The Shopify SEO guide

Shopify is a good platform for search, and a frustrating one. Good, because the basics that break on self-hosted stores (SSL, sitemaps, canonical tags, a sane robots.txt) are generated for you. Frustrating, because the URL structure is fixed, redirects have rules, and the theme and app ecosystem can slow a store to a crawl one install at a time. Knowing which category a problem falls into saves weeks.

This guide is written for a London store owner or marketing manager, not a developer, though it says where a developer is needed. Every statement about the platform links to Shopify’s Help Centre or developer documentation. The general ecommerce method (category structure, templates, facets, feeds) is covered in our ecommerce SEO guide; this one deals with how Shopify in particular implements it.

What Shopify does for you already

Shopify’s SEO overview lists what the platform handles without you doing anything: auto-generated canonical tags, an automatically generated sitemap.xml and robots.txt, theme-generated title tags that include the store name, and SSL certificates activated by default. The sitemap sits at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml and "contains links to all your products, primary product image, pages, collections, and blog posts".

That is a solid floor. It also means several "Shopify SEO apps" sell things you already have. Before paying for an app that promises canonical tags, a sitemap or structured data, check whether your theme already outputs it: most current themes include Product and BreadcrumbList markup, and every store has the sitemap and canonicals. The app you may still want is one that edits titles and descriptions in bulk, and only if your catalogue is too big to do by hand.

What Shopify will not let you change

Knowing the fixed parts stops you briefing work that cannot be done.

Collections: build the store around searches

On Shopify the collection is the category page, and it is the page most likely to rank for the searches that end in an order. The rule from the ecommerce guide applies with extra force here because the URL path is fixed: the collection handle and title are the only words in the URL you control. "/collections/living" ranks for nothing; "/collections/velvet-sofas" can rank for the thing it names.

Shopify’s own structure advice is modest and right: optimise your menus, use descriptive image file names and use descriptive link text for internal links. Extend it like this for a London store:

• One collection per search group with real demand, named in the shopper’s words, with a two or three sentence introduction above or below the grid.
• Sub-collections as separate collections linked from the parent’s introduction and the menu, because Shopify has no native hierarchy; the breadcrumb and the links create it.
• Automated collections (by tag, type or vendor) for the long tail, so a new product lands in the right collection without anyone remembering to add it.
• Merchandising collections ("New In", "Gifts under £50") kept for shoppers but set to noindex if they only duplicate products listed elsewhere.
• A collection page for the London angle where it is real: a "showroom" or "collect in store" collection only if you have one, linked from the Google Business Profile.

A hypothetical Shoreditch homeware store with 300 products might end up with 25 to 40 collections rather than six. That is normal and it is where the rankings come from.

Product pages and variants on Shopify

Shopify products have variants built in (size, colour, material), and the default behaviour is right for search: one product URL, with the variant selected by a ?variant= parameter that the canonical tag points back to the main product. Resist apps that split variants into separate products unless a variant has its own search demand.

What you control on each product: the title, the description, the handle, the image alt text and the SEO title and description fields. Shopify’s guidance on the SEO fields is specific: the page title field allows up to 70 characters, with a recommendation to keep titles to 60 or fewer so they are not shortened in results, and it recommends about 160 characters for the meta description. Themes add the store name to the title automatically, so write the product title without it.

For structured data, check what your theme outputs with Google’s Rich Results Test before buying anything. Google’s requirement for a Product snippet is the name plus one of review, aggregateRating or offers; most current Shopify themes output offers with price and availability. If you add a reviews app, make sure it writes its aggregateRating into the same Product object rather than a second one, or Google sees two products on one page.

Duplicate URLs: where they come from and what to do

Shopify stores generate several URLs for the same content. Most are already handled by the platform’s canonicals; a few need you.

Two reminders from Google’s side. A canonical tag is "a strong signal", not a command, so a tag page with many inbound links can still be chosen over the collection; noindex is the firmer tool where a page should never appear. And robots.txt "is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google"; it stops crawling, which also stops Google seeing a noindex tag. Choose one tool per URL type and write the choice down.

To hide a specific page or product, Shopify documents three routes: a noindex meta tag added to theme.liquid for the template or handle, the unlisted product status, or a custom metafield. The meta tag method keeps the page visible to shoppers and to your storefront search while hiding it from Google, which is what you want for merchandising collections.

