Shopify is one of the emerging e-commerce platforms that power more than 4.8 million online stores. Most e-commerce marketers rely on active marketing strategies to generate sales for their stores, including social media ads, PPC campaigns, and affiliate partnerships.
Sometimes they work and most of the time they fail. That is why passive marketing strategies are equally important to scale your e-commerce store. Shopify SEO is an integral part of these passive sales methods.
Comprehensive implementation of e-commerce SEO practices is a must to gain search visibility. In this guide, we will discuss the common Shopify SEO problems and how you can fix them.
Why It is Important to Fix Shopify SEO Issues?
SEO is one of the best e-commerce marketing strategies with the most promising ROI. Optimizing your Shopify product pages for search engines can earn you long-term rewards. Here are some benefits of fixing these issues.
Organic Search Traffic
Search engine-friendly product pages are more likely to rank on relevant search queries in the SERP. That drives consistent traffic to your Shopify store. These visitors are more likely to purchase as compared to paid ones.
Navigation and User Experience
An optimized URL structure makes it easier for visitors to access the desired product pages. Further, it improves website navigation and indexing by search engine crawlers. Improving the speed and performance of web pages increases user retention.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Using a single marketing strategy can lead to a disaster. That is why you need to diversify your sales channels. If one method is not working well, the other can cover the sales objectives. SEO is a keyword and intent-based optimization that brings a highly convertible audience to your website.
Long-Term and Competitive Advantages
E-commerce businesses using diverse marketing strategies including SEO have always an upper hand in long-term planning. PPC Ads, and paid social media campaigns are short-term resources. Fixing your Shopify SEO problems will drive consistent organic traffic to your store.
7 Major Shopify SEO Problems and Their Solution
Core SEO issues like page structure, loading speed, meta tags, and internal linking restrict your product pages from ranking in the SERP, which must be fixed to grab free traffic through organic search.
Here we have worked on the 7 key Shopify SEO fixes that will help you improve the search engine ranking faster.
1. Shopify Meta Title and Description Issues
Meta tags that include both meta title and description work as a guide for search engine crawlers. They know about a specific page from these tags and the keywords included in them. So keep them relevant, catchy, and engaging to increase your CTR.
Possible Issues:
There is a certain character limit for the page data to show up in the SERP. Any exceeding content won’t be shown in the results. So it should be concise and within the given search display requirements.
If you don’t optimize both for the search, the crawler will pick the random content from the page to show it in place of the meta description.
How to Fix?
Even you have cracked the position on page one of the SERP. What if no one clicks on your page? That happens to many and should be fixed for better results.
Strictly follow the character limit for meta tags as given below:
Character limit for meta title: Btw 50 to 60 characters
Character limit for meta description: Below than 160 characters
Use the preview option down below each product page to check how it will show up once published. You can update meta tags with time, especially for pages that are time-bound.
2. Shopify Blog Issue
It is basically designed for e-commerce and has limited blogging options. That can be problematic for those who want to scale their store through content marketing. Blogs are no doubt a great source to generate sales but Shopify is not as flexible as WordPress.
Possible Issues:
Adding a dynamic section is only possible on Shopify’s homepage, which is why it lacks content marketing flexibility. You get limited options to structure the blog content to make search search-friendly.
How to Fix?
There are a couple of ways to fix this Shopify SEO issue. First, you can use any paid app like Blog Optimizer or Blog Studio from its store.
Second, you can use your subdomain like blog.example.com or example.com/blog to create a separate blog website on WordPress. Because both these platforms won’t work together.
You can also create a blog elsewhere and link it to your store homepage, where visitors can easily access it. That looks tricky so it is better to use the in-house tools.
3. Duplicate Content Issues
Content duplication badly impacts the SEO of your e-commerce store. This issue is mainly linked to the indexing of your product pages. When there are too many similar pages, crawlers get confused about indexing the most relevant ones.
Possible Issues:
Shopify creates automatic product tags for each page for ease of access. The main purpose of these tags is to organize the product pages.
It also creates different versions of a single page based on color and size. This is bad for SEO as search engines get confused to figure out the actual page should be indexed.
How to Fix?
You have to remove the unwanted tags and perform manual deindexation of them. Only use the tags that have some unique content in them.
Canonical tags are the second and most authentic way to fix duplicate content issues. If you are unable to remove the pages, use these tags in the HTML of the duplicate pages. Give search engine crawlers the classification of primary and secondary pages.
A paid Shopify app named Sitemap No-Index Pro is also helpful in fixing these indexed product variants.
4. XML Sitemap Issues
Sitemap is an XML file containing all the key pages of your website or store. Crawlers are unable to discover the website pages on their own. This is created to inform them about the published product pages and blog posts on your store.
