to deliver a great user experience.

While site crawlers do scan images on the page, the more relevant clues on the page, the better. To provide them more context as to what those pictures represent and how they relate to the page, add alt text tagging.

8. Test Your Product Pages

Make sure to test your landing pages as part of your Ecommerce product page SEO strategy. Even small changes from the positions of your copy, modifying calls to action and changing the homepage and certain product pages can drive more conversions for your online store.

Test the impact of each change to figure out what works well and drives more sales. Use tools like Optimizely and Google Optimize to test even the smallest change on your product pages to understand their impact on your conversions. However, finding what works for your product pages doesn’t always happen in one try—don’t be afraid to do some trial and error to see what works best!

9. Reduce Page Load Times

A website that loads quickly provides a better user experience to your customers and makes the online shopping experience convenient. If your pages’ speed and loading times aren’t optimized, you’ll probably see high bounce rates.

However, you’ll never get your pages to load faster without identifying what’s slowing them down first. To address page speed issues, you’ll have to look into the technical side of the page. Large images can make a page slow, so consider image best practices when uploading to your site.

10. Audit for Product Page Technical SEO Issues

New URLs for every filtered search can create a problem, especially for big Ecommerce stores. When your site has too many different URLs, chances are that you will be wasting crawl budget, have split link equity, and have duplicate content.

To optimize your crawl budget and subsequently improve rankings, audit your site for technical issues. There are many SEO tools available to help you with these.

These are a few issues to keep in mind as they relate to SEO for Ecommerce product pages:

Slow page load times
Missing structured data
Duplicate title tags and meta descriptions
Thin content
Broken links
302 redirects
404 pages
Canonicals
Hreflang

5 Things to Avoid in Your Product Pages

1. Thin Content and No Calls to Action

Online stores need all the help they can get to inspire users to purchase products since they don’t get to see, feel, and use the products physically before purchasing. Be as descriptive as possible to give browsers a good idea of what you sell, and encourage them to purchase throughout the page by explaining how they can benefit from it. Plus, make sure every product has a unique description.

2. No Canonical Tags on Product Pages

Canonical tags help site crawlers avoid indexing duplicate or similar content that is accessible on multiple URLs. Crawl budgets are limited and we don’t want to waste them on duplicate content.

3. Removing Pages for Products That Are Seasonal or Out of Stock

Deleting pages to re-publish later leaves you with an uphill battle every time, especially if they have built up rankings, traffic and sales over time. SEO for Ecommerce pages involves linking that product page with other relevant product pages so traffic can flow through them, which can bring sales when the product is back.

So, rather than taking down your pages entirely, optimize for peak seasons.

4. Skipping on Internal Linking Opportunities

Support your Ecommerce product pages with internal links to make them rank for keywords with high purchase intent. Doing so increases traffic and conversions for your Ecommerce store.

Often, brands build links to their homepages, category pages and blog pages but forget about product pages. Remember to include long-tail keywords in your Ecommerce product page SEO strategy, and build links to your Ecommerce product pages as well to increase revenue and sales.

5. Not Optimizing for Mobile

These days, most people are using their mobile devices to browse the internet. Besides that, Google is a mobile-first indexer, meaning it predominantly uses the mobile version for indexing and ranking.

Not having a mobile-friendly website can hinder your sales goals. Here are a few mobile-first SEO for Ecommerce product page must-haves:

Product names
Descriptions
Delivery options
Images
Price reviews

Need Help Optimizing Your Ecommerce Product Pages?

If you have a business with an online presence, SEO can be a tremendous tool to improve your reach. If you’re interested in learning more about how SEO can help your business, get in touch with Go Fish Digital today to get started!

Ecommerce Product Page SEO: 10 Tips & 5 Mistakes to Avoid is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

How to Fix Shopify Duplicate Content

Chris Long — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 14:00:55 +0000

The Shopify platform is becoming increasingly popular among eCommerce providers. As more and more brands shift to doing business digitally, Shopify provides an easy solution for many to manage their eCommerce presence.

However, as we’ve noted in our previous Shopify SEO article, there are some SEO adjustments that store owners must consider with the platform. One of the biggest issues with the Shopify platform is the fact that it creates duplicate content out of the box.

Related Content:

Duplicate content can hinder ranking performance. This is because multiple versions of the same content are accessible at different URLs, meaning that internal and external equity signals can be split amongst multiple pages. This creates multiple weaker pages as opposed to one strong one. This forces Google to decide which of the duplicate URLs to provide ranking credit to, and it may give a lower ranking to a higher priority URL. For that reason, it’s always best to eliminate duplicate content when possible.

What Is Shopify Duplicate Content?

Shopify duplicate content is a set of pages that contain the exact same information. Shopify sites can create duplicate content through the product pages, paginated URLs and product tags.

Shopify Duplicate Content & Canonical Tags

It’s very important to note that while Shopify creates duplicate content, it does take some steps to consolidate. In the examples below, Shopify does make correct use of the canonical tag to reference what the ranking page should be. This helps Google consolidate these duplicate URLs into one.

However, it’s best practice to not rely on canonical tags, as they are hints as opposed to directives. Where possible, try to eliminate duplicate content completely.

Learn the steps to eliminate Shopify duplicate content below.

1. Duplicate Product URLs

Currently, one of the biggest ways that Shopify generates duplicate content is by creating duplicate product page links. These duplicate product page links are generated on category pages.