Theme speed and apps

Speed on Shopify is mostly a theme and app problem, and Shopify says so. Its performance guidance names your theme, the apps you have installed and any additional code as the biggest factors, notes that the Horizon and Online Store 2.0 themes by Shopify are free and optimised for web performance, and describes the image CDN serving resized, compressed images in the best format.

The targets are Google’s Core Web Vitals: a Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, an Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less and a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, at the 75th percentile of real page loads. Shopify’s own web performance dashboard reports the same three metrics. Read them for the collection and product templates, not the home page.

The usual order of work on a slow Shopify store:

1. List every installed app and what script it loads. Uninstall the ones not earning their place; uninstalling does not always remove the theme code an app injected, so a developer checks theme.liquid afterwards.
2. Replace a heavy third-party theme with a current Shopify theme, or have the existing theme’s unused sections and scripts removed.
3. Size images to the slot they fill and use the theme’s native lazy loading; upload the largest version once and let the CDN do the rest.
4. Load reviews, chat and personalisation widgets after the main content, and reserve their space so the layout does not shift.
5. Limit web fonts to two files and preload the one used above the fold.
6. Re-measure with field data a month later; lab scores move the same day, field data takes 28 days to turn over.

Robots.txt.liquid, redirects and migrations

Shopify’s default robots.txt allows public content and disallows /admin, /cart/, /checkout, /checkouts/, /account and /orders, among other rules. The developer documentation adds that the default "works for most shops" and that adding a robots.txt.liquid template "replaces Shopify’s generated robots.txt output", so the template should start by outputting the default rule groups and only then add yours. Typical additions are disallow rules for filter parameters on a large catalogue. Typical mistakes are blocking /collections/ by accident and blocking the sitemap.

Redirects matter most at two moments: when you change a handle, and when you move to Shopify from another platform. Shopify can create the redirect automatically when a handle changes, and lets you manage them in bulk. For a migration, the redirect rules above decide the plan: every old URL maps to a new one, and because the old category paths will not exist on Shopify, every category needs a collection to land on. Our migration checklist walks through the order; it is the one piece of Shopify work we would never start after the launch date is set.

Shopify SEO apps: what to install and what to skip

Apps are where Shopify SEO budgets leak. Use this test before installing one.

The Shopify SEO checklist

1. Confirm the basics are live: sitemap.xml at the root, canonical tags on products and collections, SSL, Search Console verified and the sitemap submitted.
2. Map your searches to collections; rename handles and titles in shoppers’ words; create sub-collections and link them from the parent and the menu.
3. Write a short introduction on every collection that matters, with text links to sub-collections and related collections.
4. Set SEO titles to 60 characters or fewer without the store name (the theme adds it) and descriptions to about 160 characters.
5. Keep variants on one product URL; only split a variant with its own search demand.
6. Noindex tag, vendor and type pages that duplicate collections; create proper collections for the brands and types people search for.
7. Leave pagination indexable with unique URLs; never canonicalise page two to page one.
8. Validate Product and BreadcrumbList markup with the Rich Results Test; fix the theme before adding an app.
9. Audit apps; uninstall what does not earn its load; have leftover theme code removed.
10. Measure Core Web Vitals on collection and product templates with field data; fix images, widgets and fonts in that order.
11. Add robots.txt.liquid only for a specific rule, starting from the default rule groups.
12. Before any replatform or redesign, build the redirect map to collections and products that will exist on launch day.

If you want this checked rather than checking it yourself, the free SEO audit is written by a person within two working days and covers collection structure, duplicate URLs, markup and speed on your store. The Shopify SEO service page describes the ongoing work; what drives the price is on the pricing page, and any figure there is indicative until confirmed in writing.

We build on Shopify as well as optimise it: a Shopify store with Furnex product imagery and retail SEO for Ideal Furniture World in Leeds, and Shopify, AI point of sale and social for Jaquar Midlands. No uplift figure is published for either and we have no London Shopify client case published yet; the case studies page shows exactly what we can and cannot evidence.

Get your free SEO auditA person reviews your Shopify store within two working days: collections, duplicate URLs, markup, apps and speed, with the three fixes that matter most.