Shopify SEO Ebook

LOGEIX.
Shopify SEO - Logeix
SHOPIFY
SEO
How to ﬁnd, attract, and convert
buyers from google search
Chapters
About Daryl Rosser 4
Introduction6
Chapter 1: Is Shopify good for SEO?
Introduction 9
Shopify SEO Features 10
Shopify SEO Limitations 14
Does Shopify have good SEO? 19
Chapter 2: Keyword Research for Shopify

What is keyword research? 21
How to do keyword research for Shopify 21
Creating a link structure 29
Keyword research for collection pages 32
Keyword research for product pages 32
Keyword research for homepage 33
Common keyword research mistakes 33
Chapter 3: On Page SEO for Shopify

What is On Page SEO? 38
On Page SEO for Shopify Collections 42
On Page SEO for Shopify Product Pages 49
On Page SEO for Shopify Homepage 52
Other On Page Factors 55
Final Thoughts 57
Chapter 4: Technical SEO for Shopify
What is Technical SEO? 59

How does this apply to Shopify? 59
How to do a technical SEO audit for Shopify stores? 60
Common Shopify Technical SEO Issues 60
Crawling for other issues with Sitebulb 81
Google Search Console issues 86
Final Thoughts 88
Chapter 4.1: Rich Snippets
What are Rich Snippets? 90

Types of Rich Snippets for eCommerce 91
What is Structured Data? 93
The basics of structured data 93
Recommendations for Shopify stores 95
Checking your existing structured data 96
Frequently Asked Questions 109
Final Thoughts 110
Chapter 4.2: URL Structure
Shopify's default URL structure 112

Why this can be bad for SEO 115
How to change your Shopify store's URL structure 116
Tips for migrating from another platform 118
Final Thoughts 120
Chapter 4.3: Product Variants

Why the 100 variants limit on Shopify? 122
Solution 1. Split into different products with internal links 122
Solution 2. Use a product options app 126
Solution 3. Edit your theme to merge products (not recommended) 128
Final Thoughts 129
Chapter 4.4: Product Tags
What are Shopify Product Tags? 131

Why are Product Tags bad for SEO? 132
Is my website's SEO affected by this? 134
Fixing Product Tag SEO issues 135
Recommendations 139
Chapter 4.5: XML Sitemap
What is a Shopify Sitemap? 141

Where is my sitemap on Shopify? 141
What's in my Shopify Sitemap? 141
How do I edit my sitemap on Shopify? 144
How do I create a sitemap for Shopify? 146
How do I submit my Shopify sitemap to Google Search Console? 148
Google Search Console Sitemap Errors 150
Final Thoughts 152
Chapter 4.6: Editing Robots.txt

What is Robots.txt? 154
How to edit Robots.txt on Shopify 154
Customising Robots.txt.liquid 155
Why customise Robots.txt? 161
Final Thoughts 163
Chapter 5: Blogging on Shopify
Why you need a blog 165

When should you start blogging? 169
Should you host your blog on Shopify or a subdomain with Wordpress? 171
How to publish blog posts on Shopify 172
How to find content ideas 175
Shopify Blogging Best Practices 180
Shopify Blog Examples 184
Final Thoughts 195
Chapter 6: Link Building for Shopify
What is link building? 197

Which pages to build backlinks to 197
Link building factors 199
How to do link building for Shopify stores 201
Types of link building 205
How many backlinks do you need? 209
Avoiding spam links 210
Final Thoughts 211
Chapter 7: Shopify Speed Optimisation

Why optimise your site speed? 213
What has Shopify optimised by default? 214
How to optimize your Shopify site speed 215
Final Thoughts 226
Chapter 8: SEO for International Shopify Stores
Is Shopify / Shopify Plus suitable for international stores? 228

What is a multi-currency store? 229
What is a multi-store? 229
Which type of international setup is recommended? 229
How to set up a multi-currency Shopify store 233
How to set up multiple Shopify international stores 234
SEO Considerations 235
Final Thoughts 237
Chapter 9: Shopify Plus SEO

Is Shopify Plus better for SEO? 239
Shopify Plus SEO issues 239
Final Thoughts 247
Chapter 10: Shopify SEO Checklist

Fundamentals 252
Technical SEO 255
Homepage 261
Collections 264
Products 268
Blog Posts 272
Site Speed Optimisation 277
Backlinks 282
Final, Final Thoughts 286

4 | About Daryl Rosser Shopify SEO - Logeix
About Daryl Rosser
From building "clan" websites for his team on Runescape at the age of
12, Daryl quickly fell in love with building websites, communities, and the
marketing that came with that.
This led to building community forums, where he sold his first for $1,100 at
the age of 15. Before accidentally stumbling into the world of affiliate marketing.
With a lot of luck and great timing, Daryl built a small content business on
FarmVille cheats, which he grew to almost $3,000 a month by age 16. By age 17,
he'd expanded into other video game sites and hit his first $10,000 day before...
He lost it.
Call it a mixture of short-term marketing tricks and a handshake business

agreement with a trusted mentor. Daryl was left with a few dollars to his name
and a handful of quick money making tricks that had a shelf life of about 3
months left.
Turns out it was one of the best things to ever happen to him.
5 | About Daryl Rosser Shopify SEO - Logeix
After 2 years of living on savings and struggling to bounce back, he ended

up signing a local business up to help with SEO. Then another. Then another.
On top of that, he started building his own affiliate sites again, using long-
term SEO this time to drive traffic.
That was the beginning of his journey into SEO back in 2013.
Today, Daryl has worked with dozens of clients, built hundreds of his own
websites, and consulted for SEO agencies all over the world.
When he's not actively doing SEO, he's teaching others with 500,000+ views
on YouTube, a previous top 3 SEO community on Facebook with over 20,000
members, and speaking on stage at events including the Chiang Mai SEO Con
ference with 500+ attendees.
His approach is simple, straightforward recommendations based on strate-

gies that he has tested and proven. No fluff, nor theories.
6 | Introduction Shopify SEO - Logeix
Introduction
Can I make a confession?
Up until a year ago, my only experience with Shopify was buying something
on a Shopify store. For our first Shopify client, I literally had to figure out where
the heck to log in.
But 8+ years of SEO experience compounds fast, so after a year, I'd like to
think I know this platform better than almost anyone - from an SEO perspective.
I've personally worked with several clients, reviewed hundreds of sites,

and documented every bit of it.
Which is where YOU come in. And this eBook.
This is a series of 16 guides I've written that dive extensively into Shopify SEO.
From the fundamentals of SEO including keyword research and link build-
ing, to the specific nuances of Shopify as a platform with technical SEO issues,
Shopify Plus, international store setups, and more.
7 | Introduction Shopify SEO - Logeix
This isn't just a beginners guide. It's a recipe book for rankings.
You'll see my processes, code snippets, hacks, tricks, and everything we do

at Logeix to get our clients results.
If you're a beginner or own a store yourself, pay attention to the fundamen-

tals and use this for context. You'll probably still want an SEO and/or developer
to help implement parts of this.
As for SEOs and developers, this will be the best Shopify SEO guide that
you've ever read.
Also, don't forget to request a video review of your Shopify store at my

agency Logeix.
Of if you would like some help with this from my team and I, feel free to
get in touch with us.
Daryl Rosser
Daryl Rosser
logeix.com
agency@logeix.com
01
Is Shopify good for SEO?
9 | Is Shopify good for SEO? Shopify SEO - Logeix
introduction
Did you know that there are searches every month for "shopify seo sucks"?
And many people searching for variations of "is shopify bad for SEO"?
Worse still, is half the results that actually agree with this statement.
Look, Shopify is a great platform for SEO. Anyone saying otherwise has spent
little time on Shopify recently.
That's not to that say there's no downsides or limitations, but they're all
manageable with a little understanding of the platform.
So let me explain why I love Shopify SEO, the features, the limitations, and
how to overcome them.
Shopify SEO Features

Let's start with SEO features built-in to Shopify without needing any apps,
plugins, or extra development.
Easy title tag and meta description customisation

On any page, collection, product, or blog post you'll find an "Edit Website
SEO" section:
Click this and you'll be able to customise the Title Tag, Meta Description,
and URL / Handle.
This makes it extremely simple to customise these fundamental On Page

SEO factors, unlike platforms like WordPress where you'd need to install a
third-party plugin.
Default Robots.txt setup

Robots.txt is a file that informs robots like search engines how to interact
with your website.
By default, Shopify does a fantastic job of this by disallowing access to pages

such as cart/shopping pages, account pages, and search query pages. Most
stores won't need to customise this.
But if you'd like to modify it, it's now possible too.
Our Shopify Robots.txt guide explains how.
Easy 301 redirects

Many platforms require plugins and apps for 301 (permanent) redirects, but
Shopify does this with a few quick clicks.
Start by going to Online Store > Navigation:
Click View URL Redirects:
Then you can choose to Import or Create URL Redirect:

Import is amazing for importing hundreds or even thousands of 301 re

directs at once, we have used this in the past for a client that removed their
AMP feature.
For most cases though, you'll just do one at a time:
That's all there is to it, set the From and To relative URL, then Save redirect.
The only extra step you may need to do is delete/rename the old page, if it
still exists, the redirect won't work.
Automated sitemap
If you've ever had to generate, optimise, and update a sitemap before –
you're in luck.
With Shopify it's already done. That's it.
As you create pages, products, collections, and blog posts they'll all automat-
ically be added to your sitemap and organised in a simple way.
Take a look for your store here:
YOURWEBSITE.com/sitemap.xml
And if you'd like to learn more about this, read our Shopify XML Sitemap guide.
Default server setup

Shopify have a fast server built in, solid uptime and reliability, CDN already
set up, etc.
This is significantly easier than doing it yourself, where you're likely to need
a full time person dedicated to this.
Most themes are SEO friendly

This may not always be the case, but for most clients I've worked with, they've
had pretty well optimised themes.
This includes a proper heading structure, structured data, breadcrumbs, etc.
That's not to say there aren't issues, there are often many including internal
linking issues, but these are relatively simple to fix.
Great app selection

If the above isn't enough, there's thousands of Shopify Apps you can use to
extend functionality even further.
This is great for things like image optimisation, image sitemaps, geo-location
pages, translation, and more.
Shopify SEO Limitations

It's not all good though, there are a few limitations that you should consider.
I've also written about this in detail for Shopify Plus SEO, though the same
limitations apply to both.
Directory URL Structure

One frustrating limitation is the lack of control over the directory URL structure.
Product Category pages are accessible under

example.com/collections/name-of-category
Product pages are accessible under

example.com/products/name-of-product
(Well, presuming product internal links are fixed)
That's it, no subcategory directories and no option to rename or remove /

collections/. It's very limiting.
Normally, you would want a URL structure like:
/sofas/leather/
With Shopify, this needs to become:
/collections/leather-sofas
It'll still function the same, it's just not as customisable.
For more details on this, read my Shopify URL structure article.
Filter Pages
As mentioned above, the lack of subcategories can be a real pain with Shopify.
Some stores attempt to bypass this by using Product Tags, which acts as filters.
For example:
From a URL standpoint, it even looks like a subcategory:
The problem is, these pages cannot be customised without manually tweak-
ing the theme each time which is ineffective, and as a result they create a huge
number of thin content pages:
In short, the best solution is to make sure Product Tags are properly ca-
nonicalised to the main collection and manually create new collections for
subcategories.
My Shopify Product Tags SEO guide explains how to do this.
Multi-Store Setup
One major thing to consider is whether you'll need a multi-store/international
setup. If so, this can potentially be difficult to manage with Shopify.
By default, there's no true multi-store functionality within Shopify.
You can have as many stores as you like, however they're not connected in
any way. Not only is this difficult for stock levels and other management, it also
complicates SEO.
The standard approach to international stores is to use a Hreflang tag to

explain the different pages for different locations and/or languages.
A hreflang tag for your French version may look like this as an example:
<link rel="alternate" href="https://fr.logeix.com/shopify-seo/" hreflang="fr" />
Where this gets complicated is when each store has different product ranges,
preventing you from automating this.
There's workarounds with a little development, but it's something to consider.
My Shopify International SEO guide explains more.

No Server Log File

Servers by default will keep a "log file" to keep track of every request by
robots or users to your website.
For SEOs, this can be useful when combined with a log analysis tool for mea-
suring how often your website is crawled, which pages/resources are crawled
most or lead often, etc.
Unfortunately this isn't an option with Shopify as we're not given access to
the log file.
Is this a big deal? Not particularly.
The additional data is helpful to measure the impact of technical SEO chang-
es, but between Google Search Console data and following best practices, you
can cover things anyway.
Product Variants
If you have a store with a significant number of product variants or options,
you may have difficulties with Shopify's 100 variants and 3 options limit.
This is relatively easy to fix by creating separate products for different options
such as colours or materials, but can also lead to several product variants all
being indexed by search engines i.e. thin content.
This isn't a problem as it's easy to fix with canonical tags as explained in
my product variants limit workaround post, but is something you'll need to do.
Other downsides that can be fixed

Difficult to remove pages from sitemap, product internal links, breadcrumbs, etc.
Beyond that, there's a bunch of other soft limitations which can be overcome
with a little development and customisation.
These include removing pages from the sitemap, canonicalised internal

links, breadcrumb issues, and a bunch of automated pages that are by de-
fault indexable.
My Technical SEO for Shopify guide covers all these and how to fix them.
Does Shopify have good SEO?

To sum it up then, does Shopify's SEO suck?
I'd honestly say it's a pretty great platform, especially when compared to
other simple website building platforms like Square and Wix.
With the ability to customise themes, there's very little you can't achieve
with Shopify SEO.
Some missing features are annoying, some defaults like directory structures
are frustrating, but nothing that truly matters is missing.
You can optimise pages, clean up technical issues, and create a lot of content
on Shopify without the need for any other platform. I'd call that a success.
02
Keyword Research
for Shopify
21 | Keyword Research for Shopify Shopify SEO - Logeix
What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the process of identifying search terms people use to
find products, services, or content similar to your website.
For example, if you sell protein powder, you can presume people search
for protein powder. But how many? And are they looking to buy it or for infor-
mation? And is this better than other potential keywords such as whey protein
powder, best protein powder, protein supplements, etc.?
How to do keyword research for Shopify

Keyword research for Shopify is no different than any other eCommerce
store, you almost always want to start with the bottom of funnel existing pages.
Bottom of funnel refers to pages that will directly drive sales i.e. category
and product pages.
Existing pages, meaning products and category pages you've already created.
Taken further, you should prioritise this based on the existing opportunity for
these pages, an easy way to do this is sorting by GSC (Google Search Console)
Impressions.
Existing Bottom of Funnel Pages

Here's the process:
1. Get a list of all collections, product pages, and the homepage sorted
by highest GSC impressions
2. For each page, determine a primary (i.e. best) keyword (if any) that is
feasible to rank for with your budget on this specific page. The easiest
way to determine this is if there's competitors of a similar business size
to yours ranking well for this keyword. If they're all huge brands, it's
beyond your budget.
3. Repeat the above process for all secondary keywords.
It's not one keyword per page, it's more like one topic per page.
Secondary keywords are all the other keywords someone may search to find
this product or product category.
If your main keyword is 50mm lens, for example, a few secondary keywords
could be 50mm prime lens, buy 50mm lens, 50mm f 1.8, etc.
Then you move onto non-existing pages and middle or top of funnel.
Keyword Gap Analysis

The easiest way to find non-existing pages and middle or top of funnel key-
words is with a keyword gap analysis.
Many tools like SEMRush can do a basic version of this within a matter of
seconds by simply entering your website along with a few competitors. 30 sec-
onds later, you'll be presented with a list of all the keywords your competitors
rank for that your website doesn't.
Simply find their Keyword Gap tool under Competitive Research:

Enter your website along with some competitors, then click Compare:
You'll now be given a list of all the keywords your competitors are competing
for, along with the competitors' position, search volume, keyword difficulty,
and other metrics.
Make sure to pay attention to the tabs, by default it'll be set to "shared" i.e.
keywords where all competitors rank. But you'll likely find a lot more oppor-
tunities under "Untapped", "Missing", and "Weak".
You'll also find some opportunities under the "Top Opportunities for"
section above:
You now have a list of keyword ideas that you can copy straight from your
top competitors.
Product vs Collections vs Blog Post

One thing you may struggle with is determining if a keyword should be target-
ed with a product page, collection page, or blog post. The answer is it depends.
Take a look at the Google results when I search for "protein powder":
(SERP features have been removed to condense image size)
I can count 3 stores selling protein powder out of 10 results. Meaning for
this keyword, I'd be more inclined to create an information piece of content
i.e. blog post to target this.
This is what we call "intent".

But let's change this keyword now to "chocolate protein powder":
Now the first 2 results are Amazon and I can count an additional 2 more re-
sults for stores selling these. The rest of the results are mixed between reviews
of the best protein powders and chocolate protein recipes.
This is a much more nuanced one, but my belief is the intent for this keyword
is probably fairly mixed between shopping and recipes, so I'd want to target
this in my bottom of funnel.
Next the question is product or category? Whichever best supports the in-
tent, in this case, I doubt someone is looking for one chocolate protein powder
product, they're probably looking for a choice, so I'd choose category page.
MyProtein are an example of that:
These are all chocolate protein powders, but different types.

Creating a link structure

Now we've covered the basics, let's get down to how I'd implement all this.
The first thing to do is figure out your site or link structure.
Let's say you're a store selling bicycles, a basic structure of categories and
subcategories may look like this:
Each of these items represents a separate collection page, with Bicycles

being the homepage.
This breaks down our products in an easy way for users to navigate, but is
also optimal for SEO as it allows us to target many different keywords with
each collection being dedicated to a separate topic.
Start by doing this with any existing pages on your store, but you'll probably
need to expand this.
Creating more collection pages

Once you've done this for all existing categories, you should strongly consider
creating additional collection pages. Especially if you did this originally without
keyword research in mind.
There's two easy ways to expand these:
1. Look up keywords your competitors are ranking for. This can be done
with Ahrefs and can usually be filtered down to products and product
categories only:
2. Research the names of product brands you sell and options like colours
and sizes to see if there's search volume for these.
For example, if you're selling protein powders, there's likely to be plenty of

searches for chocolate protein powder, strawberry protein powder, etc. These are
additional collections/categories. As would say Ultimate Nutrition which is one
of many brands.
You can do this by simply searching these in any keyword research tool:
Internal linking between relevant collections

Now all of the collection pages are in place, you'll want to utilise this site
structure plan for creating internal links. This falls under our On Page SEO
strategy, but worth mentioning here as it all connects.
In short, if we have subcategories under Mountain Bikes, for example:

• Hardtail
• Electric
• Full Suspension
Then a great technique is to link from the Mountain Bikes page to these
subcategories to help narrow down their selection. And even link back to
the Mountain Bikes collection from these subcategories, possibly even
between each other.
There's multiple benefits to this, but an important point here is showing the
connection and topical relevance between these separate pages.
Most stores completely neglect this and have many collection pages that
are hard to find, difficult to understand, and therefore near impossible to rank.
Keyword research for collection pages

These are the most important pages for most Shopify stores.
The important thing here is we're able to go a lot broader, it's possible to
rank for "hardtail mountain bike" on a product page, but a collection page with
several products to choose from is much more suitable.
Most product/product category keywords will be targeted with collections,

so a better process is target almost everything with them except the recom-
mendations we'll share for product pages and homepage.
The other thing I'll add is common keywords that are missed, but should be
targeted with collection pages:
• Brand Names
• Features e.g. waterproof, for bedroom, 12k/18k/24k, etc
• Colours e.g. red shoes, black shoes, grey shoes
• Materials e.g. leather sofas, suede sofas
Keyword research for product pages

Product pages are usually used for targeting either:
1. Product names
2. Very specific keywords
For example, if you sell protein powder:

• Protein powder = Collection page
• Chocolate protein powder = Collection page
• Collagen protein powder = Collection page
• Chocolate collagen protein powder = Product page
This is a much more specific keyword, so it makes sense to have a product

page as you're unlikely to have multiple products targeting this.
Keyword research for homepage

For the homepage, this is where you target your big broad keyword.
Going back to the bicycle shop example, your main keyword here may be
"buy bicycles online" or along those lines.
If you're a store selling plus size clothing, then you'll likely have collections for
"plus size tops", "plus size dresses", etc. But your homepage will be the broad
"plus size clothing" keyword.
The main thing you should be careful of here is that you aren't cannibalising
on another page.
If you're a laptop store and your biggest keyword is "buy laptops", you can't
target that on the homepage if you also have a collection page targeting this.
Remember: Only one page should target a single keyword (and likely topic)
Common keyword research mistakes

Now you know how to do keyword research, here's some common pitfalls
to watch out for.
Keyword Cannibalisation
Keyword cannibalisation is where multiple pages are targeting a single
keyword. This can happen when products and collections are targeting the
same keyword.
Or blog posts are created to target the same keywords as collections.