Here’s an example:

When navigating to a category page on a Shopify site, we can see the page contains our product listings. This should be a list of links that are associated with that category:

When clicking on one of these pages, you’ll be brought to a product page with the text /collections/ & /products/ in the URL path. The format will look something like this.

domain.com/collections/.*/products/.*

Here you can see an example of this:

However, if you inspect the canonical tag of that page, you will find that the tag references a different URL. This will be a URL with only the text /products/ in the URL path. The format would look like this:

domain.com/products/.*

We can see that this page is an exact duplicate of the page listed above:

This means that every single product that’s listed on your Shopify site’s category pages is a duplicate page:

By default, here is what your Shopify store is signaling to Google:

Here are my category pages with links to product pages. I want you to crawl and pass equity to them.
Once you get there, there’s going to be a tag that tells you to crawl and pass equity to these other pages. I want you to index those instead.

Essentially, this means that your whole site structure is linking to URLs that can’t actually rank. Instead, your products that are receiving internal links are telling Google to index other pages. Ideally, all of your site’s internal links should point to pages that are capable of ranking.

The Solution:

Fortunately, there’s a very easy fix for this. All you have to do is make a simple adjustment to your Shopify theme files. By adjusting this code, you should be able to fix this issue on all of your category pages at scale.

Here’s how you can fix this issue.

In the left sidebar, select Online Store > Themes
Select Actions > Edit Code
Find the “Snippets” folder, and select “product-grid-item.liquid”
Adjust the following code:

FROM:

TO:

By adjusting this code, this will ensure that all of your links to product pages should be adjusted to their correct URL path.

Congratulations! You just fixed Shopify’s major duplicate content problem at scale by adjusting a single line of code.

2. Duplicate Category Pages in the Pagination

There’s another duplicate content issue that Shopify creates. This issue occurs within the pagination of category pages.

To show an example, let’s actually start on page two of a particular category page. Scrolling down to the bottom of the page, we can observe the pagination beneath the individual product listings:

Page 2 Of Pagination

Of course, these pagination links point to different sets of products that fall under a particular category of the Shopify site. Now from page two, let’s click the pagination button to page one.

When we click this, we can see that we get a URL with the parameter ?page=1 appended to the end:

This is actually a duplicate page of the source collections page. In this example, it would be a duplicate of the URL https://www.terrebleu.ca/collections/all.

This is because a URL with “?page=1” will always be the same as the original non-parameterized category page. Notice how the pages below exist at different URLs but contain the exact same content:

Original Category Page

Pagination URL With ?page=1 Parameter

The Solution:

To adjust this, we typically use a bit of JavaScript to change the link to page one of a given series. Below is an example of JavaScript that our developers have used for clients in the past to remove these duplicate links. Big shout out to our developer Laurentiu Danu for this solution!



if($(".pagination").length) {

    var fniv = $(".pagination .prev").next("span").find("a").attr("href");

    if(fniv.indexOf("?page=1") >= 0) {

  let newval = fniv.replace('?page=1','');

      $(".pagination .prev").next("span").find("a").attr("href", newval);

    }

    if($(".pagination .prev").length){

    if($(".pagination .prev a").attr("href").indexOf("?page=1") >= 0) {

          let newval = fniv.replace('?page=1','');

          $(".pagination .prev a").attr("href", newval);

    }

    }

  }

This JavaScript essentially searches the pagination wrapper to find any instances of “?page=1”. If it finds an instance of that string, it will remove it from the URL within the pagination. Of course, you may need to have a developer customize the code for your site to work with your Shopify theme.

This should help eliminate some Shopify duplicate content created by the pagination.

3. Duplicate Content Created By Shopify Tags

The final thing to be on the lookout for with Shopify duplicate content is pages that are generated by product tags. Within each product, there is a module on the right hand sidebar that allows you to add tags to an individual product:

These tags will create separate category pages that list all of the products contained within that tag. While this can be a great way to start grouping products together, it can also create potential duplicate content issues within Shopify.

For instance, what if a group of products in a tag you create is very similar to one of your core category pages? In that instance, there would be similar/duplicate content: your primary category page and the category pages created by the tag.

For instance, below you can see an example of two very similar pages. The first one is the site’s primary landing page for “Ground Coffee”. The second is a duplicate page created by the “Coffee” tag the site has placed on these products:

Primary Landing Page

A duplicate page created by the “Coffee” tag

We can see that since the products in the main landing page and products with the “Coffee” tag are similar, the site has created duplicate content. We want to remove the tag from the index to ensure we can still use the tagging functionality without Google being able to index the duplicate URL.

The Solution:

Fortunately, there is an easy fix. The first step is to check whether this is even an issue with your site. These tagged pages often have the format /collections/all/. You can use the following search operator on your Shopify site to see any product tag pages that might be indexed: site:example.com/collections/all/

This should show you a list of tag pages:

Next, you should review these pages to see if any of these could be potential duplicates of your primary landing pages.

If you determine that these pages could be considered duplicate content, you can simply remove them from the index by adding a “noindex” tag. Fortunately, it’s very easy to add a “noindex” tag via a specific URL path. By using the request.path command in the theme.liquid file, you should be able to easily “noindex” all of these tag pages.


{% if request.path contains "/collections/all/" %}



{% endif %}

Note that this is not always the case. Sometimes, the pages will not follow the URL format of /collections/all/. In that event, you can use this search operator to find the blog tags: site:example.com intitle:”tagged”. This should also show you all of the product tag pages that are appearing in the index. You may need to write multiple “noindex” rules in the theme.liquid file to ensure these are removed from the index.

Conclusion

With the emergence of Shopify, it’s important for both brands and SEOs to understand how to work with Shopify stores in the coming years. We’re seeing more and more brands utilize the eCommerce platform to improve their digital commerce. By understanding Shopify’s duplicate content issues, you’ll put your store in a much more advantageous position to rank well in search engines. While this is certainly not the only SEO improvement you need to make, it will set your store up with a solid technical foundation. If you have any questions on duplicate content or our Shopify SEO services, feel free to reach out!

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How to Fix Shopify Duplicate Content is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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