Shopify SEO Tips, Problems & Frequently Asked Questions

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Why it’s important to fix Shopify SEO problems?

With over a million users and growing, Shopify is quickly becoming the eCommerce platform of choice. It’s powerful yet simple to use, and the fact that they handle the hosting takes away much of the burden of managing your store’s technical details so you can stick to running your business.

But even though Shopify stores are already well-optimized for eCommerce SEO out of the box, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take additional steps to ensure that you’re doing everything you can to help your site rank well and boost your online sales.

With that in mind, there are a number of frequently asked questions related to Shopify SEO optimization. The following Shopify SEO tips will help ensure that your pages, products, and collections are optimized with meta tags, proper URLs, and keywords for maximum SEO value.

Shopify SEO title problems & URL issues

How do I add title and meta descriptions in Shopify?

Properly optimizing your title and meta descriptions are extremely important for SEO, as it helps Google to determine relevance to search results. Fortunately, Shopify lets you easily add title and meta descriptions to pages, products, and collections.

Navigate to the page, products, or collections you want to add titles and meta descriptions
Click on it, then select Edit website SEO
Enter the page title and meta description in the boxes under Search engine listing preview
Click on save

How do I change my Shopify URL?

When you first set up your Shopify store, you’ll have an initial default URL consisting of your-store-name.myshopify.com. While you won’t be able to change the default URL, you can add a custom domain that you can either purchase from Shopify directly or from a third-party domain registrar.

To add a custom URL to Shopify:

Go to Shopify Admin and navigate to Online Store > Domains
If you want to purchase a domain from Shopify, select Buy new domain
If you are using a third-party domain, select Connect existing domain
Click on Primary Domain > Change primary domain
The available domain will appear under Change primary domain, select it
Click Save.

How do I change the Shopify product URL?

By default, your Shopify product URL will consist of the full title name followed by the domain name. You can change the URL manually, which is useful when you want to shorten it or make it more appealing in search results.

To change the Shopify product URL:

Navigate to Products and click on the product listing
Select Edit website SEO
Under the title and meta descriptions boxes, you’ll find your current URL
Change the URL as desired
Click Save.

Shopify SEO problems: products, keywords & tags

How to add keywords to my Shopify website?

Doing keyword research is a fundamental SEO best practice for any site. Once you’ve conducted your own keyword research, and have narrowed your list to buyer-focused keywords, then you’ll need to add them to your store.

There are several areas where you can add keywords to help your store’s SEO:

In page, product, and collection titles
Meta descriptions
Page content
ALT image tags

To add keywords to page, product, and collection titles and meta descriptions:

Navigate to the page, products, or collections you want to add titles and meta descriptions
Click on it, then select Edit website SEO
Enter the keywords into the page title and meta description in the boxes under Search engine listing preview
Click Save.

To add keywords to the main content in pages:

Adding keywords to pages is simply a matter of writing text that uses a good mix of primary keywords as well as semantically related keywords. You can add or modify pages by:

Under Online store go to Pages
Select Add page to create a new page or select the page title in the list to modify an existing page
Add the keywords to the body text
Click Save.

To add keywords to image ALT text:

In the Admin area, go to Products > All products
Select the product listing containing the image to which you want to add ALT text
Select ALT at the bottom of the image
Enter the keywords into the description
Click on Done.

How do I delete tags in Shopify?

If you’ve had your Shopify store for a while, your product tags may get a little unwieldy. If your tags are all over the place, it can actually be detrimental to SEO, leading to duplicate content penalties and making it difficult for Google to determine the relevance of your products.

To delete product tags in Shopify:

In the Admin section, go to Products
Select All Products at the left
Select the Actions dropdown at the bottom
Click Remove tags
Select the tags you want to remove

How do I duplicate a product in Shopify?

When adding or managing inventory in Shopify, you can make the process easier by duplicating products and then making any changes as needed. This is useful, for example, if you have similar products but want to add variants such as size, color, etc.

To duplicate a product in Shopify:

In the Shopify Admin section, navigate to Products > All products
Select the product you want to duplicate
Click on Duplicate
You’ll be asked to add a new name for the product. Click Duplicate again
Change any details as necessary
Click Save.

How do I delete Shopify duplicate products?

Unfortunately, Shopify doesn’t natively let you find and delete duplicate products in bulk. This can be a problem for stores with a large inventory; you’d otherwise have to go through each one and delete them individually.

However, there are several apps available in the Shopify App Store that allow you to duplicate products in bulk. Two of the most popular apps that will do the job quickly and easily are Duplicate Finder and Bulk Product Editor & Sync.

Other Shopify issues impacting SEO

How do I set up Shopify in Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is an invaluable tool for managing your websites in Google. It lets you submit XML sitemaps, request re-indexing, notifies you of any Google penalty actions, and helps you ensure your site is performing properly.

To set up your Shopify store in Google Search Console:

Log into Google Search Console (create a free new account using your Google credentials if you don’t have one already)
Click on Add a New Property
Enter your Shopify store’s URL
At this point, you’ll need to verify ownership of your store. There are a few methods you can use, but because the store is hosted on Shopify’s servers, you’ll have to select the Verify by HTML option.
Copy the generated verification code to your clipboard
Log in to the Admin area of your Shopify store. Navigate to Themes > Actions > Edit Code
Bring up your theme.liquid file, and paste the code under the <head> tag but before the </head> closing tag
Click Save
Go back to Google Search Console and click on Verify

After this point, you should be verified and up and running in Search Console.

Why is Meta tag SEO data in Shopify not showing correctly?

If you’ve updated your meta tags in Shopify but the Google search results aren’t showing these changes, you’ll likely need to ask Google to re-crawl your site. This is because Google can sometimes take a while to come back to your website, especially if the XML sitemap isn’t configured properly, or if it isn’t getting any pings from connected Google services.

To get Google to re-crawl your site:

Log into Google Search Console
Select your Shopify store URL
Click on Request Reindexing

Your meta tags should be updated in Google after 24-72 hours, depending on when the Google bots review your site.

How do I change robots.txt in Shopify?

A website’s robots.txt file is used to allow or block crawl bots like those used by Google to index content and gives the webmaster control over parts of a site they don’t want to be indexed. Unfortunately, Shopify doesn’t grant access to your store’s robots.txt file directly, and the default setting is for pages to automatically be displayed. But the good news is that there’s another way to block search engine access.

To hide pages from Search engines in Shopify:

From the Admin section, navigate to Online Store > Themes
Open your store’s theme (or select from the list if you have several stored)
Click on the theme.liquid file
Select the page you want to block and paste this code between the <head> and </head> tags:

{% if handle contains ‘page-name‘ %}

{% endif %}

Change the ‘page-name’ to your page title
Click on Save.

What are the best Shopify themes for SEO?

One of the reasons for Shopify’s popularity is the availability of thousands of free and paid themes. However, as any SEO expert will tell you, themes are not all created equally when it comes to SEO performance, and selecting the wrong one can seriously impact your traffic and rankings.

Here’s what the best Shopify themes do that help with SEO:

They have fast loading times thanks to optimized code and plugins
They are completely optimized for mobile devices
They have a clean layout and navigation structure
They optimize image size compression
They aren’t bogged down by extraneous code

Some of the best free Shopify themes for SEO in 2020:

Effective Shopify SEO is critical to rankings, traffic, and improved sales

These frequently asked questions show you how to make the most of your Shopify store, and will help to make sure that your site will perform well in search engine rankings. But to give your store the best chance at success, the eCommerce SEO experts at Miromind can work with you to develop a solid SEO foundation designed to improve your store’s visibility, gain buyer-focused traffic, and boost your sales.