Or in some cases, people mistakenly believe adding "gym clothing" to every

single page will help them rank for it.
All of these are mistakes.
For every keyword you're targeting, you should know exactly which page
you'll be ranking for it. It can only be one page.
(But you can, and should, have several keywords per page)
One Page vs Multiple

Another common mistake is to only have one page for a topic, where it should
be multiple.
Let's say you sell laptops.
Obviously you'll have a collection for laptops, but what else?
By screen size:
• 13" laptops
• 15" laptops
• 17" laptops
By price:
• laptops under $500
• laptops under $1,000
• laptops under $1,500
By processor:
• i3 laptops
• i5 laptops
• i7 laptops
And probably a lot more, this is all off the top of my head.
Though, having multiple could also be a mistake.
There's no need to have a collection for:

• Popular laptops
• Best selling laptops
• Laptops on sale
And other ways of targeting what's most likely the exact same keywords.
(Note: That's not to say these collections have no purpose, they're great for email
and other promotions, but normally I'd noindex these pages)
Intent
The final mistake is not understanding the keyword intent.
There's two things you need to understand here:

1. What is someone looking for when searching this keyword?
2. What does Google believe someone is looking for when searching
this keyword?
The second question will help you rank, the first will help you create the best
page and content.
Let's use "laptops under $500" as an example. Without any research, what
are the options they're likely looking for?
1. Shops they can buy laptops under $500 from
2. Reviews/information on the best laptops under $500
It's most likely one of these two, from simple intuition.

We can verify this by searching it in Google:
As we can see here, the top ranking pages are articles reviewing the best
laptops under $500. Therefore the intent is finding review articles, this isn't
something we should target with a collection page.
03
On Page SEO for Shopify
38 | On Page SEO for Shopify Shopify SEO - Logeix
Once you've researched what keywords to target for each page, it's time to
optimise these pages for your chosen keywords. For the most part, Shopify
makes this very simple.
What is On Page SEO?

On Page SEO is the process of tweaking your website to increase traffic from
search engines.
The difference between this and SEO as a whole is that we're only focused on
internal elements i.e. changes we make on the website and pages themselves.
This generally refers to 3 categories of optimisations:

1. Creating content around keywords
2. Optimising content for keywords
3. Site structure and internal linking
Or in short, it's about understanding what keywords people are searching

that are relevant to your business, then creating and optimising your content
so the intent and relevance for these keywords is clear to search engines.
Shopify SEO Settings

The good news is there's no need for apps to do any of this, it's all built
into Shopify.
Page Title [Tag]

Scroll down to the "Search engine listing preview" section when editing a
product, collection, or page, then click the "Edit website SEO" link:
You can also find this under Online Store > Preferences for the homepage:
The first option you'll find here is the "Page Title" or in SEO terms, the title
tag. This appears in the search results and usually is the first thing people see.
This is a key area of optimisation, therefore highly important to include your

main keyword.
Beyond that, here's a few guidelines to help:

• Include the exact main keyword (plural is less important) – "sofa" or
"sofas" is acceptable, but make sure the main keyword is there ideally
near beginning
• Squeeze in secondary keywords where possible – The more the mer-
rier, but adhere to other guidelines and don't make it spammy
• Don't repeat words words – It leads to over-optimisation and penali-
sation from Google.
• Don't cause keyword cannibalisation – Make sure you're not targeting
this same keyword on other pages
• Make sure it reads well – You want humans to visit your site, not robots
• Don't change delimiters – The delimiter is what separate the title tag
and brand name, usually like "- Logeix", keep this the same sitewide
• Keep it to 50-60 characters – General guideline to make sure it fits
Meta Description
Below the title, you'll find the Meta description text box. This also shows in
the search results and while it won't help with rankings directly, it can help
significantly with clickthrough rate.
The key here is to write something that will convince someone to visit your
page versus your competitors, the ad section is a wonderful example of this.
Here's some guidelines to help:
• Include the main keyword – It doesn't really help SEO, but it'll show
in bold which will stand out
• Copy competitors – Not literally copy/paste, but there's likely someone
doing a good job of this
• Highlight features/benefits – Of the product, category, your store –
sell them on clicking
• Include a call to action – Shop now!
• Use Capitalisation To Stand Out
• Maximum 156 characters – General guideline to avoid getting cut off
URL and handle

Below the Meta description, you'll find the URL and handle. This is the URL
this page will be accessible on, what we can and should customise is the handle.
The goal with this is to be as short as possible while including our main
keyword. In most cases, this is very simple.
If your product category is a chocolate protein powder, the handle would

simply be "chocolate-protein-powder" and the overall URL would be https://
yourwebsite.com/collections/chocolate-protein-powder.
Where you'll want to be careful is if your collection name is different to the

keyword (i.e. what people search) such as "womens" rather than "womens-
clothes". I'd recommend the latter so you have the full keyword.
Another consideration here is long product names, usually I'd shorten the
handle so it's better for visitors.
Collection/Product Title [H1]

Next, scroll up to the regular settings and find the Title (first option). This
is the title of your page, collection, or product; which in SEO terms is called a
Heading 1 (H1).
Note: This is presuming your theme is setup correctly to structure this as a H1 tag
This will usually just be the name of the collection or product, but again, be
sure to include the main keyword, ideally near the beginning. Secondary key-
words can also be included if very similar.
Collection/Product Descriptions
Below the Title is your Description.
This is the main content on your page, where you'll ideally want to have at
least a few hundred words describing the collection, product, or page.
Most people make the mistake of thinking SEO elements are only under "Edit
website SEO", which are arguably the most important single elements, but your
content itself can make a huge difference also.
On Page SEO for Shopify Collections

Title Tag
The "Page Title" under the website SEO section is especially important
on collection pages, which are likely to be your biggest source of bottom of
funnel traffic.
The above guidelines all apply here, but three things I'd be careful of:
1. Make sure that you have enough collections – one for each type of your
product, sometimes even additional ones (e.g. 18k gold necklaces not
only gold necklaces)
2. Use up to 60 characters – if lower, write a feature/benefit of your store
or include secondary keywords
3. Include keyword modifiers for intent and secondary keywords – words
like buy, online, shop, UK, etc
Let's say we have collection selling 18k gold necklaces, my title may be:
Buy 18k Gold Necklaces Online UK | Logeix
In this example my main keyword is almost at the beginning, but I'm also
targeting people searching to buy, buy online, or buy in the UK. This also helps
for clear intent, anyone searching clearly knows this is a store.
Meta Description
The meta description is more about clickthrough rate optimisation than SEO,
this is your chance to convince someone to visit your website vs the competitors.
For collection pages, this means sell them on why your product range and
purchasing from your store is better than the competitors.
This can be things like:

• Bigger product selection
• Better prices
• Fast delivery
• Great returns policy
• Buy now, pay later and other payment benefits
You'll also want to include your main keyword here as it'll be shown in bold
in the search results – which stands out even further.
If I was writing for the 18k gold necklaces collection I mentioned before,
I may write:
Shop our range of 18k gold necklaces in over 50 designs and styles.
Customise with your own text and gift wrap. Next day delivery. Buy
now, pay later.
URL / Handle
The handle is quite simple for collection pages, all you need to do is include
your main keyword. If we use the above example, it would be:
18k-gold-necklaces
The thing you'll want to be careful of is ensuring it does include the keyword
i.e. "dry-dog-food" not only "dry".
Also, it's not overly long and keyword stuffed i.e. "18k-gold-necklaces-for-
women" is probably overkill.
Or worse would be "18k-gold-necklaces-chains-jewelry", which people some-

times do to try target more keywords. Don't do it.
H1
The H1 (i.e. title of the collection) is another important element, but fairly
easy one to manage for collections.
All you need to do here is include the keyword. That's it. If it's 18k gold neck-
laces, then the H1 is 18k Gold Necklaces.
No need to add keyword modifiers, secondary keywords, or anything else.

Just name the collection and include the keyword.
The mistake, again, is using Womens if you're a clothing store for example.
You need to specifically write the full keyword: Womens Clothing.
Collection Description
Next is your collection description. This is especially important on collection
pages, you'll usually want to include at least a few hundred words of content
here to better help your visitors.
Here's the problem:
Writing 750 words of content would look terrible at the top of your page and
completely ruin user experience, even more so on mobile devices.
The standard alternative is to put it at the bottom or hide it behind a read

more, but then it looks spammy and obviously only there for SEO benefit.
My preference is a short user-friendly description at the top, which can

optionally be hidden behind a "Read More" link on mobile devices. ASOS is an
example of this:
As for additional content, there's a couple ways of doing this:
1. Additional product details
You can modify the products grid to show additional information about each
product. This may depend on what you're selling.
Example here from HP:
You'll need a developer to help you integrate this by adding custom meta
fields to each product, then showing these in the theme.
2. Frequently Asked Questions section
My favourite and go-to is using an FAQ toggle below the products grid:
This allows us to answer any questions or doubts that potential customers

may have, while simultaneously adding a few hundred words to the page with-
out it being spammy.
Now to do this, we need to do a bit of a hack with the Shopify theme to split
the description into two sections for the short description above products list,
then FAQ below.
You can do that relatively easily by editing Shopify's collection-template.

liquid file:
Locate {{ collection.description }} and change to:
{{ collection.description | split: '' | first }}
Then wherever you'd like the second part, use this code:
{{ collection.description | split: '' | last }}

Now all you need to do is enter the HTML view for your collection description
and write  wherever you'd like it to split.
Then you can insert any content you like after, or HTML for an FAQ accordion.
It's probably best to get a developer to manage this for you.
Internal Links
Another important usage of the Description section is internal links.
Internal links are hyperlinks to other pages on your own website. These are
very important for search engines to visit different pages on your website,
understand topical relationships (i.e. if a page links to another, they're likely
relevant), and for "powering up" pages.
I'd recommend 2-4 internal links to other pages on your category pages.
The go-to links being subcategories e.g. linking from "Protein Powders" to
"Chocolate Protein Powders", "Strawberry Protein Powders", "Peanut Butter
Protein Powders", etc.
This can also be navigational in style, similar to this:

On Page SEO for Shopify Product Pages

Title Tag
The title tag is pretty simple for product pages, all I'd recommend extra is:
• Make sure it's not too long – sometimes product names can be extremely
long, do your best with this
• Include a keyword (if possible)
• Add intent or product options/details with any extra space
The difficult part with product pages is determining the right keyword, in
many cases you may find there are none.
Product keywords have to be unique from collection pages, so most likely

they're going to be super detailed.
Your collection page may rank for "xlr microphones" or "heil microphones",
but your product page will rank for "heil pr40 microphone".
Beyond that, you can either add intent or product options.
Intent would be:

Buy Heil PR-40 Microphone Online
Option would be:

Heil PR-40 Microphone in Silver/Black | Stand & Shock Mount
Meta Description
There's not much to the meta description here, write about the product so
they know it's exactly what they're looking for. Mention the words "buy" or
"shop" so the intent is clear.
Also highlight any benefits of buying from your store specifically such as
better prices, faster delivery, better delivery/packaging, payment plans, etc.
URL / Handle
For the URL, you should mostly consider your potential visitors.
This is not a short easy to share URL:
yourwebsite.com/products/PR-40-Dynamic-Studio-Recording-Microphone
It becomes even worse when additional keywords are deliberately added

in, such as:
yourwebsite.com/products/PR-40-Dynamic-Studio-Recording-Microphone-
Cardioid-Podcasting-Mic
The best approach is to include the main keyword, that's all, something like:
yourwebsite.com/products/heil-sound-pr40
Presuming the main keyword above is "Heil Sound PR 40", "Heil PR 40", or
even just "PR 40".
Also, you should be careful not to use UPPERCASE letters and to avoid using
_underscore_ or s p a c es.
H1
The H1 will usually be the name of the product, unless you want to add a
little additional information.
In the above example, technically the product name may be "PR-40 Dynamic
Studio Recording Microphone".
I'd at a minimum add "Heil Sound" to the beginning of that, since it's likely
people search the brand name.
Product Descriptions
Product pages will have a Description section to explain the product details.
Everything mentioned for collections can be done for products also. You can
add an FAQ, split it and add a more detailed description below, etc.
I'd recommend doing this on a case-by-case basis, most of the time product
pages need very little content. To determine this, search the main keyword for
this product and see what your top competitors are doing, match that.
The important thing to do here is ensure that each product has a unique de-
scription. Do NOT copy from suppliers, manufacturers, or other stores. Write
a unique description for every product.
Internal Links
On product pages, less internal links are needed. You may have 1 or 2 in the
description, if it's relevant.
But most importantly is that you should link to product variants, if any, like so:
This is firstly for visitors navigating your website, but also helps to show these
products are all topically relevant.
Beyond that, it can be helpful to link to guides or tutorials relevant to this

product, and you can optionally link to things like the brand name collection
or other relevant categories.
On Page SEO for Shopify Homepage

The homepage is another key page that often is neglected by Shopify store
owners, here's what I'd recommend doing here.
Title Tag
Start by including a main keyword in here, not only your brand name. If I had
a Gym Clothing store, then I'd write something like:
Logeix Gym Clothing UK | Shop Online

My brand name is still in there, but now I'm able to target my most broad
keyword on the homepage.
(Note: Make sure this doesn't compete with a collection page, usually this will be
a broader keyword)
Meta Description
For the homepage meta description, it's the standard formula of treating this
like an ad to convince people to click.
Include the main keyword as always, but spend time to emphasise what makes
your product selection and store better than competitors.
H1
There's two common mistakes Shopify stores make with their homepage H1:
1. They have the logo set as a H1
2. They write something generic like "Welcome to our website"
Instead you should manually add a H1 section to the page and include your
keyword as with any other page.
For the gym clothing example, I may write:
Buy Gym Clothing Online UK
Now generally speaking you want this as near to the top of the page as pos-
sible, but there's also user/design/creative matters to consider here so we are
usually flexible about this.
Content
You'll also need a bit more content than simply collection or product grids.
I'd determine how much is needed by comparing to your competitors, but at

a minimum try adding a few hundred additional words.
The easiest way to do this is a few short paragraphs introduction your store
and an FAQ toggle to answer common questions.
Internal Links
On the homepage, internal links are extremely important for driving traffic
and influencing rankings of important collections.
You can do this with hero images and collections grids.
Two things you should consider here are:

1. You should link to the most important collections in terms of popularity/
sales/revenue
2. Ensure there is text behind the link for search engines
Many websites use image only links in the grid, which means search en-
gines may read a blank anchor text. Make sure you add text as anchor text is
a ranking factor.
Other On Page Factors

Content Structure
The content structure refers to the markup used for headings, content, and
different sections on your website.
A typical layout for a product page for example is:
Most Shopify themes get this right so you don't need to do anything, but it's
definitely worth checking.
One common issue is that themes will use the logo as the H1 on the home-
page. This leads to either multiple H1's on the page, if you manually add one,
or an unoptimised H1 if none is added.
Alt Text
Alternative text (alt text) along with image title are used to tell robots or
accessibility users what an image is. It's pretty important, not for robots, but
for accessibility.
Don't overcomplicate this. All you need to do is describe the images, which
you can optionally use as an opportunity to include a secondary keyword. Just
be careful not to over-optimise.
Here's how you set them in Shopify, simply click an image, edit and set
the alt text:
Final Thoughts
Shopify is a great platform for SEO and many things can be done out of the
box, no apps or extras needed.
These On Page SEO factors are fundamentals of SEO, and while they may
seem easy, they're often neglected by stores.
From our own research before, we found 76% of stores didn't optimise their
meta description for clicks, and 42% had no description on their collection pages.
By making these changes across all your pages, you'll be far ahead of most.
04
Technical SEO for Shopify
59 | Technical SEO for Shopify Shopify SEO - Logeix
If you've read much on SEO from the past couple years, you've probably
heard about the growing importance of Technical SEO.
And while Shopify may handle many technical SEO issues for you, there's
still plenty you should do.
After manually reviewing 100+ Shopify stores, here are some things that
I've learned.
What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the process of tweaking a website to help search engines
more efficiently crawl and index it.
As the name suggests, this is commonly about technical improvements such

as improving loading time, auto-generated pages, faceted navigation, etc.
How does this apply to Shopify?

While we have no control over the server itself, we can do speed optimis-
ation for Shopify, along with fixing a number of technical issues that happen
out of the box.
This done with a standard audit and crawl process, looking for common types
of issues, along with crawling the website (usually manually and with tools) to
identify others.
How to do a technical SEO audit for

Shopify stores?
I usually do this with three steps:
1. Manually look through the website
2. Crawl the website with a tool like ScreamingFrog
3. Check Google Search Console
Let's break these down…
Common Shopify Technical SEO Issues

The best place to start is a checklist, which is even easier with a little back-
ground knowledge of how Shopify works.
So to make this even easier, let me just show you all the most common tech-
nical SEO issues with Shopify, how to find them, and how to fix them.
Directory URL Structure

In any typical eCommerce SEO guide, the suggestion would be to structure
internal links similar to this:
/category/subcategory/ e.g. /sofas/leather/
This provides context to users and robots that leather is a subtopic of sofas.
Unfortunately Shopify does not enable this without the use of tags and heavy
theme modifications to add functionality to tag pages – by default tags have
duplicate H1 and badly optimised title, meta, etc.
This leaves you with all your category pages structured like:
/collections/sofas
There is no decent solution to this problem, besides doing the best you can
with how it works. That means using optimised URLs for subcategories i.e.
/leather-sofas rather than /sofas/leather and treating these as subcategories
within navigation and internal links.
My Shopify URL structure guide explains this in more detail.
Internal Product Links

Following on from the category directory structures, there's also the odd
setup for products.
By default product URLs are:
/products/name-of-product
However, when accessed through a collection (category) page, this becomes:
/collections/name-of-category/products/name-of-product
(Just open any product from one of your collections to see if this happens on your store)
The problem with this is it's only for show, check any of these product pages
for a canonical tag and you'll see a bit of code telling robots the original page
can be found at the /products/name-of-product page.
This means every single product in your store has internal links to the wrong
URL. And while you could argue they're "canonicalised" therefore shouldn't
be an issue, this canonical tag serves little more than a recommendation and
is often ignored by search engines.
This can lead to the same product being indexed in search engines multiple
times and a waste of crawl budget accessing the same product via multiple URLs.
All for (presumably) two benefits:

1. It's user-friendly to see the category of product
2. It supports breadcrumb links (next part!)
None of these justify the SEO downsides, so I'd highly recommend fixing
these links by modifying your theme files to link directly to product pages.
You can do this under Online Store > Themes > Customize > Theme
Actions > Edit Code > Snippets > product-grid-item.liquid:
Then removing the text that says "within: collection":
Hit Save and all your links should be fixed. Just be careful to remove all
instances, sometimes your theme may have multiple links or have a slightly
different structure.
Breadcrumbs
As mentioned in the previous step, breadcrumbs are broken when you fix
internal product links.
If you don't know what breadcrumbs are, they're the little links that help you
navigate up (i.e. back) through pages prior to accessing this page:
You should at minimum be using these on collection pages and product pages.
By default, Shopify uses the URL to dynamically insert breadcrumb links based
on which collection you accessed this product through. This isn't ideal in the
first place, but it'll be completely broken when you fix the internal product links.
The alternative is to manually set a breadcrumb for each product or even

category. This can then be stored and accessed with a custom metafield, then
used in the breadcrumb theme section.
For example, you could create a metafield named "breadcrumb" and store
the collection handle in there of "leather-sofa".
Within the breadcrumbs theme section, you can then use this to add a bread-
crumb, like so:
<a href="{{ collections[product.metafields.global.breadcrumb].

url }}">{{ collections[product.metafields.global.breadcrumb].
title }}</a>
This re-enables breadcrumb functionality and provides additional control

over this, which is even better for SEO.
Product Tags
Within the Shopify ecosystem, tags are used for products as filters, as you'd
commonly see in a typical eCommerce faceted navigation:
The problem with these tags is the thin content pages they create.
Let's say you have 3 size options: 125ml, 275ml, and 500ml. Then you tag all
products across all your categories with whichever sizes are offered.
You'll now have tag pages automatically generated such as:

/collections/perfume/125ml
This is a great thing for SEO because it's possible these are keywords people
are searching for. Maybe someone is specifically looking for 275ml perfume.
However, it's wasted on Shopify for two reasons:

1. If you happen to write the tag with a space, it'll change the space to a
"+" (i.e. 125ml+option) which is blocked by robots.txt by default
2. The auto-generated tag page cannot be customised with unique H1,
meta description, title tag, content, etc
This leads to a whole bunch of near-duplicate pages with the only difference
being the title tag will say along the lines of:
Perfume: Tagged "125ml" – Brand
You can easily check if this is happening to your store with a clever
Google search:
site:yourwebsite.com intitle:Tagged -inurl:tagged

If there's no results, you probably don't have this issue. If you see this
(below), you do:
The fix to set these tag pages to "noindex, follow" (easy), then noindex links
to these tag pages as nofollow (advanced) block these with Robots.txt to save
crawl budget.
Then you can manually create these tags as new collections (i.e. category
pages) where there's search volume.
This can be done in your theme.liquid file with a simple bit of code:
{% if current_tags %}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">
{% endif %}
I've written about this more extensively in the Shopify Product tags chapter.
Blog Tags
Similar to product tags, you can also use tags for blog posts to filter posts. These
are commonly used on Shopify blogs to separate different blog post categories.
The problem, as with product tags, is this leads to many pages being created
which you have no control or customisation over i.e. thin content.
You'll see this under URLs like:

/blogs/news/tagged/name-of-tag
Or with a quick Google search:

site:YOURWEBSITE.com inurl:tagged
Thankfully, this is another simple fix with a code snippet added to your
theme.liquid file (same as product tags):
{% if current_tags %}
{% endif %}
Vendor Collections
Another thing that can lead to potentially 100+ thin content pages are what
I call "vendor pages".
You can find these by doing a Google search for:

site:YOURWEBSITE.com inurl:collections/vendors
In most cases, it is a great idea to have a category page for each of your
vendors (i.e. suppliers, brands, manufacturers), however Shopify's default
implementation is fairly useless from an SEO perspective.
There's numerous reasons for this:

1. The page URLs are defaulted to /collections/vendors?q=Name. Even
ignoring SEO, these are not user friendly URLs.
2. These pages are auto-generated, if you happen to have a vendor with
2 or more words the space between is replaced with a "+", which is
blocked by Robots.txt. Meaning, if you have a supplier with 2+ words,
search engines won't be able to access the page.
3. Even if search engines can access the page, it can't be customised by
default with content or SEO optimisation settings, therefore is practi-
cally useless.
So how do we fix this?

