4 common SEO problems with Shopify and how to repair them
While Shopify is one of the most popular platforms for ecommerce companies, the CMS has a variety of issues that can be problematic for SEO
Best SEO practices generally use to all CMS platforms, but Shopify has numerous in-built functions that can not be customized, indicating some items need more unique workarounds
Edward Coram-James discusses problems such as limited URL structure and duplicate content, supplying recommendations on how to combat Shopify's drawbacks in these locations
Shopify is the most widely-used ecommerce platform, making it much easier than ever before for services to sell their stock online. Its user friendly CMS has actually made it particularly beneficial for smaller retailers during the pandemic, enabling them to claw back around 94% of what would have otherwise been lost sales.Just like any brand-new site, a fresh Shopify shop will need a great deal of effort on the part of its webmaster to establish the necessary visibility for users to find the website, not to mention transform into customers. And similar to any CMS, there are a couple of SEO hurdles that keep owners will require to clear to ensure that their website discovers its audience effectively. A few of these hurdles are more deep-rooted than others, so we have actually broken down four of the most typical SEO issues on Shopify and how you can repair them for your webstore.
1. Restricted URL structure
In similar manner in which WordPress splits content between posts and pages, Shopify's CMS enables you to divide your product listings into two main classifications-- items and collections-- alongside more general posts, pages, and blogs. Creating a brand-new item on Shopify enables you to list the specific items you have for sale, while collections offer you the chances to bring your diverse products together and sort them into easily-searched categories.
The problem many people have with this imposed system of organizing material is that Shopify also enforces a predetermined hierarchical structure with minimal modification alternatives. The subfolders/ item and/ collection should be included in the URL of every brand-new item or collection you publish.
Regardless of it being a substantial bone of contention with its users, Shopify has yet to resolve this and there is no solution currently. As an outcome, you will need to be incredibly careful with the URLs slug (the only part that can be customized). Ensure you are using the best keywords in the slug and classify your posts sensibly to provide your items the best possibility of being found.
2. Immediately produced duplicate material
Another frustrating problem users have with categorizing their content as an item or collection occurs when they include a specific product into a collection. This is because, although there will already be a URL in location for the item page, linking a product to a collection automatically produces an extra URL for it within that collection. Shopify immediately deals with the collection URL as the canonical one for internal links, rather than the item one, which can make things incredibly hard when it concerns guaranteeing that the ideal pages are indexed.
In this circumstances, nevertheless, Shopify has enabled fixes, though it does include modifying code in the back end of your shop's theme. Following these instructions will advise your Shopify website's collections pages to internally link just to the canonical/ item/ URLs.
3. No trailing slash redirect
Another of Shopify's duplicate content problems connects to the routing slash, which is generally a '/' at the end of the URL used to mark a directory. Google treats URLs with and without a routing slash as distinct pages. By default, Shopify immediately ends URLs without a tracking slash, but variations of the same URL with a trailing slash are available to both users and online search engine. This can typically be prevented by implementing a site-wide routing slash redirect through the site's htaccess file, however Shopify does not permit access to the htaccess file
Shopify rather advises seo agency gold coast that webmasters utilize canonical tags to inform Google which variation of each page is preferred for indexing. As the only fix offered so far, it will need to do, but it's far from perfect and frequently causes data attribution problems in Google Analytics and other tracking software.
4. No control over the site's robots.txt file.
Beyond the CMS forcing users to create duplicate versions of pages versus their will, Shopify likewise prevents web designers from having the ability to make manual edits to their shop's robots.txt file. Obviously, Shopify sees this as a perk, taking care of the pesky technical SEO issues on your behalf. When products go out of stock or collections get pulled, you can neither noindex nor nofollow the redundant pages left behind.