Possible Issues:
You need to manually integrate the sitemap in GSC with a specific URL case. If it is working there will be a “success” written in green color. But if it is integrated, there will be “couldn’t fetch” in red color.
How to Fix?
Fixing the sitemap is important to ensure the discoverability of all your URLs including collections, blog posts, and product pages. Here is the completed process to fix it.
- Go into your store’s Google Search Console
- Find the sitemap section of it from the left menu
- Check if there is any integrated sitemap or its status
- To add a new one just add /sitemap_blogs, /sitemap_collections, /sitemap_products after the custom domain URL of your Shopify store
5. Image SEO Issues
Images are crucial to give a unique and engaging look to a web page. They also help you stand out in the search results showing the product alternatives, carousal, and pages.
Image SEO is equally important for blogs and product pages as they badly impact the load times.
Possible Issues:
Fixing the image SEO errors will make it preferable for the search engines to rank in the images option. That can drive free organic traffic to your store and product pages. Usually, two types of problems are found:
- Image Size and resolution
- File name, title, and Alt text
How to Fix?
Both are kind of technical issues that should be fixed before submitting your pages to search engine crawlers. Product pages containing such SEO errors will be taken out of the top results due to search engines’ commitment to their guidelines.
To fix the image size and resolution, always optimize your images before importing them to your Shopify store. Here are the standard sizes for them to make search-friendly:
- For blog posts and product pages, the images should be less than 4472×4472 pixels and 20 MBs
- The maximum product or blog page size should not exceed 1 MB to load faster
For the second type of issue, you need to fix the image SEO issues through below practices:
- Give your image file name similar to the product or blog page keyword or title, for example, “men t-shirt casual” then import it from the editor
- Give your image a similar title to the product page
- Use an Alt text defining the purpose of the image to let search engine crawlers know about it
You can easily edit the Alt text from the theme code however, Image Alt Text Optimizer is a cost-effective Shopify app to optimize it. Keep the image size as small as possible and use image compression tools to load your sites faster.
6. Default URL Structure
URL or slug is another main factor with meta tags that helps crawlers index the pages in SERP analyzing their relevancy. Shopify has limited URL customization access and you have to rely on the default URL structure.
Possible Issues:
Shopify has a default URL structure for listing the products and splitting them into different categories. Here is an example:
https://www.examplejewels.com/collections/jewelry
https://www.examplejewels.com/products/handmade-artificial-earrings
https://www.examplejewels.com/blogs/best-artifiical-earnings
How to Fix?
Unfortunately, there is no way to fix this issue as you can’t use custom URL alternatives in Shopify. Use the keywords and search terms in the last section of the slug as shown above.
You have to optimize your pages within the given SEO limits. Use a mega menu in your header to make your category or product pages accessible to search engines and visitors.
7. Complex Breadcrumb URLs
The weird store navigation system confuses both search engines and visitors. Shopify breadcrumb URLs many times give a random sequence of the pages.
To make it SEO-friendly the breadcrumb structure should be similar to the page/product URL.
Possible Issues:
This technical SEO issue is related to a complex user interface. The use of Breadcrumbs on your pages makes it easier for users to navigate through your store. The problem occurs when Shopify starts showing the breadcrumb sequence on its own.
How to Fix?
Breadcrumb issues on each page can be discovered through the Google Search Console. When you analyze the page code, it will automatically highlight the problems with your page Breadcrumbs.
To fix this issue in your Shopify store follow the below steps:
- Go into the theme section of your store
- Click on the edit code option
- Locate the snippets option and choose “collection-template.liquid”
- Add the desired Breadcrumb hierarchy
- Test the edited code through the free Structured Data Testing Tool to confirm the problem-fixing
Directly playing with the theme code can break your store. Hire a Shopify development expert to fix these technical SEO problems.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is SEO Difficult In Shopify?
Yes, SEO is relatively complex and difficult in Shopify due to limited features. You need to integrate different tools and install apps in your store to fix these problems. They are mostly paid and increase the monthly management costs.
Is Shopify Good For SEO?
No, Shopify is a mess in terms of SEO. It has several technical and On-page SEO problems that impact the search rankings. Fixing them can also be hectic and complex for beginners.
Conclusion
Most of the e-commerce store owners face the above Shopify SEO problems. People with no coding experience find them difficult to fix, so they must hire a Shopify developer to make their store search engine friendly.
ConvertMate is a cost-effective and AI-powered Shopify SEO tool to optimize your store. Analyze your product pages and perform an e-commerce SEO audit for free. Increase your Shopify sales with its CRO features.