Set these pages to "noindex, follow" by customising your theme.

liquid file like this:
{% if template contains "collection" and collection.

handle == "vendors" %}
{% endif %}
This is a backup, but also good to do first if they're already indexed to have
them removed first.
Then block them in your Robots.txt file (explained below).
If you'd like to rank for any vendors brand names, which I'd highly recommend,
manually create these as new collections.
Product Types Collections
Similar to vendor pages are product type pages. These can be find under a
similar type of parameter URL:
/collections/types?q=Name
Or again by searching Google:
site:YOURWEBSITE.com inurl:collections/types
These again are automatically generated from the "type" field when creating
your products in Shopify.
As with vendor pages, these have all the same issues as vendor pages and
no upsides. Usually product types are literally the same as your categories (i.e.
collection pages), therefore this provides no benefits.
Set these to noindex, follow as before and then block with Robots.txt:
{% if template contains "collection" and collection.handle

== "types" %}
{% endif %}
Other Default Pages

Beyond this, there's sometimes other pages that provide zero value to search
engines or users of search engines, so may as well be noindexed also.
These can include:

• /collections – A list of all collections on your store
• /collections/all – A list of all products on your store (with pagination
this can really become a lot of unnecessary indexed pages)
• /collections/new – A list of new products on your store
And any others manually created such as best selling products lists. These
can all be set to "noindex, follow" if not being used, with the following code
added to theme.liquid:
{% if (template contains "collection" and collection.handle

== "all") or (template contains "collection" and collection.
handle == "new") or (canonical_url == "https://YOURWEBSITE.com/
collections") %}
{% endif %}
Setup a Custom Robots.txt File

As of June 2021, you can finally setup a custom Robots.txt file on Shopify!
This will give you significantly more control over the above issues.
Start by taking a look at your current Robots.txt file here:
https://YOURWEBSITE.com/robots.txt
As for customising this, here's how to do it…
Go to your Theme Editor then under Templates click "Add a new template":
From there, select "robots.txt" and click Create template:

You'll now have a robots.txt.liquid template file with the default robots.
txt information added:
The good news is we can now remove or add additional rules by modifying
this file, for example:
# we use Shopify as our ecommerce platform

{%- comment -%}
# Caution! Please read https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/
promoting-marketing/seo/editing-robots-txt before proceeding to
make changes to this file.
{% endcomment %}
{% for group in robots.default_groups %}
{{- group.user_agent -}}
{% for rule in group.rules %}

{{- rule -}}
{% endfor %}
{%- if group.user_agent.value == '*' -%}

{{ 'Disallow: /collections/all*' }}
{{ 'Disallow: /*?q=*' }}
{{ 'Disallow: /collections/*/*' }}
{{ 'Disallow: /blogs/*/tagged/*' }}
{%- endif -%}
{%- if group.sitemap != blank -%}

{{ group.sitemap }}
{%- endif -%}
{% endfor %}
(WARNING: Please be careful using this, if you haven't yet fixed internal product
links this will cause crawling issues)
This will block search engines crawling:

• /collections/all – List of all products with pagination (usual-
ly not needed)
• /collections/vendors?q= – Auto-created collections for each vendor
(explained above)
• /collections/types?q= – Auto-created collections for each type of
product (explained above)
• /collections/any-collection/tag-name – Product Tag Pages
• /blogs/any-blog/tagged/tag-name – Blog Tag Pages
For more tips on modifying this, read our full Shopify robots.txt guide.
Canonicalise or Merge Product Variants

Product variants are something you have to watch out for as you're creating
a lot of products. If you're creating a separate product for each variant, this
can lead to a lot of unnecessary pages.
Here's an example from Gymwear where they have 6 identical products

besides the colour:
This may be a good thing if each one has search volume, but are people re-
ally searching for "core seamless t-shirt white" or "core seamless t-shirt red"?
Probably not.
In which case, you can merge these all into a single product with variant
options set within Shopify.
Or if that's not user friendly, like in this case where users want to see all the
colour options before clicking, you can use a simple "canonical tag".
A canonical tag tells robots where to find the original version of a page. This
allows you to have 6 products, but each of them point into a single product that
robots (i.e. search engines) know is the original to index.
All you have to do is link to the "original" page in a canonical tag.
This can be achieved with a custom meta field, like you can edit here:
https://YOURSTORE.myshopify.com/admin/bulk?resource_
name=Product&edit=metafields.global.canonical,metafields.seo.
hidden:boolean&limit=250
Then modifying the theme.liquid file to use this meta field if applicable:
{% if product.metafields.global.canonical != blank %}
<link rel="canonical" href="{{ product.metafields.global.
canonical }}">
{% else %}
<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}">
{% endif %}
For more details here, refer to our Shopify Product Variants guide.
301 Redirect Deleted Products

A much easier part of SEO maintenance is redirecting deleted products. This
isn't urgent, but it's helpful for users (and robots) to be redirected to a relevant
page rather than landing on a 404 page.
Thankfully, this is extremely easy to do.
Next time you're deleting a product, go into the Shopify redirects section
(Shopify Admin > Online Store > Navigation > View URL redirects):
And create a new redirect:
Then you can enter the old URL and where to redirect it to (the most similar
product or collection), then it's done:
Use Structured Data

Structured data is a method of explaining your content. This is usually done
with Schema.org markup.
Most Shopify themes will integrate this by default, but it's worth double
checking and ensuring it's set up correctly.
Product Structured Data
Product schema is probably already set up within your theme, but double
check the setup here.
You want to make sure at least the following properties are used:
• Name
• Offer — Price, Availability, priceCurrency, URL
• Brand
• Description
• Image
We've seen many themes skip the "URL" part of the offer, which is an easy
fix, but usually causes a warning message in GSC.
Article Structured Data
For your blog posts, you'll want to use Article structured data. Again, this is
probably setup by default but worth checking.
You want to make sure at least the following properties are used:
• Headline
• Image
• dateModified
• datePublished
BreadcrumbList Structured Data
BreadcrumbList is a markup to explain the breadcrumb and the position of

each link. Position is important here for context. If you look at a typical bread-
crumb, here's how the positions work:
In schema.org code, this could look like so:
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "BreadcrumbList",
"itemListElement": [{
"@type": "ListItem",
"position": 1,
"name": "Books",
"item": "https://example.com/books"
},{
"position": 2,
"name": "Authors",
"item": "https://example.com/books/authors"
},{
"position": 3,
"name": "Ann Leckie",
"item": "https://example.com/books/authors/annleckie"
}]
}
Make sure that your theme is using this, it'll probably be found
under Snippets (Store > Themes > Customize > Theme Actions > Edit Code)
named breadcrumbs.liquid.
A full breakdown of recommended structured data can be found in our

Shopify Rich Snippets tutorial.
Remove from sitemap

Here's an odd one, if you've ever used any other CMS before, your instinct
would be that if you set a page to canonical or noindex, it'd automatically re-
move it from the sitemap. Unfortunately that isn't the case.
Instead we need to manually remove from the sitemap, but there's bad news
again, there's no real simple option for doing that.
Oh, and we can't modify the sitemap out of the box. More fun.
Fortunately, there is a little known hidden meta field that can do this for you:
The above link will let you edit the "hidden" SEO meta field, simply tick the
box to remove from sitemap and modify a custom canonical meta field, if that's
the name you use (as explained above).
But there's an important catch:
By ticking the "seo.hidden" meta field, you'll automatically set your page to
"noindex,nofollow". Which means don't index this page in your search engine
AND don't follow links. Neither option is ideal, and both are bad for canoni-
calised pages.
Therefore, I'd recommend having a developer strip this code from the page,
similar to below.
Find {{ content_for_header }} in theme.liquid and replace with:
{% capture content_for_header_fixed %}
{{ content_for_header }}
{% endcapture %}
{% if product.metafields.seo.hidden == 1 or collection.
metafields.seo.hidden == 1 %}
{{ content_for_header_fixed | remove: '<meta name="robots"
content="noindex,nofollow">' }}
{% else %}
{% endif %}
It's a little bit of a hacky workaround, but it'll work and it's better overall for SEO.
I've explained this in more detail in our Shopify XML Sitemap guide.
Crawling for other issues with Sitebulb

The above issues will cover quite a lot in Shopify, but there's likely others
that you're missing if you only use a checklist-like process.
To find them, we need to do a crawl of your website. This is where we have

our own robot go through every page of your website, like a search engine, and
identify any issues it can find.
For this process, I'm going to use Sitebulb. But Screaming Frog is a popu-
lar alternative for this, and other tools including Ahrefs and SEMRush can
also do this.
Here's how…
Starting the crawl

Click the green "Start a new Project" button:
Enter your project details:
I'd probably recommend using the Chrome Crawler for eCommerce sites,
most won't need it, but it's a good catch-all as a few eCommerce stores use
JavaScript faceted navigation and product grids.
Click Save and Continue when done.

Next, configure your options. All I did here was turn on "Structured Data".
Then click Start Now:
Reviewing the crawl

Now you'll have to wait for the crawl to finish, this could take a while as you're
likely to have hundreds or thousands of product pages:
Once it's done, it'll look like this:
At this point, it's easy to be overwhelmed especially by all the Security recom-
mendations, I'd probably leave those to a developer. Instead an easier starting
point is the SEO hints:
Sitebulb does a good job of sorting these and explaining them, take the first
hint here as an example:
If we click "View URLs", you'll see all the URLs here are product pages or
pagination as a result of internal product link issues we mentioned previously:
Each of these hints will tell you the importance, explain the hint, and give you
a list of URLs. I'd recommend fixing all the Critical and High importance ones
to start, then work through the rest of them.
Here's some common issues you'll see on Shopify:

• Has only one followed internal linking URL or Canonical URL has no in-
coming internal links – Fix your internal product links (explained above)
• URLs with similar content – Likely product variants
• URLs with duplicate h1s – Either product variants or automatically
generated pages like tags
• Internal redirected URLs – If you've changed URLs at some point and
correctly redirected them, this means you didn't update the links to
those old URLs
• Broken internal URLs – Broken links (likely deleted or renamed prod-
ucts, collections, etc)
There will also almost always be common issues such as title tag length, meta
description missing or length issues, images missing alt text, etc.
Google Search Console issues

Google Search Console is a dashboard provided by Google to understand
how they're crawling and indexing your website.
Once you've got it setup, an easy section to find issues is under "Coverage":
You'll see here there seems to be 80 errors.
Looking further into it, there are 76 pages that are missing (404 pages), 3
that are in the sitemap but set to noindex (easy to fix), and 1 that is a soft 404:
This is another way of finding issues and something we can fix immediately.
Start by confirming all the missing (404) pages and redirecting (301) them
if necessary.
Then double check the noindexed pages to see if it's correct, if so, follow the
instructions explained above to remove them from the sitemap.
Another place I'd recommend checking is Structured Data issues i.e.

Enhancements:
You can see here this website has only 1 breadcrumb issue, which is a little
odd how affects only a single page.
A quick manual look showed there was some basic coding error which only
impacted that page currently, but still worth fixing.
Obviously your own store will show different issues (if any), the point is it's
a great source of finding potential problems to resolve.
Final Thoughts
Technical SEO for Shopify is similar to any other platform except two things:
1. You don't have to worry about the server side of things (as it's man-
aged by Shopify)
2. You can't access server logs for analysing bot crawl activity
Neither of these things are remotely dealbreakers, and honestly, not having
to worry about hosting or server issues is a massive plus point.
As for everything else, it's the same as Technical SEO for any other website.
The only other thing to consider is if it's worth all the hassle fixing these issues?
Probably.
Shopify stores typically have 1,000+ pages which is really the size where I'd
say it starts to matter.
For a local business with a 10 pages website, it's probably not worth it, be-
sides critical issues.
But for Shopify stores, it's likely going to make a difference to your overall
rankings and search visibility, especially if you have hundreds of thin content
pages like we often see.
89 | Rich Snippets Shopify SEO - Logeix
4.1
Rich Snippets
If you want to increase your organic search traffic without increasing your
rankings, one easy strategy is to use rich snippets to stand out in the SERPs.
The good news is:
You're probably already using them, most themes have them built in. Though,
there are usually a few things missing or conflict issues caused by apps, so in
this guide we'll cover how to ensure your store is fully capitalising on this.
What are Rich Snippets?

Rich Snippets (also known as Rich Results) are the additional data sometimes
added to normal Google search results.
So if you're searching on Google, a normal result may look similar to this:
But with a Rich Snippet, it could look like this:
This additional rating part (i.e. Rich Snippet) makes your website stand out
and can often lead to higher click-through rate
Types of Rich Snippets for eCommerce

There are many types of Rich Snippets you can try to get, but a lot of them
are specific to certain types of sites such as Recipes or Music.
Below are a few common types you'll want to use for your store:
Reviews: A star rating out of 5 for aggregate reviews or an individual reviewer.

Perfect to show overall reviews for each of your products.
Product Offer: Information about your product, including price, product

images, and stock level.
Organisation: Explain the key details of your business, including name, ad-
dress, logo, and contact information.
FAQ: Answer common questions about this topic and have these questions
show in the search results.
What is Structured Data?

These Rich Snippets come from search engines' ability to understand your
content, which is achieved with Structured Data.
Whereas for humans, we can read a product page and instantly understand
which part is the name, description, product image, price, etc. This is not always
immediately obvious to robots, i.e. search engines.
By deliberately adding some code to your webpages, you can clearly label
each of these items for search engines to know.
And if it works, you'll be rewarded with a lovely Rich Snippet.
The basics of structured data

Structured data format
There are 3 formats of structured data:
1. Microdata
2. JSON-LD
3. RDFa
These represent different ways of coding the structured data into your page.
Microdata and JSON-LD are the most popular two, it's likely your Shopify
Theme or App is using one of these two.
My recommendation is to use JSON-LD.

The difference is JSON-LD is a piece of code you can add anywhere on your
page, irrespective of your content. Whereas Microdata is a markup to wrap
around your existing content, which is more difficult to set up. JSON-LD is also
recommended by Google.
We'll cover how to set up JSON-LD structured data in the "How to add struc-
tured data to Shopify" section.
Data vocabulary
Vocabulary refers to the property names you're using in your structured
data. This is how search engines understand your structured data. On your
product page for example, the product brand should be "brand" not "vendor" as
Shopify would call it.
The most commonly used vocabulary is schema.org. All popular search en-
gines accept this and most themes/apps will use this, so it's recommended to
stick with it.
Data Types
The data type is what this structured data is describing. For eCommerce,
you'll commonly use:
• Product to describe each product
• Offer to describe your product price and options
• AggregateRating to summarise each product's overall rating and reviews
• Article to describe your blog posts and articles
• Organization to describe your company details
• WebSite to describe how to search your website
• BreadcrumbList to describe your breadcrumbs
• FAQPage to describe frequently asked questions (and answers) used
on your pages
Recommendations for Shopify stores

While every eCommerce store is different, there's usually a few specific types
of pages and types of structured data I'd recommend using.
Homepage
Organization: This is a standard place to explain the details of your company.
WebSite: Searching is important for eCommerce stores, this markup will
describe to search engines how to do it.
Collections
BreadcrumbList: Your breadcrumb should link back to your homepage and
possibly a parent collection, make sure this is marked up with schema for search
engines to understand.
FAQPage: Add a list of frequently asked questions at the bottom of your
page for additional content, then mark this up as FAQPage, you may even get
the rich snippet.
Products
BreadcrumbList: Your breadcrumb should link back to the homepage
along with any collections and sub-collections, make sure this is marked up
with schema.
Product: Describe the product details for search engines.
Offer: Describe the product's pricing options and stock.
AggregateRating: Summarise the overall rating and reviews for this product.
Blog Posts
BreadcrumbList: Your breadcrumb should link to homepage and main blog
page, mark this up with schema
Article: Describe the title, author, and article content
Checking your existing structured data

It's highly likely your Shopify Theme and/or Apps are adding structured data
to your pages already, so I'd highly recommend testing them first.
You can do this on an individual page basis or a site-wide basis using Google
Search Console, I recommend both.
Google Search Console

If your website is using structured data and has been setup with GSC for a
while, you should see an "Enhancements" section in the sidebar of GSC:
Click on one of these, say Breadcrumb, and you'll be taken to a page like this:
Hopefully there are no Errors, otherwise you'll want to dive into the Details
section to see what they are and which pages they apply to.
For 100+ page websites though, you're likely to find "Valid with warning"
pages. These aren't a big deal, warnings are normal, but worth checking.
These aggregateRating and review fields warnings are commonly caused

by products not having any reviews, though it could also be they're not be-
ing utilised.
And of course the "Valid" ones are good to go. That's a nice confirmation
you're using Schema and it's setup correctly.
What you're looking for is any missing types such as Breadcrumbs, Product,
FAQ, Review Snippet, or Sitelinks search box. If these are all being utilised, look
for Errors or Warnings next.
Individual Pages
Individual pages can be checked with Google's Rich Results Testing tool.
Simply enter your URL (or code), then click Test URL:
After this, you'll be taken to a page like this:
In this case we can see the page is using structured data and is eligible for
rich results.
Diving deeper into it, we can see they're using Products schema and Offer
schema within this:
For GymShark, they actually have 11 products on this one page.
Why? They're marking up every colour and product variant on this page as
separate Products. This makes sense for product variants, though I probably
wouldn't do that for completely different products like "Gymshark Arrival 5"
Shorts – Black", which I presume are pulling in from the "You Might Like" sec-
tion at the bottom.
How to add structured data to Shopify

You don't need an app to add Structured Data to Shopify, especially if you're
using JSON-LD format, it's as simple as pasting some code either into the page
directly or the theme files.
Here's how to do it:
Add to the page description

For FAQPage schema, you can paste this directly into your Collection page
by switching to HTML/Code mode:
Then pasting the Schema.org code at the top or bottom (not important which):
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@type": "FAQPage",
"mainEntity": [{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "Is this article helpful?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "I hope so, but feel free to contact us and
let us know!"
}
},{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "Should you hire us for help with SEO and
rich snippets?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "Probably. You're welcome to try this yourself,
but be careful to test it. There's a lot more to SEO than
rich snippets though, so wouldn't be a bad idea to get some
experienced recommendations."
}
}]
}
</script>
As for generating it, just use a FAQPage schema generator.
Add to the theme

For everything else, you'll want to add it into your theme, though likely a
basic version of it is already there by default.
You can edit these by going to Online Store> Themes > Actions > Edit Code:
Here's an example of where to add it from one of our clients (every theme
is slightly different):
Product Schema: The product-template.liquid section includes

a product-schema.liquid snippet which contains the structured data code.
{
"@context": "http://schema.org/",
"@type": "Product",
"name": "{{ product.title | strip_html | escape }}",
"url": "{{ shop.url }}{{ product.url }}",
"sku": "{{fa_product_id_value}}",
{%- if product.variants.first.barcode.size == 12 -%}
"gtin12": {{ product.variants.first.barcode }},
{%- endif -%}
{%- endif -%}
{%- endif -%}
"productID": "{{ product.id }}",
"brand": {
"@type": "Thing",
"name": "{{ product.vendor | escape }}"
},
"description": {{ product.description | strip_html | json }},
"image": "https:{{ product.featured_image.src | img_url:
'grande' }}",
{%- if product.variants -%}
{%- assign fa_count = fa_count | plus: 1 -%}
"offers":
{
"@type" : "Offer",
"priceCurrency": "{{ cart.currency.iso_code }}",
"price": "{{ fa_product_price }}",
"itemCondition" : "http://schema.org/NewCondition",
"availability" : "http://schema.org/{% if fa_current_
variant.available %}InStock{% else %}OutOfStock{% endif %}",
"url" : "{{ shop.url }}{{ fa_current_variant.url }}",
{%- if fa_current_variant.image -%}
{%- assign variant_image_size = fa_current_
variant.image.width | append: 'x' -%}
"image": "https:{{ fa_current_variant.image.src |
img_url: variant_image_size }}",
{%- else -%}
"image": "https:{{ product.featured_image.src |
img_url: 'grande' }}",
{%- endif -%}
{%- if fa_current_variant.title !=
'Default Title' -%}
"name" : "{{ product.title | strip_html | escape
}} - {{ fa_current_variant.title | escape }}",
{%- else -%}
"name" : "{{ product.title | strip_html
| escape }}",
{%- endif -%}
{%- if fa_current_variant.barcode.size == 12 -%}
"gtin12": {{ fa_current_variant.barcode }},
{%- endif -%}
{%- endif -%}
{%- endif -%}
"sku": "{{fa_product_id_value}}",
{%- if product.description != blank -%}
"description" : {{ product.description | strip_
html | json }},
{%- endif -%}
"priceValidUntil": "{{ 'now' | date: '%s'
| plus: 31536000 | date: '%Y-%m-%d' | uri_encode |
replace:'+','%20' }}"
}
{%- if product.variants.size > 1 -%},
"additionalProperty": [{
"@type": "PropertyValue",
"propertyID": "item_group_id",
"value": "{{ product.id }}"
}]
{%- endif -%}

