02 Apr
SEO is known as one of the greatest and most powerful instruments for your business’s path of touching the success of the Internet. It is defined to be a long-term process of making your sites visible on several search engines, including Bing, Yahoo, or Google.
Shopify is the most widely used ecommerce platform, making it easier than ever before for businesses to sell their stock online. Its easy-to-use CMS has made it particularly beneficial for smaller retailers.
What is SEO and why it’s important?
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of attracting traffic from the “organic” or “free” search results on search engines like Google, Bingo, and Yahoo. Search engines rank content based on what they think is the most relevant to users’ search terms. The goal of SEO then is to be at the top of search engine rankings for terms related to your products.
Attracting organic traffic to your Shopify webstore is important for a few reasons. First, it’s free. Unlike paid search, you don’t have to pay to rank higher. You can build a natural following that doesn’t rely on how much you spend. This is especially important when you’re first starting out and don’t have financial resources to heavily market your products.
Second, SEO is your best bet to better click-through-rates (CTRs) for your webstore. The higher you rank, the more likely someone is to click on a link to your webstore. Look at how CTR’s decrease as your search results position decreases. From positions 1 – 10, CTR’s decreased from 20.5% to just 7.95%.
Lastly, SEO is important to the growth of your business. If you want to find and attract new customers, then your site needs to show up for customers searching for products that you sell. It’s also how you ensure that your customers find your products and not your competitor’s.
Common SEO problems with Shopify
1. Restricted URL structure
As WordPress splits content between posts and pages, Shopify’s CMS allows you to divide your product listings into two main categories that are products and collections alongside more general posts, pages, and blogs.
When creating a new product on Shopify allows you to list the individual items you have for sale, while collections give you the opportunities to bring your disparate products together and sort them into easily searched categories. For example, on a traditional ecommerce site, the URL for a returns policy will be like exampleshop.com/returns/; however, due to the force structure, this later changes to exampleshop.com/pages/returns/.
When it comes to the product as well as product category pages, they are forced into exampleshop.com/collections/category/ and exampleshop.com/products/product-title. This is not something you are able to deal with yourself, even on Shopify’s most premium plan.
Unfortunately, there is no solution for this issue. Shopify has yet to address this and there is no solution currently. As a result, you will need to be extremely careful with the URLs slug (the only part that can be customized). Ensure you are using the right keywords in the slug and categorize your posts sensibly to give your products the best chance of being found.
2. Automatically generated duplicate content
Another frustrating issue users have with classifying their content as a product or collection occurs when they add a specific product into a collection. This is because, although there will already be a URL in place for the product page, linking a product to a collection automatically creates an additional URL for it within that collection. Shopify automatically treats the collection URL as the canonical one for internal links, rather than the product one, which can make things extremely difficult when it comes to ensuring that the right pages are indexed.
In this instance, however, Shopify has allowed for fixes, though it does involve editing code in the back end of your store’s theme. Following these instructions will instruct your Shopify site’s collections pages to internally link only to the canonical /product/ URLs.
3. No trailing slash redirect
Another of Shopify’s duplicate content issues relates to the trailing slash, which is basically a ‘/’ at the end of the URL used to mark a directory. Google treats URLs with and without a trailing slash as unique pages. By default, Shopify automatically ends URLs without a trailing slash, but variations of the same URL with a trailing slash are accessible to both users and search engines. This can normally be avoided by enforcing a site-wide trailing slash redirect via the website’s htaccess file, but Shopify does not allow access to the htaccess file.
Shopify instead recommends that webmasters use canonical tags to inform Google which version of each page is preferred for indexing. As the only fix available so far, it will have to do, but it’s far from ideal and often leads to data attribution issues in Google Analytics and other tracking software.
4. No control over the website’s robots.txt file
Past the CMS forcing customers to create duplicate variations of pages in opposition to their will, Shopify additionally prevents site owners from having the ability to make handbook edits to their retailer’s robots.txt file. Apparently, Shopify sees this as a perk, taking good care of the annoying technical search engine optimization points on your behalf. However, when merchandise exits from inventory or collections get pulled, you may either noindex or nofollow the redundant pages left behind.
On this occasion, you’ll be able to edit the theme of your retailer, incorporating meta robots tags into thepart of every related web page. Shopify has created a step-by-step information on how to hide redundant pages from search here.
Conclusion
Shopify is a popular platform because of its easy usability, templated themes and included hosting, among many other features. With their app store, you can find just about any type of functionality needed for your site to help with your Shopify SEO campaign.
While there are many factors that go into SEO, there are a few common issues you can tackle right out the gate. This post will cover common Shopify SEO problems and tips to solve them.