{%- if product.metafields.spr.reviews -%}
{%- assign fa_rating = product.metafields.spr.reviews
| split: '"reviewCount": "' | last | split: '"' | first
| plus: 0 -%}
{%- if fa_rating > 0 -%}
,"aggregateRating": {
"@type": "AggregateRating",
"ratingValue": {{ product.metafields.spr.reviews | split:
'"ratingValue": "' | last | split: '"' | first | plus: 0 }},
"ratingCount": {{ product.metafields.spr.reviews | split:
'"reviewCount": "' | last | split: '"' | first | plus: 0 }}
}
{%- endif -%}
{%- endif -%}
{%- endif -%}
}
</script>
Breadcrumb Schema: Can be added to or customised in

breadcrumbs.liquid under theme snippets.
{
"@type": "BreadcrumbList",
"itemListElement": [{
"position": 1,
"item": {
"@id": "{{ shop.url }}",
"name": "{{ 'general.breadcrumbs.home' | t }}"
}
},
{% if product.metafields.global.breadcrumb != blank %}
{
"position": 2,
"item": {
"@id": "{{ collections[product.metafields.global.
breadcrumb].url }}",
"name": "{{ collections[product.metafields.global.
breadcrumb].title }}"
}
},{
"position": 3,
"item": {
"@id": "{{ product.url }}",
"name": "{{ product.title }}"
}
}
{% elsif %}
{
"position": 2,
"item": {
"@id": "{{ product.url }}",
"name": "{{ product.title }}"
}
}]
{% endif %}
}
</script>
(Note: The above code presumes you're using a custom meta field for breadcrumbs,
as explained in the previous chapter)
Organization Schema: We created a new

organization-schema.liquid snippet which contains the structured data
code then included this in index.liquid template.
{
"@type": "Corporation",
"name": "{{ shop.name }}",
"url": "{{ shop.secure_url }}/",
"logo": "https://enter-logo-url",
"sameAs": [
"https://link-to-social-profile-like-fb",
"https://link-to-social-profile-like-twitter",
"https://link-to-social-profile-like-ig"
]
}
</script>
WebSite Schema: Added after <head> tag in theme.liquid layout.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "WebSite",
"url": "{{ shop.secure_url }}",
"potentialAction": {
"@type": "SearchAction",
"target": "{{ shop.secure_url }}/
search?type=product&q={search_term_string}",
"query-input": "required name=search_term_string"
}
}
</script>
Article Schema: The article.liquid template file includes an

article-template.liquid section which contains the schema.
{
"@type": "BlogPosting",
"mainEntityOfPage": {
"@type": "WebPage",
"@id": "{{ article.url }}"
},
"headline": "{{ article.title }}",
"description": "{{ article.excerpt }}",
"image": "{{ article.image.src }}",
"author": {
"@type": "Person",
"name": "{{ article.author }}"
},
"publisher": {
"@type": "Organization",
"logo": {
"@type": "ImageObject",
"url": "https://enter-logo-url"
}
},
"datePublished": "{{ article.published_at | date:
'%Y-%m-%d' }}",
"dateModified": "{{ article.updated_at | date: '%Y-%m-%d' }}",
}
</script>
Frequently Asked Questions

I have set up structured data,
but why don't I have a rich snippet?
That could happen for any of these reasons:
1. They haven't crawled your updated page yet.
2. They don't think it's relevant.
3. You're in a competitive niche where they don't show them often.
4. It's not the right type of page/structured data for this keyword.
5. Your website doesn't have enough trust/authority.
Do I need to worry about GSC warnings?

Warnings are nothing to worry about, they're usually recommendations only.
Especially if it's warnings for lack of reviews/ratings on products, this usually
is a result of having no reviews for that product yet. Errors, however, should
absolutely be addressed.
Why are there multiple / duplicate

structured data tags on my page?
Sometimes there's a conflict between the theme and apps, which causes
structured data to be added multiple times. I recommend having a developer
look at the code to see if they can identify where it's coming from, then remove
one of them.
Do I need an app for this?

Absolutely not. In fact, I'd recommend against it. Most these apps are trying
to sell you something your theme probably does by default. The extras they're
offering can be done easily with a free JSON-LD structured data generator
tool – very easy.
Final Thoughts
I'd highly recommend using structured data on your Shopify store, to recap,
here's what you should do now:
1. Check Google Search Console for issues with your existing setup
(and fix them)
2. Manually check a few different page types with Google's rich snip-
pet tester tool
3. Tweak/fix your existing structured data setup for product, collections,
homepage, breadcrumbs, and blog posts (as explained above)
4. Manually add structured data to descriptions such as FAQ schema
5. Re-test this after adding, then periodically check on GSC for issues
Hopefully this will result in landing some rich snippets, if not, keep going
with your SEO and they'll probably come. A lot of this depends on the specific
keyword, overall niche, and your website's trust/authority.
Either way, this is well worth putting in the small effort to set it up correctly.
111 | URL Structure Shopify SEO - Logeix
4.2
URL Structure
Can you change the Shopify URL Structure?
Not really.
But let me explain why, the best workaround, and your options if you're
very determined.
Shopify's default URL structure

Let's start with the native Shopify URL structure and its limitations.
Product Pages
Out of the box, your product URLs will be a subdirectory under your collec-
tion (category) pages.
If you have a product with the handle "fluffy-pink-socks" and a collection

with the handle "socks", then you'd have:
/collections/socks/products/fluffy-pink-socks
Or at least it'd appear that way, a closer inspection shows the real URLs are:
/products/fluffy-pink-socks
Unfortunately, Shopify opt to use the longer version by default to allow

breadcrumb functionality. This however can be fixed with a simple code edit.
Start in your Shopify dashboard by going to Online Store > Themes > Cus-
tomize > Theme Actions > Edit Code > Snippets > product-grid-item.liquid:
Then remove the text that says "within: collection":

With that 5 minute fix, your product URLs will be in a more typical format
for eCommerce. I'd highly recommend doing this.
Collection Pages
The problematic part is collection pages i.e. product categories.
Collection pages have 2 major URL issues:

1. They require /collections/ to be included in the URL
2. They don't allow sub-directories e.g. /chairs/office/leather
This also comes down to how Shopify is built, there's no admin functionality to
set a parent or child collection to even begin building this type of URL structure.
The solution in most cases is to switch from a subdirectory structure to a

flat URL structure e.g. /chairs/office/leather would become
/leather-office-chairs.
As for /collections/, there is no way to remove this from the URL.

Blog Pages / Posts

Many blogs on Shopify have a weird URL structure, especially if they name
their blog "blog".
This leads to the following blog URL:
example.com/blogs/blog
Then blog posts will be under:
example.com/blogs/blog/my-example-post
This is fairly ugly but also weird to migrate to from another platform.
The thing to understand here is Shopify's built in blogging platform. It's built
to enable multiple blogs, for example you could have:
• /blogs/faq
• /blogs/news
• /blogs/guides
All under a single website, acting almost as categories on a traditional blog.

The only downside to this is navigating to them as you'll need to open the full
URL, opening /blogs/ to find a list of all doesn't work.
My suggestion is to think carefully about what blogs you will create and how
that will reflect in the URL structure.
Most Shopify stores opt for "news" to keep this simple i.e. /blogs/news and
/blogs/news/new-post.
Again, there's no customisation available here besides the handle of the blog
i.e. "news" in the above example.
Other Pages
For other pages, you'll find them under /pages/name-of-page.
Once again, there's no ability to customise this i.e. remove /pages/. But also,
it's not such a bad thing.
Why this can be bad for SEO

If we were to make some blanket SEO recommendations for eCommerce
URLs it'd be:
• Keep URLs as short as possible
• Include the main keyword
• Use a user-friendly directory structure
• Don't repeat words
For the most part Shopify can tick all of these with some conscious effort,
besides a proper directory structure.
While it's possible to create a collection under /collections/leather-

office-chairs, if we also have a number of other office chair materials, and
a number of other chair types, it makes sense to have all these organised.
For example:
/chairs/ – List of all chairs / types
/chairs/office/ – List of all office chairs with filters to narrow down
/chairs/office/leather – List of all leather office chairs
For SEO purposes, each of these would be customised to rank as they likely
all have search volume.
It's also extremely easy to understand the relationship between these pages.
Leather is the child of office i.e. a subcategory, and office is the child of chairs.
Does it matter?
Not particularly. You'll just have to do the best with what you can, that means:
• Include the full depth / keyword in the URL e.g.
/leather-office-chairs
• Create each of these as separate collections
• Use Shopify product tags or something similar to set the products in
these collections
The only really annoying thing is these won't be integrated into the faceted
navigation (by default), so you'll need to manually link to these from menus
and collection descriptions.
How to change your Shopify store's

URL structure
If you're determined to change the URL structure of your store though, what
are your options?
• Use product tags
• Add custom functionality to standard pages
For the record, I wouldn't recommend neither of these options as it adds too
much complexity for little benefit, but they're both real world fixes I've seen
applied. So I'll explain anyway.
Use product tags

If you're only after one additional directory/folder and willing to do some
custom development, one option is product tags.
Product tag URLs look like this:
This isn't ideal as it's only one additional folder, ideally you would want
/mens/t-shirts/black, but you could say it's better than nothing...
There is a major problem though:
Without custom development and in my opinion, more complexity than it's

worth, there's no way to customise these tag pages for users nor search engines.
Some stores do use this though, Horizn Studios for example. This is a product
tag page that acts exactly as a collection page. It works because their store has
limited products and functionality, but again, I wouldn't suggest it in most cases.
Add custom functionality to standard pages

I'm not sure why you'd want to do this except in rare cases, but it is possible
to develop some custom solutions within the standard constraints of Shopify.
But you're still limited to the default URL structures explained above.
Emulsion, for example, use a page instead of collection for their products.
They also use a URL variable to change category. I'm not entirely sure why they
do this and wouldn't recommend doing the same, but it is an option.
Another interesting example is iSmash. Click "Book Repair" and you'll be

taken through a step-by-step process to book your repair. No product pages
used at all.
Again, probably unnecessary or outright pointless for most stores, but if

you're really determined, a developer can help to some degree.
Tips for migrating from another platform

If you're migrating from another platform, you have a massive project ahead of
you. My best advice would be to hire an SEO agency or consultant to assist you.
If that's not an option, here is what you should consider:
Changing URLs
Inevitably you'll need to change URLs.
Maybe your products are currently accessible under the root domain e.g
/product-name/ or your platform uses a different folder for categories e.g.
WooCommerce uses /product-category/. You may even have query URLs
like /?material=cotton.
While changing URLs is discouraged if possible, it's a necessary downside of

changing platforms. And if done right, most likely won't lead to any loss of traffic.
The first thing you should do is crawl your entire website with a tool like
Screaming Frog or SiteBulb, get a list of all pages on your website, then plan
and create the replacements on Shopify.
These will usually be separate collections in Shopify, so rather than

/chairs/gaming/leather it would be one collection for chairs, another for
gaming chairs, and another for leather chairs.
Redirect old URL structures

Once all the replacement pages are made, you'll need to create redirects in
the Shopify Redirects section from the old structure to the new one.
This will ensure users visiting the old structure will be redirected to the cor-
rect page, along with search engines.
You should do this inside of a spreadsheet, then simply import all the redi-
rects – saves time.
Deleting or Removing old pages

If you plan to delete some pages, just redirect them to the most similar page.
Or if there is not an equivalent filter, for example, if your page's URL is

/bed/sheets?material=cotton (as a filter), you could either create a collec-
tion named /collections/cotton-bed-sheets or redirect them directly to
the bed-sheets collection.
There's a bit of nuance here to figure out the best way of doing things, but the
simplified version is to redirect to the same or most relevant replacement page.

Here's a few questions that come up commonly about Shopify URLs.
Can you remove /collections/ from category pages?

No. I mean, it's possible to change this function to /pages/ instead (as above), but it
doesn't make sense to do so. Nor can this be removed from URLs.
Can you remove /products/ from product pages?

Unfortunately this is not possible also.
Can you use sub-directories /

sub-folders for international stores?
Kinda. Usually we'd recommend setting up unique stores under subdomains
(e.g. fr.example.com), but it's possible to do this at least for languages. Using
an app like Langshop, it's possible to setup sub-directories such as /fr/ for
French language.
This is for languages though, not international stores, you may want to have
separate US and UK stores for example, where this wouldn't make sense.
What's the best approach for

international store URLs?
The best approach is to use either subdomains (e.g. uk.example.com) or top-
level domains (e.g. example.fr). This can then be configured with Hreflang
tags for SEO.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, the answer to whether you can change the Shopify URL
structure is still "not really". But hopefully this provides some explanations and
advice for making the most of how it works.
121 | Product Variants Shopify SEO - Logeix
4.3
Product Variants
One major limitation stores run into when setting up their store or moving
to Shopify is the limit to 100 variants (and 3 options) on a single product.
Shopify have said themselves that "the variant limit of 100 variants per
product cannot be raised for any account or plan".
But thankfully, if this is necessary for your business, there are workarounds.
Why the 100 variants limit on Shopify?

From my understanding and Shopify's comments, I believe this is a technical
limitation of Shopify.
Likely how they've structured their databases (for storing data), which makes
this extremely difficult to increase the limit later. Hence why they haven't done
it despite much pleading from customers.
This means there's a hard limit built-in to all plans to create a maximum of
100 variants for a single product across up to 3 options.
We can't bypass this limit, but there are 3 solutions to get around it.
Solution 1. Split into different

products with internal links
The first solution is to divide your product variants into separate products,
this can actually be more user friendly.
If you look at GymShark's T-Shirt collection, for example, you'll see multi-
ple Arrival Regular Fit T-Shirts each in a different color.
I'd argue this is more user friendly as this is a more visual friendly purchase,
but also because it allows you to select your product from the start – rather
than clicking in first and changing colour later.
Opening any of these products will allow a swatch-like selector to change

between colours:
Each one of these colours are linked to separate products:

• Gymshark Arrival Regular Fit T-Shirt – White
• Gymshark Arrival Regular Fit T-Shirt – Black
• Gymshark Arrival Regular Fit T-Shirt – Charcoal
Then within each of these products, they're using variants for select-
ing the sizes.
I've seen many stores using this same approach where separate products
are created for each colour, material, and even size. Generally, it's easier for a
potential customer to see all their options up front, rather than need to click
through to each product to compare.
The two complexities with this approach are:

1. You'll need to hire a developer to implement the internal linking between
different products – meta fields can be used to connect the products.
2. You'll need to use canonical URLs for SEO.
The latter is my area of expertise, you don't need to have 6 different pages
for a single t-shirt in different colours. It's unlikely that people are searching
for "charcoal arrival t-shirt".
So presuming there are no searches for each of these individual product

pages, you can inform search engines that they're all part of a single page.
For example, you could have one page setup for /products/gymshark-
arrival-regular-fit-t-shirt which we'll call a "parent" product.
The colour variations would then be our "child" products, with each of
them containing a canonical tag that points to the parent product. That would
look like this:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.gymshark.com/products/

gymshark-arrival-regular-fit-t-shirt">
(You can create a custom meta field to store the canonical URL)
Now you'll have 6 separate products for users, allowing you to get past the
100 variants limit while improving user experience. But from an SEO perspec-
tive, it's only one single page.
Solution 2. Use a product options app

A much easier way to solve this is with a Shopify app. There are many apps
that will allow you to add additional product options, not only variants.
Here are 4 of them:

• Infinite Options
• Product Options by Bold
• Product Customizer
• Product Builder
Make sure to consider usability also: is it easier for your customers to select
the option directly from the collection page rather than needing to click through
to another page first? Especially if it's a visual option.
The upside of these apps is they allow you to add options in a variety of ways.
A great example is all these options on Sapphire Eyewear:

They even allow you to upload your prescription:
Depending on your product options, this could be a great choice. Just be

careful to test this with a staging website to check for conflicts and issues be-
fore adding to your website.
Solution 3. Edit your theme to

merge products (not recommended)
The final option is more advanced and not recommended in most cases.
It's possible to create multiple products then use a bit of wizardry (coding)
to merge the options of these products into a single one.
It looks something like this:

1. Make a product with 100 variants.
2. Set the options you need.
3. Make another product with up to 100 variants.
4. Set the options you need, but make sure they are exactly the same as
the first product – both option order AND the option name used.
5. Use code to merge the multiple products together.
Jason Bowman wrote a tutorial for how to do this, you can read that here.
Make sure to read my guide to Shopify Sitemaps also, as you'll want to re-
move the extra pages from your sitemap later. Jason's approach to this is less
effective than the one shared here.

How do I get more than 100 variants on Shopify?
You can try any of the following:
1. Create additional products with internal links between.
2. Use a product options app.
3. Edit your theme to merge products.
How do I get more than 3 options on Shopify?

You can either:
1. Use Line Item Properties, however, this will not affect price or in-
ventory levels.
2. Use a product options app.
Is there a limit to products on Shopify?

No. Shopify allows unlimited products with many stores utilising up-
wards of 100,000.
Final Thoughts
While we can't "bypass" the 100 variants limit, there are plenty of ways to
get around it – some of which arguably create a better user experience. In most
cases, I'd recommend choosing one of the first two options.
Many stores here think about product options in a fairly traditional way, you
have the product name, then product options. This makes sense when ordering
from a single form or over the phone, but is it the best when purchasing online?
Say, you were purchasing some new curtains. Would you rather select the
style you like, then select the colour and lining afterwards?
Or would you prefer to filter by blackout lining on the collections page, then
see a list of all patterns and colours to visually compare right from the collection?
This depends on your store and products, but it's worth considering.
Beyond that, you should pay close attention to any SEO issues created by
these approaches. I'm definitely biased, but I'd suggest consulting with an SEO
during or shortly after implementing this.
130 | Product Tags Shopify SEO - Logeix
4.4
Product Tags
Products Tags are a fantastic feature of Shopify that allow your visitors to
narrow down product selection on collections. But from an SEO perspective,
they're a duplicate / thin content nightmare.
In this short guide, I'll explain what are product tags in Shopify, why they're
bad for SEO, and the many options to resolve this.
What are Shopify Product Tags?

When creating or modifying products on Shopify, one option you may come
across is "Tags".
Tags can be used to group and categorise products, along with allowing vis-
itors to filter products on your collection pages.
A single collection can often have 20, 50, 100 or more products.
Tags allow these to easily be narrowed down by your visitors, with a filter
menu like this:
Tags can also be used for additional functionality such as hiding products
with Shopify Apps or other types of settings.
Why are Product Tags bad for SEO?

For every product tag on your store, Shopify will automatically create a new
page under each collection that it applies.
Say you have a product tag named "colour_red" and it's being used for prod-
ucts across 5 different collections. This will automatically create 5 different
pages, except every one of them will be duplicate content with no ability to
customise them. You'll know you have these when you see URLs like this:
This can quickly add up, like this store:

Also if you look closely, the titles are not attractive to click in search results.
Nobody wants to click on Mens T-Shirts Tagged "colour_red".
But the even bigger problem is when you click onto these pages. Take this
for example:
The red circles show we're clearly on a tag page, but the page heading and
content is all identical to the collection. This page is an exact duplicate of the
parent collection, besides the filtered products. That means the H1, collection
description, content, meta description, and everything else that matters for
SEO is duplicated for each of these tag pages.
Even worse is the fact there's no default functionality built into Shopify to
customise any of these things. This leads to three issues:
1. Thin Content – This is a blanket term in SEO referring to pages that will
reduce the overall SEO quality of your website e.g. duplicate content pages
2. Wasted Crawl Budget – Search engines will be wasting a lot of crawl

resources on these tag pages, potentially leading to important pages
being missed
3. Missed Opportunities – Some of these pages may have good keyword

potential but by default can't be customised for SEO
Is my website's SEO affected by this?

If you're using product tags, the answer is mostly likely yes.
But here's how to check:
1. Do a Google search using a site: and intitle: operator
site:yourwebsite.com/collections/ intitle:tagged
This will give you a list of all indexed product tags, if there are none, you'll
need to manually check under your collections for filter options.
2. Open up the tag page and view the source code (right click > view
page source)
3. Check for a Canonical Tag or Noindex meta tag
You can do a search (Ctrl + F) for "canonical" or "noindex" to find these, if

none, they don't exist.
If there's a canonical tag, check if it's pointing to itself or the main collection.
It should point to the main collection.
4. If there's no canonical tag or noindex tag, check Robots.txt
Open yourwebsite.com/robots.txt and check if there's a rule disallowing

access to /collections/*/*.
If not, your product tags can be both crawled and indexed.

Fixing Product Tag SEO issues

There are multiple ways to resolve this, depending on your store and goals.
Canonicalise
The first way is to use a canonical tag pointing at the collection, it'll look like this:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/collections/

mens-t-shirts" />
To implement this, you'll need to edit your theme.liquid template file and
replace <link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" /> with:
{% if template contains 'collection' and current_tags %} <link

rel="canonical" href="{{ shop.url }}{{ collection.url }}" />
{% else %} <link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}"
/> {% endif %}
All we're doing here is notifying search engines that this page is a duplicate
of another one, then recommending them to index the other one instead (the
canonical URL).
Presuming search engines follow this recommendation, this will resolve the
thin content issue, but it doesn't save crawl budget.
Important Note: Be careful not to set these pages to canonicalised and noin-
dex, this is contradicting as we want the canonical URL to be indexed
NoIndex
Another simple solution is to set Product Tags to "noindex, follow". This is a
request to search engines not to add this page to their index (search results),
but still to follow links on the page.
This can be implemented by adding the following code to your theme.liquid

template file:
{% if template contains 'collection' and current_tags %} <meta

name="robots" content="noindex, follow" /> {% endif %}
This code snippet will set all product tag pages to noindex, so search engines
shouldn't pick them up. Or if they've already indexed them, they'll probably be
removed once re-crawled.
I wouldn't say this is better or worse than canonicalising, there's no addi-

tional downsides, but noindex tends to be a stronger signal than a canonical
tag – which acts as more of a recommendation.
It does share the same downside as canonicalising though, it doesn't save

crawl budget.
Block Crawl
With the recent added ability to modify Robots.txt on Shopify, another great
option is to block these tag pages being crawled altogether.
This can be done by modifying your robots.txt.liquid (may need created

first) to add an additional rule like this:

{%- endif -%}
This blocks robots from accessing /collections/any-collection/anything.

Which will perfectly cover the product tags, however this may lead to issues
depending on your website setup.
One issue would be if you're using default product links e.g. example.com/
collections/t-shirts/products/name-of-product as these will be blocked
from crawlers also.
So be careful using this one, probably best to consult with an SEO or at least
triple check it before and afterwards.
The upside of this is it'll resolve crawl budget issues and most likely prevent
the pages being indexed. Though if they're currently indexed and you'd like to
be sure, you may want to set them to "noindex" first for a few days, then block
crawl later.
Use Them As Sub-Categories

If you have very capable developers, it's possible (but not particularly efficient)
to customise these product tag pages to change the title tag, meta description,
H1, content, etc.
This isn't ideal, but it has the upside of SEO friendly URLs.
Normally if you had a collection for Sofas (/collections/sofas), as an ex-

ample, you'd have another for Leather Sofas (/collections/leather-sofas).
By customising a product tag, you could have a page under /collections/

sofas/leather.
This is user-friendly and an SEO friendly URL structure, but I wouldn't rec-
ommend it in most circumstances as it's not easily done within Shopify, though
I've seen a couple stores doing so.
Delete them
Not particularly a great option, especially if you're actually using them. But
worth mentioning nevertheless.
If you're not using product tags and your theme doesn't utilise them to fil-
ter products, it may be easy to just delete them all. This completely resolves
the problem.
Just be careful to 301 redirect them to the main collection so you don't create
a bunch of 404 pages. Especially if they're indexed or have backlinks.
The other options are significantly easier than this.

Recommendations
For most of our clients, we'll disallow access to them via Robots.txt, then
canonicalise them as a back up – just in case. The canonical tag does nothing
if search engines can't access the page, but it's only a backup if the Robots.txt
file is messed up.
I'd probably recommend this approach in most cases, but it's important to
make sure this robots.txt rule doesn't conflict with your website setup.
Even if you do it yourself, you may want to book an hour with an SEO con-
sultant to look it over and advise you. Otherwise a full SEO audit or campaign
will likely find other similar issues to this with your store.
140 | XML Sitemap Shopify SEO - Logeix
4.5
XML Sitemap
Your sitemap is an essential, but fairly easy part of SEO for your Shopify store.
Thankfully, it's built into Shopify and there's almost nothing to do. The key-
word being "almost". If you do absolutely nothing, you may run into problems.
In this guide, we'll cover all the fundamentals of sitemaps on Shopify and
how to optimise it for SEO.
What is a Shopify Sitemap?

A Shopify Sitemap is an XML file that search engines use to find all the
webpages on your website. Shopify automatically generates and updates your
sitemap to contain links to your products, collections, blog pages, and other
marketing pages.
Where is my sitemap on Shopify?

You can find your sitemap simply by adding /sitemap.xml to your website.
For example: yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml
What's in my Shopify Sitemap?

The Shopify sitemap is automatically created with parent and child sitemaps,
depending on the size of your website.
Sitemap Index File

The first sitemap you'll see is the parent sitemap aka index file. This is the
main /sitemap.xml file, which links to all the secondary i.e. child sitemaps.
You should see the following links:

• Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)
• Collections (sitemap_collections_1.xml)
• Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)
• Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)
It's also possible to have multiple product page sitemaps i.e.

sitemap_products_2.xml, sitemap_products_3.xml, etc.
Shopify has a limit of 5,000 pages per sitemap. If you hit that limit, they'll
automatically create a new collection. Hence, big stores may have several
product sitemaps.
Child Sitemap File

Opening any of the index file links will take you to a child sitemap containing
links to all your pages, along with other details.
Within them, you'll find information like:

• <url>: The URL of the page
• <lastmod>: The last modification date of the page
• <changefreq>: An estimation of how often the page is likely to be changed
• <image:loc>: The featured image of that page e.g. main product image
• <image:title>: The title of the page the image is on
Here's a real world example for collection pages:
These sitemaps give a list of all your pages to search engines to make finding
and crawling them easier.
How do I edit my sitemap on Shopify?

You kinda can't, let me explain:
You can't easily add a new sitemap, without a bit of a hack.
And you can't add pages to the existing sitemap.
This is an automatically generated file, which has its upsides – there's no need
to manually add or remove pages every time you update the website.
The downside is the severe lack of control.
Thankfully, there is one thing you can control:
Removing pages from the sitemap, well, with a little coding.
How can you remove pages from a sitemap in Shopify?

While it's barely talked about, there's a hidden field that allows you to remove
pages from the Shopify sitemap.
It's a meta field named seo.hidden.
You can find it and modify it here:
Ticking this triggers 3 actions:

1. It removes the page from the sitemap
2. It sets the page to noindex (a request to search engines to not add this
page to their results)
3. It sets the page to nofollow (a request to search engines to not follow
links on this page)
The first action is perfect, the latter two, not so much.
To explain, let's interrupt this tutorial with a quick lesson.
Why should you remove a page from the sitemap?
• The page is set to noindex (as this conflicts with being in the sitemap,
which is essentially a request to find and index the page)
• The page is canonicalised i.e. a duplicate of another page (as this, again,
conflicts with it being in the sitemap same as noindex)
The problem then is Shopify forcing "noindex, nofollow" on the page because
they're both optional. You may or may not want it to be noindex, it could also be
canonicalised. And you may or may not want links to be nofollow, most likely not.
Thankfully, this can be cleaned up with a bit of code. Ideally a developer

should do this.
Simply navigate to theme.liquid and replace

{{ content_for_header }} with:
{% capture content_for_header_fixed %}
{% endcapture %}
{% if product.metafields.seo.hidden == 1 or collection.
metafields.seo.hidden == 1 %}
{{ content_for_header_fixed | remove: '<meta name="robots"
content="noindex,nofollow">' }}
{% else %}
{% endif %}
Problem solved. You can now tick the seo.hidden meta field to remove pages
from sitemap, then manually set them to noindex or canonical.
How do I create a sitemap for Shopify?

There's only 2 reasons I imagine you'd want to do this:
1. Moving from another eCommerce platform – Google recommends
uploading the old sitemap to make crawling easier
2. Creating an image sitemap
The latter is probably easier with an app to save you needing to repeated-
ly update it.
As for the first one, it's kind of possible, with a hack:

1. Start by saving a copy of your old sitemap file or creating a new one
with a tool like Screaming Frog. Name this file "old_sitemap.xml".
2. From your Shopify Dashboard, go to Settings > Files, then upload the
old_sitemap.xml file. Once uploaded, it'll give you a URL beginning with
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/. Save this for later.
3. Go to Online Store > Navigation > URL Redirects and create a redirect
from /old_sitemap.xml to the file URL in step 2.
4. Double check it worked by opening yourwebsite.com/old_sitemap.xml
5. If so, submit this sitemap in Google Search Console. It may take a few
resubmissions to work, but you'll know it worked when it says "Success".
That's it, now Google will easily be able to crawl all your old URLs and see
they've been redirected to new ones.
How do I submit my Shopify sitemap

to Google Search Console?
Setting Up Google Search Console
First, you need to verify your store with GSC. If you have already done
this, skip to the next step.
Head to Google Search Console, then log into your Google account. You
should see something like this:
You can either verify your site with a .txt record (Domain) or with an HTML
Tag (URL prefix). I recommend the former.
In the "Enter domain or subdomain" field, write down your store domain. Google
will show you a custom .txt code to add into your DNS configuration.
Select your domain name provider in the drop down menu, then follow the
instructions to authorise Google to access your DNS account. If your DNS
provider isn't on this page, check out this list of hosts.
Your domain should now be verified and you can use Google Search Console.
Submit Shopify Sitemap

1. Log into Google Search Console.
2. In the sidebar, navigate to Index > Sitemaps.
3. Under the Add a new sitemap form, enter your sitemap file name i.e.
/old_sitemap.xml.
4. Click the blue Submit button. After a few seconds, you should see "Site-
map submitted successfully".
If Google throws you an error message, make sure your sitemap URL is for-
matted correctly.
Google Search Console Sitemap Errors

You've submitted your sitemap to GSC, but it's not working, here's two com-
mon issues we come across and how to fix them.
Couldn't Fetch The Sitemap

This is frustratingly a very vague problem, so it's quite hard to diagnose.
Make sure your sitemap URL is correct and you've set up Google Search
Console under the right URL. I'd recommend using your root domain – and
definitely not your myshopify.com URL.
If nothing else, try resubmit it a few times.
"Indexed, not submitted in sitemap"

Sometimes your sitemap will submit successfully, but a deeper dive into
the Index Coverage Report will reveal lots of URLs that say "indexed, not sub-
mitted in sitemap".
Is this a problem?
Probably not. As long as you've not manually removed pages from the sitemap
that aren't noindexed or canonicalised, then it's probably a few common issues.
These are:
• False Positives. Sometimes this report makes mistakes and the pages
are in the sitemap.
• Pagination. Pagination pages are deliberately not shown in the sitemap
and shouldn't be.
• Vendor / Types pages. Shopify creates a collection for each vendor
and product type. These are low-quality pages you won't want in-
dexed anyway.
• /collections/all. This is a default page, not something you'd want to
rank, nor pagination on top of this collection.
In short, Shopify deserves credit for setting up sitemaps well out of the box.
Any issues here are unlikely to be something to worry about, unless you've
unintentionally created issues yourself.
Final Thoughts
While Shopify provides limited control over the sitemap, there's at least
two benefits:
Firstly, the sitemap is set up well out of the box with little customisation
needed. All your pages will be added to this automatically, no need to ever
consider it.
Secondly, while it takes a bit of development, it is possible to remove pages

from the sitemap and create a new manual sitemap.
For most people though, besides submitting your sitemap to GSC, you can
do nothing and be confident it's all set up correctly.
153 | Editing Robots.txt Shopify SEO - Logeix
4.6
Editing Robots.txt
After years of waiting, we're finally able to edit the Robots.txt file on our
Shopify stores (both standard and Shopify Plus).
Here's how to edit it, when you should customise it, and how this is useful
for Shopify SEO.
What is Robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a file containing rules for robots/crawlers accessing your web-
site. An example rule could be "disallow", where you set a specific directory or
URL as disallowed so specific or all robots are asked not to access it.
This file is always located at:
yourwebsite.com/robots.txt
Having rules in your Robots.txt doesn't necessarily "force" bots to adhere to

them, but most good bots including googlebot, ahrefsbot, bingbot, duckduckbot,
etc will check this file before crawling.
How to edit Robots.txt on Shopify

1. Open your Shopify Dashboard
2. Go to Online Store > Themes
3. In the Live theme section, click Actions > Edit code
4. Under the templates section, click "Add a new template"
5. Change "create a new template for" to "robots.txt"
6. Click "Create template"
This will create a Robots.txt.liquid file with the following code:

{%- comment -%}
# Caution! Please read https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/
promoting-marketing/seo/editing-robots-txt
{% endcomment %}
{{- group.user_agent -}}
{% for rule in group.rules %}

{{- rule -}}
{% endfor %}

{{ group.sitemap }}
{%- endif -%}
{% endfor %}
This template file directly modifies the Robots.txt file, while this default code
adds all the default rules Shopify use out of the box.
Note: I'd highly suggest not removing these rules, most are optimised well by Shopify
Now we've got the file, we can customise it however we see fit.
Customising Robots.txt.liquid
There are 3 customisations we may want to make to this file:
• Add a new rule to an existing group
• Remove a rule from an existing group
• Add custom rules
Group refers to a set of rules for specific crawler(s).

Add a new rule to an existing group

Here is the file modified to include a few default rules we tend to use for clients:

{{- group.user_agent }}
{%- for rule in group.rules -%}

{{ rule }}
{%- endfor -%}

{{ 'Disallow: /collections/all*' }}
{{ 'Disallow: /*?q=*' }}
{{ 'Disallow: /blogs/*/tagged/*' }}
{%- endif -%}

{{ group.sitemap }}
{%- endif -%}
{% endfor %}
What this code says is if the user_agent (Robots name) is equal to *, which
applies to all robots, then disallow the following:
• /collections/all – This will block the default collection containing a
list of all products incl. the pagination for this
• /*?q= – This will block the default vendors and types collection pages
being crawled
• /collections/*/* – This will block product tags being crawled (be
careful with this, it may prevent products being crawled also if you
don't customise internal links)
• /blogs/*/tagged – This will block blog tags being crawled
The * applies a wildcard to mean "anything here" i.e.

/anything?q=anything will be blocked.
Remove a default rule from an existing group

While not recommended, if needed default rules can be removed from the
Robots.txt file.
Here's the default Shopify Robots.txt and rules for your reference:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /a/downloads/-/*
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /orders
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /8203042875/checkouts
Disallow: /8203042875/orders
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /collections/*sort_by*
Disallow: /*/collections/*sort_by*
Disallow: /collections/*+*
Disallow: /collections/*%2B*
Disallow: /collections/*%2b*
Disallow: /*/collections/*+*
Disallow: /*/collections/*%2B*
Disallow: /*/collections/*%2b*
Disallow: /blogs/*+*
Disallow: /blogs/*%2B*
Disallow: /blogs/*%2b*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*+*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*%2B*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*%2b*
Disallow: /*?*oseid=*
Disallow: /*preview_theme_id*
Disallow: /*preview_script_id*
Disallow: /policies/
Disallow: /*/*?*ls=*&ls=*
Disallow: /*/*?*ls%3D*%3Fls%3D*
Disallow: /*/*?*ls%3d*%3fls%3d*
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /apple-app-site-association
Sitemap: YOURWEBSITE.COM/sitemap.xml
# Google adsbot ignores robots.txt unless specifically named!

User-agent: adsbot-google
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /orders
User-agent: Nutch
Disallow: /
User-agent: AhrefsBot
Crawl-delay: 10
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /orders
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /search
User-agent: AhrefsSiteAudit
Crawl-delay: 10
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /orders
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /search
User-agent: MJ12bot
Crawl-Delay: 10
User-agent: Pinterest
Crawl-delay: 1
Let's say we wanted to remove the rule blocking /policies/, here's an ex-
ample code to do that:

{{- group.user_agent }}
{%- for rule in group.rules -%}

{%- unless rule.directive == 'Disallow' and rule.value ==
'/policies/' -%}
{{ rule }}
{%- endunless -%}
{%- endfor -%}

{{ group.sitemap }}
{%- endif -%}
{% endfor %}
All we're doing is saying if there's a "Disallow" rule with the value "/policies/"
don't show this. Or more accurately, show all rules unless it's this one.
Add custom rules

If you'd like to apply rules that don't apply to a default group (*, adsbot-google,
Nutch, AhrefsBot, AhrefsSiteAudit, MJ12bot, and Pinterest) then you can add
them at the bottom of the template file.
For example, if you wanted to block the WayBackMachine you could add
the following:
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /
Or if you wanted to add an additional sitemap, you could add this:
Sitemap: [sitemap-url]
Why customise Robots.txt?

If you're not an SEO, you may be wondering why this even matters.
Let me explain.
It comes down to both:

1. Crawl Budget
2. Thin Content
Crawl Budget
There is a technical SEO concept known as Crawl Budget, it's a term describ-
ing the amount of resources search engines allocate to crawling each website.
In short:
Search engines can't crawl every page of the entire web regularly (it's too
many!). So they use algorithms to decide how much resources to allocate to
each website.
If your website requires more resources than is allocated to it, then pages
will be skipped from crawling regularly.
For SEO, you want search engines like Google to regularly crawl your website
so they're tracking your improvements. If they're not crawling these pages, they
have no idea how they've changed or improved, so you won't see any ranking
improvements.
Where this matters is when low quality pages are being crawled and import-
ant ones are being left out.
So when SEOs discuss "crawl budget", they're specifically referring to how

can we best utilise the crawl budget we have.
By utilising Robots.txt, we can specifically block bots from crawling certain

pages or directories, which reduces the wasted crawl budget.
Before this the only solution we had was setting pages to "noindex", which
helps for thin content (next section), but still requires robots to crawl the pages.
Thin Content
Thin content is an SEO term referring to content that adds no value to search
engine users.
If you go to YOURSTORE.COM/collections/vendors?q=BRAND, you'll see a

default page created for any vendors you've set in your Shopify Dashboard.
This page has no content on it, no description, and can't be customised in any
way. Not to mention the ugly URL.
We'd call this "thin content", it's unlikely to rank for anything in Google with
all these downsides.
The best solution would be to remove or block this page, then manually
create a new Shopify Collection to target this vendor/brand name, which can
be fully customised.
Before we could edit Robots.txt, our only solution for this was to set these
pages to "noindex, follow". Essentially requesting search engines to follow links
on this page, but don't add it this page to their search engine results.
This worked, but it still led to potentially hundreds of pages being crawled first.
Now we can disallow these from being crawled altogether, which both
reduces the thin content and saves crawl budget.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully that last section didn't lose anyone, this can get quite technical.
Shopify finally trusting us to edit our own Robots.txt file is a huge upgrade for
Shopify stores, however I would urge caution to non-SEOs and non-developers
when doing so.
It's entirely possible to block your entire website and create serious issues
with this functionality.
So by all means customise it, we make modifications for all of our clients, but
be careful to do it right.
You can also test rules using Google's Robots tester tool inside of GSC.
05
Blogging on Shopify
165 | Blogging on Shopify Shopify SEO - Logeix
If you’ve looked into digital marketing today, you’ve probably seen two con-
flicting ideas:
1. Every business should have a blog.
2. Nobody reads blogs anymore.
The truth is, they’re both kinda right.
Blogging as a community engagement tool has mostly been reduced to social

media instead.
But as a business growth tool? It’s huge.
Let me explain why and how you can capitalise on this.
Why you need a blog

Some people will tell you to start a blog to keep your website “fresh”.
But that’s pointless, you can update your existing pages for that.
A blog has one purpose only: to increase traffic.
You can do this in two ways:

1. Rank your blog posts in search engines.
2. Increase the rankings of your category pages via internal linking.
Let me explain…
Informational Intent
We talk with a lot of eCommerce brands at Logeix, and while most of our
recommendations are the same – sometimes their specific niche is different.
One place this can vary wildly is intent.

Let’s say someone goes to Google and searches for “best carry on luggage”,
what do you think that person is looking for?
If you said a shop, you’re probably wrong. Most SEOs would guess they’re
looking for a comparison, which usually would be a guest post.
As we can see, the search results match that:

This is what we call informational intent.
But what if someone searches for “carry on luggage”, most people would
presume that means they’re looking for a store to purchase it.
Unfortunately, a quick Google search shows differently:
While there are 3 eCommerce category pages in the results, the vast majority
are informational, including comparisons and airport sizing advice.
This is what we call mixed intent.
The truth is that not all keywords in your market will be transactional intent,
some will be informational, and in many cases, important ones will be mixed.
(In fact, the trend we’re seeing is a shift towards mixed in most industries)
This means it’s extremely important to not only have your category page sell-
ing carry-on luggage, but also a review blog post comparing the best carry-on
luggage, and possibly even another with sizing guides for different airlines
and countries.
Not only will this open up possibilities for search rankings, it’ll also help with
ranking your category pages when these are utilised for internal linking.
Middle of Funnel
While there may be potential simply reviewing your existing category pages
and identifying mixed intent keywords, there’s likely even more in identifying
middle of funnel keywords.
Your middle of funnel content is the bread and butter of ecommerce blogs.
While top of funnel can drive traffic and improve brand awareness, MoF is
where you’ll increase both traffic and sales.
Let’s say you sell protein powder. Your category pages will offer your selec-
tion of protein powder, vegan protein powder, whey protein powder, chocolate
protein powder, etc.
But in the Middle of Funnel stage, what are people searching for?
5 minutes of research shows “best protein powder”, “how to use protein

powder”, “what does protein powder do”, “what is protein powder good for”,
“how much protein powder per day”, etc.
These are likely searched by people that are interested in buying protein
powder – which is an even bigger audience than people directly looking to
purchase it.
Creating content around these topics allows you to massively increase your
traffic potential while also increasing sales. Most ecommerce websites should
see more traffic from their blog than their category pages.
When should you start blogging?

The difficult part isn’t understanding the opportunity of blogging, it’s com-
paring and deciding between other channels. There are almost too many
opportunities.
To make this easier, here are times I would consider blogging:
Low Budget
If you’re on a low budget, then your main form of leverage for growth is going
to be labour. Your own labour, for that matter.
In this case, I’d strongly consider blogging if your keyword research shows
potential. This will be quite slow, but over 6-12+ months of consistent targeted
blogging, you could generate a sizable amount of traffic and sales.
At this point, you’re also unable to run ads for faster results. So either way,
you’re likely limited to organic traffic sources.
Longer-Term Strategy
If you’re already running paid ads and/or already an established business
looking for a longer term, consistent traffic source, then SEO and content
marketing will be perfect for you.
It’ll be slow to build up to a significant level of traffic, but in the meantime,

you’ll have traffic and sales from other sources.
Once it starts to pick up though and the results compound, it could be a sig-
nificant revenue stream for your business.
Competitive Ads
If you’re in a market where the ad costs are constantly rising and/or it’s
massively cutting into your margins, especially if you’re already using Google
Search Ads, you should strongly consider SEO / content marketing.
Again, the main downside is the time to establish this and match or beat the
level of traffic you can get from ads.
But once you’ve got there, your acquisition costs will drastically decrease.
And if you’re in a situation where it’s becoming hard to remain profitable from
ads, it’d be smart to get this in place before that becomes a reality.
Difficult Products
Another time you may want to consider content marketing is if you have
high-priced and/or difficult to understand products.
Take my podcasting setup as an example.

I have a Heil PR-40 which costs about $400. That’s useless without the stand
though, which is an extra $100 or so. And the windscreen for another $20. And
something to plug it into, I bought the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 for around $200.
The point I’m making is this:

1. I have no idea what any of these things are. You can bet I did a lot of
research to even figure out this combination.
2. If I’m spending $700 on microphone equipment for a small hobby pod-
cast, you can be sure I’m checking reviews and guides to make sure it’s
a good investment.
Should you host your blog on Shopify

or a subdomain with Wordpress?
You should host your blog on Shopify.
The only reason to even consider using WordPress is for the added control
and customisation of your blog. But that’s achievable with Shopify using apps
like Shogun page builder.
As a growing or well-established business, it’s adding additional unneeded

complexity to your business by having to manage two completely indepen-
dent websites.
Managing separate web hosting, a separate website (maintenance), separate

design, separate logins, and then integrating this with your existing website
and business – for a little additional control? It makes no sense.
Shopify is an ecommerce platform first, blogging platform second. Absolutely,

but so is your business.
How to publish blog posts on Shopify

From your Shopify Admin dashboard, head to Online Store > Blog posts,
then click the Create blog post button.
Shopify’s blog editor is actually very similar to its other pages, so this should
be familiar to you. You may notice a new Excerpt field, which is a summary of
the post that appears on the home and/or blogs page. If you do not enter an
excerpt, Google will automatically generate it.
Start creating your blog by giving it a title and some content first. I recom-
mend planning out the content in a separate Google Docs file beforehand to
better structure your post.
Remember to add tags and a featured image. You can choose any user as the
author of the article. Shopify comes with a blog called “news” by default, but
you can create a new name if you’d like.
Head down to Search engine listing preview, click Edit website SEO. Here,
you can edit page title, meta description, but more importantly, you can set a
URL handle. Be sure to target relevant keywords to maximise your SEO.
That’s it. You can choose to publish your post immediately or schedule for
a later time by picking an option on the Visibility panel. If you wish to update
the blog later, you can find it in the same Blog posts menu.
How to find content ideas

Now that your blog is in place, here’s how to quickly find a year’s worth of
content ideas.
Existing Category and Products Analysis

The absolute easiest starting point is with your existing categories. Start by
looking up each of your categories in a tool like SEMRush, compare the top 10
search results:
What’s the intent here? Are they all category pages similar to yours, informa-
tional content, or mixed intent? If the intent is anything other than transactional,
consider creating a complimentary information blog post to match the intent.
For example, if you’ve got a category for “carry on luggage”, based on the
search results I’d consider creating a piece of content with a “carry on luggage
size guide” and/or “what is the best carry on luggage”. Both seem to be ranked
favourably by Google.
Then I would scroll up to the Keyword Variations, Questions, and Related

Keywords section and look for other ideas in here:
This approach is much more manual, but it’ll reveal a lot missed by the next
much easier approach.
Content Gap Analysis

The easiest approach though is to do a content gap analysis (aka keyword gap).
Many tools like SEMRush can do a basic version of this within a matter of
seconds by simply entering your website along with a few competitors. 30 sec-
onds later, you’ll be presented with a list of all the keywords your competitors
rank for that your website doesn’t.
Simply find their Keyword Gap tool under Competitive Research:

Enter your website along with some competitors, then click Compare:
You’ll now be given a list of all the keywords your competitors are competing
for, along with the competitors’ position, search volume, keyword difficulty,
and other metrics.
Make sure to pay attention to the tabs, by default it’ll be set to “shared” i.e.
keywords where all competitors rank. But you’ll likely find a lot more oppor-
tunities under “Untapped“, “Missing”, and “Weak”.
You'll also find some opportunities under the "Top Opportunities for"
section above:
Shopify Blogging Best Practices

Always use Keyword Research
A lot of brands create content almost randomly. And while market knowledge
can be invaluable in creating content, if you’re new to this, I’d highly recommend
doing keyword research.
That means using a tool like SEMRush to verify people are searching for this.
But more importantly, checking what else they’re searching for.
There are 230 global searches per month for “shopify blog seo”, but “blogging
on shopify” has a whopping 8,900 searches per month. There’s a reason it’s in
the title of this blog post.
Prioritise Middle of Funnel

If you sell workout supplements, it’s probably good for your brand to have
content and traffic around workout tips.
That’s branding 101. If every time someone is looking for exercise tips, work-
out tutorials, and diet advice – they see your brand name, it’s much more likely
they’ll buy from you later.
But in the mid-term, do you know what’s more effective?
When they’re interested in purchasing workout supplements and looking for

comparisons, reviews, and advice for buying; that your brand and store come up.
This is what we call “Middle of Funnel”. It should be your priority for all con-
tent until you’ve run out of ideas.
Create Content in Topical Clusters

Google measures your E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trust) based on topics,
not only overall. You may be highly qualified to give dental advice, but that
doesn’t mean you’re qualified to give financial advice.
For SEO, it’s usually most effective to focus on a single topical cluster at a time.
This means if you sell a whole range of workout supplements, start with cre-
ating content around protein powder, then slowly expand from there.
You can establish your website as a trusted expert source for protein pow-
der information first, before increasing this to other topics. This is achieved by
having multiple pieces of content on a topic.
Recommend Relevant Products

Don’t start a blog only to keep your website updated. That’s a waste of time.
You should be increasing traffic and ideally sales too, hence the Middle of
Funnel prioritisation.
One way to increase sales is by featuring relevant products within your ar-
ticles. You can either do this at the end of the blog post or at the relevant part.
For example, recipes are a perfect way to promote ingredients your readers
can purchase in your store. But don’t just name the ingredient, show them the
product and make it clear they can purchase it on your website.
Use Internal Links

Internal links are a not-so-secret weapon in every SEO's arsenal, but often
under-utilised.
This is where you link from one page to another on your own website.
It’s massively important for creating topical relevance (previous point), as

well as increasing the authority (and therefore rankings) of individual pages.
If you’re trying to rank your blog posts, link to 2-3 relevant ones within or at
the bottom of your article – especially any within this topical cluster.
But at a minimum, link to your category page on this topic. It can really help
the rankings and also send traffic to your store.
Optimise Content for SEO

Doing keyword research already puts you ahead of most blogs, but to fully
maximise your efforts, you’ll want to optimise your content.
In general, this comes down to:

• Use keyword research to identify blog post ideas.
• Write an optimised title tag, meta description, and H1 around
these keywords.
• Include the main keyword in the article (usually near the beginning).
• Compare competitors articles to ensure yours is as good or better –
reviewing their heading structure can be useful for this.
• Analyse their content with a tool like Surfer to understand how to opti-
mise the page from a keywords, phrases, and topical coverage approach.
Include images, videos, and visuals

Another way to support your SEO, but more so your potential customers, is
to make your blog posts look good.
This includes your website design, but also the usage of images, videos, table,
charts, and any visuals to make your content more interesting to read.
Nothing will create a bigger bounce rate than a huge wall of text.
And bounce rate (i.e. someone bouncing off your website back to the search
results) is a potentially negative ranking factor.
Shopify Blog Examples

If you’re looking for some examples of brands executing on this, here’s 3
successful Shopify blogs you can get inspiration from.
Beardbrand
Name: Beardbrand
Blog Organic Traffic: 195.4k
Blog Keywords: 36.5k
Beardbrand creates and sells products to help men grow, style, and manage
awesome beards. Interestingly, they started as a blog first then store after,
which no doubt has contributed to their huge success.
Their blog, Urban Beardsman, has 907 blog posts as of writing this and brings
in a significant amount of traffic for their brand.
Their most popular blog post ranks #3 for “beard” with 165,000 searches per
month and #2 for “beard styles” with 110,000 searches per month.
But it’s not all Middle of Funnel content, they’re creating content for their
ideal audience, not just content that directly relates to their products. Looking
through their blog, you’ll find content on topics like “best sunglasses for men”,
workout tips, and even book recommendations for men.
A further look will also reveal other strategies we mentioned in this article,
such as internal linking:
Using call to actions to sell products:
And even featured products at the bottom of every blog post:

Luxy
Name: Luxy
Blog Organic Traffic: 213k
Luxy sells clip-in hair extensions and accessories worldwide for easy,
beautiful hair.
As of writing this article, they’ve published 718 blog posts covering all
things hair.
Their most popular blog post “How to do a French braid”, ranks #2 for “french
braid” with 165,000 search volume per month. One smart strategy you’ll see
immediately on this blog post is their use of a quiz for collecting emails:
Once you fill out this little quiz, you’ll be presented with an option to “Enter
your email to see your results!”.
Beyond this, they’re publishing a significant amount of content related to

hair styles, hair care, hair tutorials, hair accessories, celebrities hair, and more.
This is both Middle and Top of Funnel.
A closer look at their blog posts will show a significant amount of in-
ternal linking:
And relevant products featured at the bottom of each post:

Gaiam
Name: Gaiam
Blog Organic Traffic: 113.7k
Gaiam is a lifestyle brand selling yoga, fitness, and wellness products.
As of writing this article, they’ve published 471 blog posts on topics related
to mindfulness, yoga, nutrition, wellness, fitness, and more.
Their most popular blog post on meditation, ranks for keywords including
“how to meditate” in position 7 with 74,000 searches per month, as well as
“meditation” in #13 with 246,000 searches per month.
Most of their content is relevant to their product categories, even if not tech-
nically Middle of Content. This includes articles like yoga poses for swimmers,
while while not relevant to purchasing yoga products, it’s at least targeted at
their ideal customers.
Others are a bit closer to the Top of Funnel style though, such as Pre-Wedding
Wellness tips. Again, focused more on the type of person they want to attract,
rather than trying to sell something at this moment.
Despite their simple blog design though, you’ll still see internal links to sprin-
kled throughout their content:
And many of these leading to product category pages on their store:
Some posts also have a bit more of a call to action too:
Though, I believe they could feature products a little better like Luxy
shown previously.
Final Thoughts
Shopify isn’t an amazing blogging platform, it’s by far better as an eCommerce
platform. But it’s also good enough.
And blogging for the right businesses can have a massive impact on not only
your traffic, also your bottom line. At least, when done right.
If you fit into one of the 4 categories explained above, I’d highly recommend
leveraging a blog as an additional traffic source.
There’s nothing quite like having customers search for their problem, choose
to go to your website to learn the solution, then choose to buy your products
as a result. No interruptions needed, they choose to go looking for you.
06
Link Building for Shopify
197 | Link Building for Shopify Shopify SEO - Logeix
What is link building?

Link building is the process of acquiring backlinks to your website. Backlinks
are hyperlinks from other websites.
While the importance of backlinks has arguably lowered in recent years, it’s
still a hugely important signal of trust and authority. The fact many other
websites link to yours, signals they trust/like/vouch for your content therefore
are recommending it to their own visitors.
Look at any top ranking website for any remotely competitive keyword, you’ll
usually find they have hundreds (if not thousands) of websites linking to them.
Which pages to build backlinks to

One important decision you’ll need to make over deliberate link building is
which page to point the links at.
The main decision being between bottom of funnel (i.e. product or product
category pages) or mid/top of funnel (i.e. content).
The actual answer is that it depends on what works for your competitors.
But the easy answer is that backlinks tend to be more effective when pointed
at the page you intend to rank i.e. your product category pages (usually).
This can be determined with a very simple link gap analysis.

Let’s say we want to rank for the keyword “office chairs“, here’s a quick Ahrefs
SERP analysis:
Here’s what we can see here:

• Domain rating (DR) is the overall authority/power of the website and Do-
mains is the number of different websites linking to this specific page
• If you’re furniture-work.co.uk, you should be considering that the top
site only has 12 more referring domains than you, so you can build more
backlinks to this page, but you may also want to consider other pages
• However if you’re officefurnitureonline.co.uk, there’s a lot more room
to build backlinks to this specific page
• Another consideration is that many pages like Dunelm, John Lewis,
and Wayfair have much less links; however, these should be ignored
as they’re significantly higher DR
This is an example of a very simple link gap analysis, the point is we’re deter-
mining our strategy based on the competition.
Link building factors

If we get into the details, there’s a lot of factors that influence the quality
of a backlink.
DoFollow vs NoFollow
If you don’t trust a website, you can mark it as “nofollow“. This doesn’t com-
pletely remove the value of the link, but makes it much less effective than a
standard dofollow link.
There’s also variations of this like sponsored, which act similar to nofollow.
If you’re doing link building, make sure you’re not putting in all this effort
for nofollow or sponsored links.
Anchor Text
The anchor text is the text of the link, this is one of the ways search engines
can determine the relevance.
If the anchor text is click here, it’s quite vague. But if it’s office chairs, clearly
I’m linking to a page about office chairs.
This is an important factor so make sure you’re planning this when building
links. Also be careful not to be overly aggressive in optimising this, that can
look unnatural and cause issues too.
Relevance
Beyond anchor text relevance, there’s relevance of the actual page linking to
you and relevance of the overall website containing that link.
A link from the BBC may be great, but if I run a clothing store I want a link
from a huge clothing website like ASOS.
It’s not necessarily the strongest or biggest website that’s better, as relevance
is also weighed into the effectiveness of a link.
Domain Rating
Presuming relevance is considered though, you should consider the Domain
Rating (DR) or Domain Authority (DA).
These are all different ways of measuring the authority of the overall website.
Generally speaking, the higher the better presuming it hasn’t been manipu-
lated and follow other factors mentioned here.
URL Rating
Beyond the overall domain authority, you also have a URL Rating (UR) or Page
Authority (PA).
This is a measure of how much of an authority the specific page link-

ing to you has.
I don’t particularly worry about this, but generally speaking if the page has
a great piece of content, then it’ll get internal links from other pages on their
website and backlinks from other websites.
Both of these things result in a better backlink for you.

Linked Page
The final factor I’d strongly consider is which page you’ll be linking to.
For the most effectiveness, always link to the specific page you would
like to rank.
But as explained in the “Which pages to build backlinks to” section, you want
to make sure it’s not too different from competitors. If they have 10 links to
the page, but you have 100, it looks odd.
How to do link building for Shopify stores

For Shopify, there’s only 3 core strategies I’d recommend using for building links:
Business Directories
For brand new websites, you need some presence online.
I’ll presume you’re already going to create social media profiles, therefore
my recommendation for additional presence and starter links is registering to
business directories like Yellow Pages, Yelp, and local or industry specific ones.
These won’t help you rank, but it’s a starting point as part of an overall back-
link profile.
For existing businesses with websites for many years, you likely have links
like this that naturally occurred over time.
Outreach Links
Outreach is where you connect with webmasters, bloggers, and writers to
persuade them into linking to your website.
The actual persuasion element is usually an incentive in the form of payment,

mutual value (i.e. helpful for their visitors), promotion, or similar.
This is our bread and butter approach to backlinks.
We can email websites and offer to write content for their blog, pay to get
a link within existing content, send them a free product in exchange for link,
improve their resource list with our amazing content/tool, etc.
For example, for this Shopify SEO training I may send an email like:
Hey [NAME],
Awesome job with your Shopify setup guide. You really break down every step
well and I’m loving the clean design for your blog articles, super easy to read.
I noticed you didn’t mention a few SEO fixes that can be fixed upfront to
prevent future issues, like:
1. Canonicalising product tags
2. Noindexing Vendor collections
3. Noindexing blog tags
I actually have an amazing (yes, I’m biased) tutorial that breaks these down:
[LINK]
Maybe your visitors would benefit from adding these to your checklist, with
a link to the tutorial for fixing them?
Or let me know if there’s another way I can help out.
Cheers,
Daryl
Amazing Content
To make your outreach as effective as possible, you should create
amazing content.
If your content is unique, more detailed, more visually appealing; or better

in any way then it’ll naturally attract links.
This can be collection and product pages, though generally they’re much more
difficult to acquire links to without guest posting or paying for them.
But blog content and tools are extremely easy.
Especially if you create “link bait”.
Let’s say you create a guide on how to buy an office chair, it may get links,
but it’s not that exciting. There’s probably a hundred other guides on the topic.
However, if you conduct a study or collect research on how often the aver-
age person sits in their office chair, maybe broken down for different types of
jobs. Along with research on the damaging effects of sitting – even if it’s not
your own study/research. This could be cited by all types of websites including
news outlets.
Calculators are another great example.
Sell mattresses? Create a calculator to determine how much sleep you should
get or when the optimal time to sleep and wake up is.
That’s exactly what Nectar have done:

More importantly, look how effective it is for landing backlinks:
That’s 353 backlinks from 123 different websites.

Types of link building

Guest Posts
Got an idea for a piece of content that will work very well with someone
else’s audience? Offer to write a guest post.
This is a great opportunity to not only get a link, but also build up your brand
when done right.
For example, a guest post I wrote for Ahrefs (a popular SEO tool) has resulted
in probably hundreds, if not many more, visitors to my website.
Mostly from this sidebar on the right of the article:

As you can see, the article was fairly popular with 51 linking websites and
59 tweets referring to it.
Blogger Links
If you don’t want to write a full article, or pay a writer, an easier alternative
is blogger links. These may also be referred to as link insertions.
This is where you find a relevant blog with existing content that is relevant
to your business, then you convince them to link to you.
The simplest form of incentivising here is payment, though of course other

ways will work too.
Skyscraper
Skyscraper technique is an approach to landing free links by simply creating
the best piece of content.
It’s based on the idea that if you have a taller skyscraper, everyone will im-
mediately begin talking about you instead.
Except now you replace skyscraper with content.
Create the best piece of content in your niche, then approach websites linking
to inferior content and suggest they link to you also.
Broken Link Building

As you probably know running an eCommerce store, it’s very difficult to stay
on top of everything.
Sometimes products will go out of stock for a while, or permanently.

Rules or laws may change what you’re allowed to say, requiring a lot of con-
tent changes.
And over time you can potentially have hundreds of blog posts with various
links all over the place.
This can result in broken links. Links that lead to a missing (404) page, which
is a great opportunity for us.
Broken link building is where we find those broken links, then reach out and
offer our content as a replacement. An interesting starting point may be to look
at your competitors broken backlinks.
In Ahrefs, you can do this under Site Explorer > Enter domain > Broken un-
der Backlinks:
Then you’ll be given a list of all the broken backlinks to this website:
Now if you sell the same products or have similar (ideally better) content, why
not reach out to these websites and offer to link to your better working page?
Unlinked Mentions
A great quick win is to find unlinked mentions of your brand name, then ask
them to link to you.
Ahrefs Content Explorer is an easy way of doing this, do a search for your
brand name in content, then select “highlight unlinked domains“:
This gives us a list of websites that mention our brand name and highlights
the ones that don’t link to us.
In this case, it’d probably be very easy to get links from these 3 highlighted
websites by simply emailing them and asking.
How many backlinks do you need?

It depends.
As there’s many factors that influence SEO rankings, even the effectiveness
of backlinks, it’s hard to pin-point an exact number.
We can estimate quite well though, based on analysing our top ranking
competitors.
Let’s say this is our website:
I’ve filtered these by DoFollow and DR30+ to try reduce low quality backlinks
from the count. We can see there are 105 referring domains in total.
But let’s go ahead and apply that same criteria to a leading competitor:
You can see here they have 276 referring domains.

If we then checked an additional 2-3 competitors, we may see the average

is more like 203.
In this case we know we need in the region of 98 referring domains.
Over 24 months, that’s 4 per month. Plus enough to keep up with the new
backlinks our competitors are building every month.
Avoiding spam links

Hopefully this article gives you some context behind why backlinks are im-
portant, how to start building them, and how many you’ll need.
The thing you need to be extremely careful of though is spam links.
Yes, you can buy backlinks from Fiverr.
And you probably get spam messages daily trying to sell you backlinks.
At least I do.
But these are almost all low quality links that will hopefully do nothing to
your website, or worst case scenario, damage your rankings.
I’d recommend checking any website you’re looking for to check for things like:
• Is this a real website someone cares about?
• Check the wayback machine to see if the domain has been
purchased and rebuilt
• Is the website relevant to your website? Not a general blog setup
to sell links
• Does this website have real organic traffic?
• Is the organic traffic trending upwards? Or at least not declining?
• Does this website have high quality backlinks itself?
Ultimately, be careful you’re building high quality links. Blog comments, forum
posts, social bookmarking sites, account profiles, and other spammy techniques
like this will not help your rankings.
Final Thoughts
Despite the increasing importance of Technical SEO, On Page SEO, and con-
tent; backlinks are still a hugely important ranking factor.
Leaving this out of your SEO strategy is a mistake and will make competing
that much harder.
Even if you don’t have a large budget for this, I’d look into some quick win
options like unlinked mentions, broken link building, and the skyscraper tech-
nique if your content is amazing.
This combined with onsite changes will put you miles ahead of most.
07
Shopify Speed Optimisation
213 | Shopify Speed Optimisation Shopify SEO - Logeix
One of the most common problems our Shopify clients run into is slow
loading pages.
But is Shopify actually slow?
Not at all.
In fact, even out of the box Shopify can be pretty quick. But when cleaned
up with a few core concepts like image optimisation, lazy loading, and app
analysis and optimisation; you can make any store lightning fast.
Here’s how to do that…
Why optimise your site speed?

Page speed is hugely important for conversion rates i.e. your actual website
visitors. The slower your pages load, the higher your bounce rate, therefore
the less people will stay on your website.
From an SEO perspective, while having a lightning fast website may not nec-
essarily increase rankings, having a slow or inconsistent loading website will
most definitely damage them.
Therefore, the question becomes “How fast do your web pages need to load?”
According to the Google Webmaster Team when asked what a “good respon-
sive time” to aim for, they said:
Studies by Akamai claim 2 seconds as the threshold for ecommerce site

“acceptability.” Just as an FYI, at Google we aim for under a half-second.
To put this into perspective, we did a study of 1,200 eCommerce stores and
found the average page loading time to be 3.97 seconds.
Many websites also fared much worse:

• 72.67% of stores had slower average loading times than 2 seconds
In short, if you want more sales and better SEO rankings, you should take
the time to optimise your site speed.
What has Shopify optimised by default?

There is some good news though:
Shopify is well aware of the importance of site speed and out of the box
provides multiple optimisations you won’t need to spend time on. These are…
Server configuration
Shopify servers are fast so there’s nothing to worry about here.
Gone are the days of choosing the best hosting provider and configuring the
server for uptime and speed, this is all managed for you – and exceptionally well.
Leveraging Browser Caching

Browser caching allows some important and regularly accessed files such
as Javascript and CSS files (for style and functionality) to be downloaded to
the users’ device, then accessed locally rather than re-downloading each visit.
This can make a big difference to page loading times, but thankfully is built in
to Shopify by default.
Using a CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) is where files are stored on servers across
the world, then loaded from the nearest server to your visitors’ location. A visitor
from the UK may have files loaded from a London server, whereas someone in
New York may have them loaded via a NY server. This again increases site speed
and again is managed by Shopify with their CDN run by Fastly and CloudFlare.
How to optimize your Shopify site speed

1. Choose a lightweight theme
2. Select the right image file format
3. Compress Images
4. Reduce Large Image Sizes
5. Lazy load images
6. Properly uninstall unused apps
7. Conditionally load app scripts
8. Minify Javascript and CSS files
9. Async non-essential scripts
10. Use Resource Hints / Preloading
Let’s break these down in detail…
Choose a Lightweight Theme

Themes can be badly coded or bloated with design features such as sliders,
carousels, and huge mega menus.
These aren’t always necessarily bad features, but can quickly slow down a
website unnecessarily.
A quick win if you’re starting out is to simply choose a lighter theme that’s
either coded more efficiently and/or less bloated with features.
Here’s a few lightweight example themes:

• Create Theme
• Toy Theme
• Warm Theme
• Light Theme
• Outdoors Theme
Now you’re far from limited to this selection, there are many light themes
and any theme can be modified to load faster. But it may be worth considering
for a brand new website.
For existing websites though, analyse your theme and see where you can
make improvements.
Can you switch from a slider to a single hero image? Can you reduce a car-
ousel from 100 products to a more reasonable 8-12? Is the quick view feature
being loaded on the initial page load?
Select the right image file format

Different file formats have different benefits in terms of quality and file size
therefore loading time.
As a general rule, product images should be in WebP or JPEG format for

the lowest file size as quality isn’t as important. But will still look great if com-
pressed well.
For hero images and other images with text inside them, you’re usually going
to use a lossless format like PNG, though again WebP is suitable here.
And for your logo and theme icons, make sure you’re using SVG format for
high quality and scalable images.
The main consideration here is both quality and size.
Compress Images
Choosing the right file format is only part of the battle, next you need to
compress your images.
I did a quick test of 3 random images to see how much smaller the files were
after compression:
You can see they ranged from 49-77% smaller files, which is a massive reduction.
Thankfully, this is extremely easy to do with a Shopify App, you can automate
the entire process.
Just install a compression app like Crush.pics and you’re off to the races.
Or if you have any difficulties or want to do it manually, you can use a free
website like TinyPNG.
Reduce Large Image Sizes

The other thing you should pay attention to is the dimensions of the image
you’re uploading. If you’re working with photographers to capture your prod-
ucts, it’s likely they’re sending you back huge HD photos so you have more
flexibility on where and how to use them.
For the web though, you want to reduce images to the size they’ll be shown.
As an example, your visitor may be on a 400px wide mobile device, but your
image is 2,000px wide. That’s 5x the size of what they need, which will not only
load slowly but also appear low quality as it’s shrunk down so significantly.
The process then is two parts:

1. Resize images on upload to the max size needed (this may be 2x the
dimensions shown to cover for retina displays)
2. Use srcset to selectively show different image sizes
The second part of this will likely need a developer, but is extremely efficient
on optimal images and loading times.
Here’s an example of how that may look:
<img
alt="A baby smiling with a yellow headband."
srcset="
baby-s.jpg 300w,
baby-m.jpg 600w,
baby-l.jpg 1200w,
baby-xl.jpg 2000w
"
sizes="70vmin"
>
In this case we’re informing the browser what image to show based on the
width of the image and space it has to display.
This way, mobile devices are likely to load a small file, whereas fancy retina
devices will load the XL size. This maintains consistent quality across devices,
while optimising for speed.
You don’t have to do this for every image though as we also have lazy loading.
Lazy load images

Typically when a page is opened, every script, image, and resource is loaded
immediately on load to ensure things are displayed correctly. But is that al-
ways necessary?
Collection pages, for example, could easily have 24+ product images, but how
many of them are visible even after the page loads. Many are further down the
page and require scrolling to even see.
Lazy loading is where you defer loading of images until they’re actively visible.
This could be not loading images until they’re almost visible on the screen.
Or only loading the first 2 product images in a carousel, then loading the rest
as you click. Now setting this up is a future blog post on its own, but here’s the
short version:
1. Add the lazysizes.js library to your theme assets folder and include it
in theme.liquid
2. Update image tags by swapping src with data-src and adding
the lazyload class
So you’ll have a standard image which may look like this:
<img src="IMAGE_URL.jpeg">
Which would now look like:
<img data-src="IMAGE_URL.jpeg" class="lazyload">
The difference is you’re replacing src with data-src and adding the
class lazyload. That’s all, it’s pretty simple, though I’d recommend having a
developer do this for you.
Properly uninstall unused apps

You’ve probably heard this before, but apps can severely slow down
your website.
But then carrying bags of money is heavy too, that doesn’t mean I’m going
to drop them.
The trick is to only install apps that you need, some can even be hardcoded
into your theme, optimising these apps, then uninstalling the rest.
One problem you may run into when uninstalling apps is leftover code in
your theme. These usually aren’t removed when uninstalling the app, unless
done manually.
To fix this, start by running your website on Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
Look for the “Reduce the impact of third-party code” and you’ll find a huge
list of scripts loading from other domains:
We’re looking for domains and scripts here that we’re no longer using, if
you’re seeing any, these can be removed as they’re unnecessarily slowing
down the page.
Beyond that, we can also manually check the theme files for any unneces-
sary app code.
To do these things, I’d recommend having a developer look through your

theme.liquid file, along with other theme files, then identify and remove any
unused scripts or code.
Conditionally load app scripts

By default, most app scripts are added to your theme.liquid file so they load
across every page – this is convenient. But it’s also slow.
It’s the equivalent of carrying an umbrella with you 24/7 for the off-chance
it may rain – some day. Wouldn’t it be more effective to only have an umbrella
when it rains?
With apps this can be achieved with conditional loading.
In short, if a condition is met, the app script is loaded.
For example:
• Product Reviews: If these are only shown on the product page, then
conditionally load this script on product pages only
• Social Share Buttons: Are you using these on every page or just blog
posts? If it’s only certain types of pages, then load them only on these
• Product Image Zoom, Infinite Options, and more: Any product page
specific features like this likely only need loaded on the product page
Now this is something I’d strongly recommend using a developer and testing
properly, but the code itself is a simple if statement.
For example:
{% if template == 'product' %}

{% endif %}
Or for specific pages:
{% if page.handle == 'contact' %}

{% endif %}
Minify Javascript and CSS files

As with writing articles, when developers write code they usually do it with
elements of style in there.
This comes in the

form
of
spacing,
// Comments
And other ways of making the code easier to understand.
Minifying refers to the process of eliminating this styling, as it’s unnecessary

for robots, which will in turn reduce the size of the file.
For non-developers, there’s apps that can minify these files for you such
as File Optimizer.
Otherwise you can do this manually with JSCompress, and let Shopify do it
for you automatically with CSS files by turning them to .scss.css format.
Async non-essential scripts

If you have scripts that aren’t essential for the initial page load, you can defer
them so they’re loaded last, or load is asynchronously so the full script is loaded
in the background before being executed.
Again, this should only be done for non-essential scripts.
Essential scripts will be things like jQuery that directly impact the website
functionality.
But maybe you have a live chat script, while helpful for conversions, it can
absolutely be deferred to speed up loading the actual page and content first.
Analytics and tracking scripts are another thing that can be loaded asynchro-
nously to speed up rendering the page.
This diagram explains the differences in how these are loaded:
This is something you should have a developer implement for it, but it’s relatively simple
again by adding defer or async to your script tags.
Use Resource Hints / Preloading

Resource hints including preload, prefetch, dns-prefetch, or preconnect;
are used to optimise the loading of important resources.
Each has a different purpose as follows:
• Preload: Fetch a critical resource for the current page before the page
begins rendering
• Prefetch: Fetch resources not needed on the current page, but likely
needed on next page e.g. stylesheet
• DNS-Prefetch: Reduces latency by performing a DNS lookup ahead of

time to a domain you will load resources from. Note this is performed
after the current page has loaded.
• Preconnect: For when you plan to fetch content from a specific domain
within 10 seconds. Similar to DNS-Prefetch but also does TCP hand-
shake and TLS negotiation.
These can be used by modifying the <link> elements to add a rel=

attribute, such as:
<link rel="preload" href="{{ jquery.min.js | asset_url }}" as="script">
<link rel="prefetch" href="{{ stylesheet.css | asset_url }}">
<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="//cdn.shopify.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="//cdn.shopify.com">

Final Thoughts
Out of the box, Shopify is a pretty quick platform and does a lot of speed
optimisations automatically.
But with a huge number of images, inefficient themes, and a never ending list
of apps to install – it’s easy to bloat your website and slow it down.
I’d highly recommend working with a developer to implement these 10 chang-

es, not only for the SEO benefits, but for the conversion benefits of having a
fast loading website.
With eCommerce, you’ll never have a perfect page speed or score. But there
should be a very noticeable difference in page loading times after implementing
these suggestions.
08
SEO for International
Shopify Stores
228 | SEO for International Shopify Stores Shopify SEO - Logeix
Your Shopify store is doing well and you’re thinking of expanding into other
countries or languages.
Or maybe you’re moving from another platform and want to keep your in-
ternational setup in place.
Is Shopify a decent option for this?
It depends.
Let me explain…
Is Shopify / Shopify Plus suitable

for international stores?
Honestly, not really.
It can be made to work, but it’s not as simple as it should be, especially for com-
plex stores with lots of products and several different options between locations.
Where it’s a good option is for much simpler setups such as:
• Simple retailers with a small product range
• Small retailers with small international presence offering interna-
tional shipping
• Multi-location stores with similar products across all interna-
tional locations
As soon as you go the opposite way with a large product range, different
options across each store, and several locations – it becomes either difficult to
configure or extremely difficult to manage the options. The difference comes
down to whether you set up a multi-currency store or a multi-store.
What is a multi-currency store?

A multi-currency and/or multilingual store is a single store that’s configured
to allow selection between multiple currencies and, optionally, languages.
This is the simplest setup as all options are configured one time, prices are set
based on your local currency, then prices are converted into other currencies
and text translated into other languages.
What is a multi-store?
A multi-store setup is where multiple independent stores are set up for
targeting different countries or regions.
This can be achieved with subdomains (i.e. fr.example.com) or country spe-

cific top-level domains (i.e. example.fr).
While significantly more difficult, this option gives retailers full control over
each location’s store for configuring pricing, product selection, payment meth-
ods, and more.
Which type of international

setup is recommended?
The answer to whether you should opt for a multi-currency store or multi-
store setup depends massively on your store and objectives long-term.
Below we’ll discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each for you to understand
how to make this decision.
Benefits and drawbacks of multi-currency

If you’re on Shopify Advanced or Shopify Plus, you have access to Shopi-
fy’s Multi-Currency feature. This allows you to easily display and enable pay-
ments in alternate currencies, including rounding for more pleasant prices.
The downside is these prices can’t be configured. You can’t upload custom
pricing for each currency, instead it’s based only on exchange rates – with
rule allowances for rounding prices from say $17.26 to $17.99 (or however
you choose).
You’re also lacking customisation for things like shipping methods and pay-
ment options. Different countries may have different standards they’re used to.
If you’re not on Shopify Advanced (or Plus), it’s even worse as you’re limited
to displaying different currencies only, not accepting payment – it’ll be charged
in your local currency.
Beyond currencies, you can also enable multiple languages with apps, even
using subfolders (i.e. example.com/es/). This is easy to set up and configure,
and can also be combined with a selector to update both currency and language.
Where this all falls flat is marketing, there’s no customised experience for
their country. It’s all based on your main location, with options added to enable
other languages and currencies. This may be good enough, but it’s not going to
be as effective as a tailored solution.
You’ll also have to consider some technical details such as tracking sales totals
in Google Analytics and even options such as filtering by price on your own store.
The benefit of this though is the ease of setup. It’s unquestionably easier to
set this up than a multi-store setup.
An example store utilising this approach is Horizn-Studios:
Benefits and drawbacks of multi-store

The more scalable and better approach to marketing is to have an individual
store for each location. This can be set up either with subdomains or country
specific top-level domains.
From an SEO and marketing standpoint, this allows full configuration of each
store to target country-specific keywords, specific demographics for each
location, and overall significantly more configuration. Building localised email
lists is another example.
Beyond this, you can personalise your store for each demographic’s expec-
tations. Local payment options, local shipping options, taxes setup, correct
invoicing, etc.
But with this added flexibility comes significantly more complexity.
Shopify still doesn’t have a proper multi-store architecture to enable man-

agement of data between multiple stores, which creates a massive headache.
This means you’ll need to choose or create a system to connect all your prod-
ucts together to share data between each store. Or worse, manually update
each of them – every time.
In short, this absolutely cannot be done without consulting with an expert.

And with a lot of extras to sync between stores, it’s not simple at all.
An example store utilising this approach is Gymshark:

How to set up a multi-currency

Shopify store
If you’re a smaller or simple retail store and settled on a multi-currency store
setup, here’s some advice on how to do this. I’d still recommend hiring an expert,
but it’s at least possible to configure this yourself.
Multi-Currency Store
To start, I’d highly recommend you on at least a Shopify Advanced plan, if
not Shopify Plus. You’ll need this to charge in alternate currencies, rather than
simply for display.
Afterwards, you can enable multi-currency from your Shopify Dashboard:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Payments.
2. In the Shopify Payments section, click Manage.
3. In the Countries/regions section, click Add country/region.
4. Select the country or region that you want to support from the list of
supported countries and regions.
5. Click Add country/region.
I’d also recommend setting rounding rules so your prices look less random.
You’ll also need to add a currency selector to your store either manually via
theme customisation or a single app which covers the multilingual aspect also.
Multilingual store
Beyond multi-currency, you may want to add multiple languages. The easiest
way to achieve this is through an app such as LangShop.
An app like this will enable a currency and language selector for your store
visitors, along with adding translated content (manually or automated).
These will also be SEO friendly with subfolders (e.g. example.com/es/) and
Hreflang tag setup.
There are limitations though, for standard Shopify plans you’re limited to 5
languages, and for Shopify Plus you’re limited to 20. Though, this is likely to
be more than enough.
How to set up multiple

Shopify international stores
For setting up multiple international stores, the process varies massively
depending on your current infrastructure and objectives.
The main difficulty is that each of these are separate stores (which you’ll
need to pay Shopify for separately), therefore the main consideration is how
to connect these stores.
Automated Product / Data Syncing Solutions

The ideal solution is an automated way of synchronising between stores.
This could be something like a PIM (Product Information Manager), a Shopify
Sync app such as Rewind, or some more complex custom development work.
The goal with each of these is to automatically synchronise changes where

needed across all stores. So if you update a category, product tag, or important
option on one product, it’ll automatically update on the other stores.
Automating this will be difficult initially, but for scale and long-term manage-
ment across multiple stores, it’s strongly recommended.
Manually Importing / Exporting Changes

Alternatively you can manually manage these changes by importing and ex-
porting between different stores. This is suitable for small stores with a small
product selection.
The best way to do this would be to manage products and collections within
a Google Sheet or Excel spreadsheet, then import these changes using a tool
like Matrixify.
It’s not perfect as you’ll have to manually import the changes each time, but
it’ll get the job done with a bit more manual work.
SEO Considerations
One thing you’ll need to pay attention to with international store setups is
whether your website is set up correctly for SEO.
Ideally your store will be set up in a way to allow you to rank in different coun-
tries and languages, so when someone searches on Google.it in Italian (if you
have a store there), they’ll see a localised store or version of your store for Italy.
Hreflang
This can be achieved with Hreflang tags, an HTML attribute that explains and
links to country-specific and/or language-specific versions of your webpages.
By adding for example:
<link rel="alternate" href="https://fr.logeix.com/shopify-seo/"

hreflang="fr" />
Search engines will know the French version of our Shopify SEO guide is
available under the above URL.
It can also apply to countries where languages are the same, such as
the UK and US.
This covers for duplicate content issues so you don’t have multiple web-
sites with identical content competing against each other. These can also be
configured inside of GSC when using subdomains or top-level domains for
each location.
The biggest complication is the lack of connection between stores. It’s easy to
code Hreflang tags into every page, but how do you know the URL?
With separate stores, there’s no reason that example.com/products/red-bi-

cycles would be accessible under the same URL on the example.co.uk store.
Though, for ease of management, I’d highly recommend it.
Even if they are identical, what if your UK store has significantly more prod-
ucts than the US one i.e. a multi-store. In this case, most of these Hreflang tags
will point to missing pages (as the product doesn’t exist on the US store).
This is where Shopify becomes complex, but can be resolved with some
manual exclusion using things like meta fields:
{% if product.metafields.global.excludefr != 1 %}
<link rel="alternate" href="https://fr.logeix.com/products/{{
product.handle }}/" hreflang="fr" />
{% endif %}
Again, it can be done, but it’s something you should consult with an SEO about.
Multi-Store Differences
If you have one store, therefore a smaller number of products identical across
all languages and countries – you’re fine.
That allows a simple Hreflang setup as it’s all in one store.
The complexity is with multiple stores. This leads to issues of stores being
disconnected, which makes a Hreflang setup (explained above) difficult.
It also leads to decisions needing made:
You probably want to translate your English articles into French. But should
you have identical blog posts for your UK store and US? Blog posts are fairly
international, you can still offer a popup to navigate to their localised store later.
The benefit though is the customisation. You’re not simply translating, you
can create additional collections and market things in a way each demographic
would understand. Then optimise the entire store for SEO individually.
It’s significantly more work, but will make SEO and other marketing much
more effective.
Final Thoughts
Setting up an international store on the Shopify platform is possible and
arguably easy for simple retail businesses.
For larger retailers, it becomes much more complicated, but can still be done.
Personally, I’d recommend hiring an expert to help you set this up. This isn’t
my area of expertise, my team and I usually come in after the synchronisation
(between stores) is in place, then consult on the SEO side of things i.e. Hreflang.
09
Shopify Plus SEO
239 | Shopify Plus SEO Shopify SEO - Logeix
Whether you’re upgrading from a standard Shopify plan or moving from

another platform, you’re probably considering whether or not Shopify Plus is
good for SEO.
I’ve written about Shopify SEO extensively, so in this guide we’ll focus exclu-
sively on SEO issues that apply to Shopify Plus stores.
Is Shopify Plus better for SEO?

No.
I’ve worked with clients on both Shopify standard plans and Shopify Plus and
there’s no real difference from an SEO perspective.
(But plenty of benefits from a non-SEO standpoint)
However, is Shopify Plus a great platform for SEO? I’d say so, there’s a few lim-
itations to know of that we’ll get into, but nothing serious that can’t be overcome.
Shopify Plus SEO issues

There’s a number of SEO issues to consider with Shopify Plus. Most have
previously been covered on this blog as they also apply to any Shopify plan,
but let’s recap them here.
JavaScript product grid

Shopify’s product filtering functionality isn’t the best, especially for enterprise
level, which often leads to brands using solutions such as Klevu and Algolia.
From a usability perspective, these are probably much better, the only argu-
able downside is they’re usually using JavaScript to power the products grid.
Now Google is pretty good at reading JavaScript these days, but as an SEO
myself and I’d presume others think similarly, I’d be more confident if it used
the native Shopify products grid and AJAX or links for filtering.
Google will probably read all the content and products fine, but I’d still rather
be 100% confident. This ultimately depends on the app you’re using though,
some apps like BoostCommerce do a good job of this.
Directory Structure
One major issue you’ll run into when moving from another platform is the
fairly flat and non-customisable directory structure.
Product Category pages are accessible under

example.com/collections/name-of-category
Product pages are accessible under
example.com/products/name-of-product
(Well, presuming product internal links are fixed)
That’s it, no subcategory directories and no option to rename or remove

/collections/. It’s quite limiting.
This means if your setup is similar to say:
/sofas/leather/
It’ll have to become:
It’ll still function well, it’s just not as customisable.
For more detail and advanced tricks, check out my

Shopify URL structure tutorial.
Filter Pages
As mentioned above, the lack of subcategories can be a real pain with Shopify.
Some stores attempt to bypass this by using Product Tags, which acts as filters.
For example:
From a URL standpoint, it even looks like a subcategory:
The problem is, these pages cannot be customised without manually tweak-
ing the theme each time which is ineffective, and as a result they create a huge
number of thin content pages:
In short, the best solution to this is to make sure Product Tags are properly
canonicalised to the main collection and manually create new collections for
subcategories.
My Shopify Product Tags SEO guide explains how to do this.

Multi-Store Setup
One major thing to consider is whether you’ll need a multi-store/international
setup. If so, this can potentially be difficult to manage with Shopify. By default,
there’s no true multi-store functionality within Shopify.
You can have as many stores as you like, however they’re not connected in
any way. Not only is this difficult for stock levels and other management, it also
complicates SEO.
The standard approach to international stores is to use a Hreflang tag to

explain the different pages for different locations and/or languages.
A hreflang tag for your French version may look like this as an example:
<link rel="alternate" href="https://fr.logeix.com/

shopify-seo/" hreflang="fr" />
Where this gets complicated is when each store has different product ranges,
preventing you from automating this.
There’s workarounds with a little development, but it’s something to consider.
My Shopify International SEO guide explains more.
Lack of htaccess
If you’re moving from another platform, one frustration is likely to be the
inability to edit the htaccess file.
This can be used for modifying URL structures, which we explained under
the Directory Structures section.
But is also extremely helpful for creating redirect rules, rather than man-
ually redirecting every single URL individually. Unfortunately, this can’t be
done though.
We experienced a similar problem to this recently with a client that removed

their AMP setup, and had thousands of 404 pages under the /a/ directory.
The solution to this is to create rules inside a spreadsheet to catch these in

bulk, then exporting this as a CSV file and importing directly into the Shopify
Redirects section. No apps needed.
Default Pages
If you have a large number of products/pages, one thing to clean up will be
the large number of automated pages Shopify generates.
If you have (or know) a Shopify store, do a quick Google search for this:
site:EXAMPLE.COM inurl:/collections/vendors OR inurl:/

collections/all OR inurl:/collections/types OR
intitle:Collections
These are a few of many default pages you may see and on some stores, these
can add up to hundreds or even thousands of pages.
Every new vendor/brand added? New page.
Every new product type added? New page.
These can add up significantly and can’t be customised to have any SEO value.
My suggestion is to block them at a Robots.txt level or noindex them.

Internal Linking Issues

Shopify has a lot of internal linking issues built in.
Product tags, blog tags, vendor pages, and product type pages are a few
of these as they’re all default pages that are typically linked (and indexable)
throughout most themes.
But even more of a problem is product pages.
By default they’re accessible under the wrong (a canonicalised) URL.
It’ll look like this:
But if you were to look at the source code behind the page, you’d see a little
line called a “canonical tag” that links to:
Practically every theme links to the wrong URL then adds a canonical rec-
ommendation to search engines not to use it. They do this to pass information
to the breadcrumb – but there’s other ways of doing that.
This leads to long URLs and potential issues with the wrong URLs being
indexed by search engines and sometimes the same product being indexed
under multiple URLs.
Thankfully, it’s a nice simple fix in most themes.
You can do this under Online Store > Themes > Customize > Theme Ac-
tions > Edit Code > Snippets > product-grid-item.liquid:
Then removing the text that says “within: collection“:
Product Variants
If you have a store with a significant number of product variants or options,
you may have difficulties with Shopify’s 100 variants and 3 options limit.
This is relatively easy to fix by creating separate products for different options
such as colours or materials, but can also lead to several product variants all
being indexed by search engines i.e. thin content.
This isn’t a problem as it’s easy to fix with canonical tags as explained in
my product variants limit workaround post, but is something you’ll need to do.
Final Thoughts
I’ve written in detail about Shopify before, the conclusion is always the same…
While there are some limitations, in general it’s a fantastic platform that can
be setup and optimised well for SEO with a few workarounds.
Shopify Plus is no different, if you’re moving from a different enterprise plat-

form you’ll likely need to change directory structures and approaches to certain
things, but you can definitely have a well setup site from an SEO perspective.
10
Shopify SEO Checklist
249 | Shopify SEO Checklist Shopify SEO - Logeix
After writing extensively about Shopify SEO on our blog, here’s a full checklist
of all the items we’ve covered.
Use this to quickly check your website for common issues.
But don’t forget, every site is a little different and there’s no way you’ll cover
everything in a simple checklist.
1. Fundamentals
1.1. Google Analytics is setup
1.2. Google Search Console is setup
1.3. No errors in GSC
1.4. Website contains trust elements and pages
2. Technical SEO
2.1. Non-Canonicalised Internal Product Links
2.2. Breadcrumbs setup and functional
2.3. Product tags noindexed
2.4. Blog tags noindexed
2.5. Vendor collection blocked
2.6. Product type collections blocked
2.7. /collections/all noindexed
2.8. /collections/ page noindexed
2.9. Noindexed/blocked pages are not in sitemap
3. Homepage
3.1. Homepage <Title> tag is 50-60 characters
3.2. Homepage <Title> tag includes main keyword
3.3. Homepage Meta description exists and under 160 characters
3.4. Homepage Meta description includes main keyword
3.5. Homepage Meta description optimised for CTR
3.6. Only one H1 on the homepage
3.7. Homepage H1 is keyword optimised
3.8. If collection grid links, there are text behind images
4. Collections
4.1. Collections contain one <Title> tag under 60 characters
4.2. Collection <Title> tags include main keyword
4.3. Collection Meta descriptions are unique with 130-160 characters
4.4. Collection Meta descriptions include main keyword
4.5. Collection Meta descriptions optimised for CTR
4.6. Only one H1 on collection pages
4.7. Collection H1s are keyword optimised
4.8. Collections contain a decent depth of content
4.9. Collections have at least 3 products
4.10. Collections have internal links to
subcategories or related categories
5. Products
5.1. Products contain one <Title> tag with most under 60 characters
5.2. Product <Title> tags include main keyword
5.3. Products contain unique Meta description with 130-160 characters
5.4. Product Meta descriptions include main keyword
5.5. Product Meta descriptions optimised for CTR
5.6. Only 1 H1 per product
5.7. Each Products H1 is keyword optimised
5.8. Product Keywords are not cannibalising collection pages
5.9. Products are fully utilising structured data
5.10. Unique product descriptions (not copied from suppliers/others)
5.11. Decent depth of content on product pages
5.12. Product images contain alt text
6. Blog Posts
6.1. Blog Posts contain one <Title> tag with under 60 characters
6.2. Blog Posts <Title> tags includes main keyword
6.3. Blog Posts contain unique Meta description with 130-160 characters
6.4. Blog Post Meta descriptions include main keyword
6.5. Blog Post Meta descriptions optimised for CTR
6.6. Only one H1 per blog post
6.7. Blog Post H1s is keyword optimised
6.8. Good usage of subheadings in content
6.9. Content contains internal links
to collections (1 for every ~200-300 words)
6.10. Blog posts link to related products
6.11. Images in blog posts contain alt text
6.12. Blog keywords are not cannibalising collection pages
7. Site Speed Optimisation
7.1. Appropriate Image file formats used
7.2. Images are compressed
7.3. Images are correctly sized
7.4. Images are lazy loaded
7.5. Unused apps are full uninstalled
7.6. Apps are conditionally loaded where possible
7.7. JS and CSS files are minified
7.8. Non-Essential scripts are set to Async/defer
7.9. Resource hints / preloading is used where possible
8. Backlinks
8.1. No spammy backlinks
8.2. Anchor text are not over-optimised
Now let’s break each of these down in more detail…

1. Fundamentals
1.1. Google Analytics Setup
Google Analytics is highly recommended for tracking traffic, sources (incl.
search), sales/revenue, etc.
It also integrates with GSC to connect data from there.
You can also access a lot of this data inside your Shopify Dashboard, but for
more detailed tracking and analysis I’d recommend GA. Especially if you plan to
work with an ads or SEO agency, they’ll appreciate the existing setup and data.
1.2. Google Search Console Setup

Google Search Console (GSC) is a requirement for any website taking
SEO seriously.
Registering your website with GSC will give you information about how
Google is crawling your website, what terms you’re ranking for and getting
traffic from, crawling and technical SEO issues, and more.
Read this guide from Google on how to add your website
Also if you’re doing this for the first time, make sure to submit your sitemap
to GSC. Just click into the “Sitemaps” menu under “Index” and add the following
URL: yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml.
1.3. No errors in Google Search Console

Once GSC is setup, login and check for errors.
There could be some in the coverage section:
We can see this client has one error, which seems to be a 404 page that
needs redirected.
They could also be in the experience section:
This website has some big core web vitals issues across 13 pages.
Or under Enhancements:
This is structured data issues, in this case the client had none.
Double check for any issues in these places and either fix them yourself or
have a SEO/developer support.
1.4. Trust elements and pages

While not directly related to SEO, it’s highly important that your store has
all the necessary trust signals. This will directly influence conversion rate (and
time on site), which could possibly impact your SEO, and will also cover you
long-term against Google’s E-A-T.
(E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Something

Google’s Quality Rates Guidelines are big on looking for)
This just means that you’ll want basics covered like:
• A clear about page with details of who runs this store
• Phone number that is easily accessible
• Delivery details
• Clear and understandable warranty/guarantee details
• Any additional trust signals like third-party reviews
2. Technical SEO
2.1. Internal Product Links
By default product URLs are:
However, when accessed through a collection (i.e. category) page, this becomes:
The problem with this is it’s only for show, check any of these product pages
for a canonical tag and you’ll see a bit of code telling robots the original page
can be found at the /products/name-of-product page.
This means every single product in your store has internal links to the wrong
URL. And while you could argue they’re “canonicalised” therefore shouldn’t be
an issue, this canonical tag serves little more than a recommendation and is
often ignored by search engines.
This can lead to the same product being indexed in search engines multiple
times, and a waste of crawl budget accessing the same product via multiple URLs.
Make sure to fix this by modifying your theme files, it’s a simple fix.
2.2. Breadcrumbs
The problem with fixing internal product links is that it’ll break the default
breadcrumbs setup.
If you don’t know what breadcrumbs are, they’re the little links that help you
navigate up (i.e. back) through pages prior to accessing this page. Example here:
You should at minimum be using these on collection pages and product pages.
By default, Shopify uses the URL to dynamically insert breadcrumb links based
on which collection you accessed this product through. This isn’t ideal in the
first place, but it’ll be completely broken when you fix the internal product links.
The alternative is to manually set a breadcrumb for each product or even

category. This can then be stored and accessed with a custom metafield, then
used in the breadcrumb theme section.
Our Technical SEO for Shopify guide covers how to do this.
2.3. Product Tags

Within the Shopify ecosystem, tags are used for products as filters, as you’d
commonly see in a typical eCommerce faceted navigation:
The problem with these tags is the thin content pages they create.
Let’s say you have 3 size options: 125ml, 275ml, and 500ml. Then you tag all
products across all your categories with whichever sizes are offered.
You’ll now have tag pages automatically generated such as
This is a great thing for SEO because it’s possible these are keywords people
are searching for. Maybe someone is specifically looking for 275ml perfume.
However, it’s wasted on Shopify for two reasons:

1. If you happen to write the tag with a space, it’ll change the space to a
“+” (i.e. 125ml+option) which is blocked by robots.txt by default
2. The auto-generated tag page cannot be customised with unique H1,
meta description, title tag, content, etc
This leads to a whole bunch of near-duplicate pages with the only difference
being the title tag will say along the lines of:
Perfume: Tagged “125ml” – Brand
You can easily check if this is happening to your store with a clever
Google search:
site:yourwebsite.com intitle:Tagged -inurl:tagged
If you’re seeing this happen, it’s something you should definitely fix.
You can fix this by either:
1. Canonicalising these to the collection page

2. Noindexing them
3. Blocking at a Robots.txt level
Our Shopify Product Tags SEO guide explains how to do this.
2.4. Blog Tags

Similar to product tags, you can also use tags for blog posts to filter posts. These
are commonly used on Shopify blogs to separate different blog post categories.
The problem, as with product tags, is this leads to many pages being created
which you have no control or customisation over i.e. thin content.
You’ll see this under URLs like
/blogs/news/tagged/name-of-tag
Or with a quick Google search:
site:YOURWEBSITE.com inurl:tagged
Thankfully, fixing these is similarly easy by noindexing them or similarly

blocking at a Robots.txt level.
You can find code snippets to do that here.
2.5. Vendor Collections

Another thing that can lead to potentially 100+ thin content pages are what
I call “vendor pages“.
You can find these by doing a Google search for:
site:YOURWEBSITE.com inurl:collections/vendors
In most cases, it is a great idea to have a category page for each of your ven-
dors (i.e. suppliers, brands, manufacturers), however Shopify’s default imple-
mentation is fairly useless from an SEO perspective.
There’s numerous reasons for this:

1. The page URLs are defaulted to /collections/vendors?q=Name. Even
ignoring SEO, these are not user friendly URLs.
2. These pages are auto-generated, if you happen to have a vendor with
2 or more words the space between is replaced with a “+”, which is
blocked by Robots.txt. Meaning, if you have a supplier with 2+ words,
search engines won’t be able to access the page.
3. Even if search engines can access the page, it can’t be customised by
default with content or SEO optimisation settings, therefore is practi-
cally useless.
I’d recommend blocking in your Robots.txt file, as explained in our Shopify

Robots.txt guide.
2.6. Product Type Collections

Similar to vendor pages are product type pages. These can be find under a
similar type of parameter URL:
/collections/types?q=Name
Or again by searching Google:
site:YOURWEBSITE.com inurl:collections/types
These again are automatically generated from the “type” field when creating
your products in Shopify.
As with vendor pages, these have all the same issues as vendor pages and
no upsides. Usually product types are literally the same as your categories (i.e.
collection pages), therefore this provides no benefits.
The best fix is to disallow with Robots.txt. Copy our example Robots.txt
file to do this.
2.7. All Collection

Every Shopify store by default as a “All” collection, which contains a list of
all your products.
You can find it here:
https://YOURWEBSITE.com/collections/all
Usually this collection isn’t being used, and especially when you have 1000+
products, this could lead to 40+ additional pages being crawled indexed when
including all the pagination.
It’s not a big deal, but as there’s no intention of ranking them and products
can be crawled through other collections, I’d noindex or block these from
being crawled.
Our Robots.txt tutorial covers this.
2.8. Collections page

Another page many people don’t realise exists is the default page containing
a list of all your collections:
https://YOURWEBSITE.com/collections
For bigger stores, you’ll likely have pagination on top of this which can create
a bunch of additional pages too.
This is minimal though, so rarely a big deal, but I’d normally noindex these as
they’re unused.
2.9. Noindexed pages in Sitemap

Here’s an odd one, if you’ve ever used any other CMS before, your instinct
would be that if you set a page to canonical or noindex, it’d automatically re-
move it from the sitemap. Unfortunately that isn’t the case.
Instead we need to manually remove from the sitemap, but there’s bad news
again, there’s no simple option for doing that.
Oh, and we can’t modify the sitemap out of the box. More fun.
Thankfully, there’s a workaround with a little theme modification and hidden

metafield, our Shopify XML Sitemap guide explains how.
3. Homepage
3.1. Title tag length
The title tag should in most cases be less than 60 characters long.
A common mistake I see is the theme automatically adding something to the

title, which usually repeats the brand name (and possibly more) in every page
including the homepage.
You can customise this under Online Store > Preferences for the homepage:
Though, I’d also do a quick check of the source code (visit your homepage >
right click > View source code) and check the <title> tag to make sure there’s
nothing extra added.
Keep it under 60 characters to be safe and ensure it won’t be cut off.
3.2. Title tag includes main keyword

Don’t forget to include a keyword in your homepage title tag.
Usually this is your main general keyword.
For example if you’re a gym clothing store, you’ll have collections for leggings,
gym shorts, gym tops, etc. But “gym clothing” is your overall topic which you’d
target on the homepage.
3.3. Meta description exists

and under 160 characters
Don’t skip on the meta description, it’s likely what people will see describing
your page in the search engine results.
But also don’t write too much, a max of 160 characters is around the sweet spot.
3.4. Meta description includes main keyword

While this won’t really help rankings, including the keyword means it’ll dis-
play bold in search engines which is useful for standing out.
3.5. Meta description optimised for CTR

What’s the main purpose of the meta description? Driving clicks i.e. click-
through rate.
You Can Capitalise Letters To Do This. Highlight features and benefits of

your store or products. And add a call to action like Shop Now!
3.6. Only one H1 on the page

The Heading 1 is the main heading to tell readers what the page should be
about. While it’s not a major issue to have more than one, it’s recommended
to only have one.
A common issue with Shopify themes is setting the logo as the H1, which is
essentially your brand name. This is especially common on the homepage.
Check the source code of your homepage and do a search for “<h1”, if there’s
more than one, you should have a developer fix this.
3.7. H1 is keyword optimised

Your H1 should be keyword optimised to set the topic for the page. Include
your main keyword especially.
That means avoiding something like “Welcome to Logeix!” as it’s too generic
and doesn’t particularly help anyone.
What is your website about? Why are they here? What do they want to know?
This usually ties into your keyword anyway, you may write something like
“The Biggest Selection of Gym Clothing in the UK”.
3.8. Text on images (if applicable)

If you have a collection grid on your homepage like this:
You want to make sure that this is actually text, not just an image containing
text. The difference is in how easily search engines can read this.
In the above case, you want to actually have text in these boxes that says
“Shop Womens” and “Shop Mens”. This can either be visible and styled to look
like it is (which is what they do in this example), or it can be hidden with CSS.
The former option is most ideal.
4. Collections
Keep it under 60 characters, but also make the most of those 60 characters.
Many stores have a default title tag set like “Mens – Logeix”. Make sure you’re
utilising the opportunity.

These are arguably the most important pages on your store, make sure you’re
doing keyword research and including the main keyword in the title tag.
Preferably at the beginning.

Collection pages are likely to be the biggest bottom of funnel traffic drivers,
so make sure you have a custom meta description for each page and it’s 130-
160 characters in length.

As with the homepage, including your main keyword will help stand out as
it’ll appear in bold.

These collection pages will likely drive the most organic search traffic, make
sure you’re optimising for CTR.
Do you offer free shipping? Buy now, pay later? Is your collection the biggest?
Or the cheapest? List these benefits of your store.

You should only have one <h1> element on the page, which will be the name
of the collection.
Usually this will display above the products grid, though some display it be-
low. Personally I’d prefer above.
But make sure that’s it, common issues are logo also set as H1 and additional
H1s being used in content descriptions below.

It’s very important that your H1 is optimised.
A common mistake eCommerce stores make is naming collections based on

the context coming from the brand and website itself. If you’re on a clothing
store, “Mens” is understandable to mean Mens Clothing for visitors.
For SEO though, you want to be explicit with detail or what we call keywords.
In the above case, it means ensuring your H1 includes the full keyword which
would be “Mens Clothing”.
4.8. Decent depth of content

It’s important your collection pages have a decent depth of content. But also
note that doesn’t mean a 3,000 word essay pasted at the bottom, which we all
know nobody will ever read.
In general, more quality content that matches the intent is better.
That means if I’m on a page looking to buy a new coffee machine, what do I
want to know?
• What is the difference between these? Types, etc
• Why are these better than crappy instant coffees
• What extra stuff do I need?
And probably a bunch of other similar topics.
What I like to do is write a short description of the collection, then include

an FAQ toggle list with all these questions in it and short to the point answers
for each. For additional detail, you can link to blog posts if you have one.
4.9. Collections have at least 3 products

Another type of insufficient content is having too few products. This is easy
to happen for larger stores with a lot of products and collections.
I like to check for this with a simple Google search:
site:YOURWEBSITE.com "This collection is empty" OR "There are

no products"
This will find any empty ones, for collections with 1-2 products you’ll have
to manually look through them.
4.10. Internal links to subcategories

or related categories
Internal linking is a powerful ranking factor, it’s also hugely helpful to your
visitors for navigating your website. If you have any subcategories or closely
related collections, I’d highly recommend linking to these.
Here’s an example from a product category page for chocolate protein powders:
You can do this from the top of the page, if it’s very helpful for users.
Or the bottom if it’s additional pages that may be helpful, but not strictly related.
5. Products
As with other pages, keep this to 50-60 characters ideally.
In certain cases, this is literally impossibly as the product name is too long.
In that case, just do the best you can to keep it short.
It’s not that big of a deal if it goes over, but remember it’s likely Google will
cut the title and add an ellipses (…). This is fine, but may impact CTR, so usually
I’d try my best to fit it in around 60 characters.

If your product has a keyword, make sure to include it in the <title> tag.
In many cases, the keyword may simply be the product name. Possibly the
product options too.
But in other cases, you can target very specific keywords on a product page
that aren’t targeted on a collection page.

With most stores having several hundred or thousands of products, a common
issue is pages either completely missing a meta description.
Or if you crawl with a tool like SiteBulb, most products containing a 300+
character meta description. This is the equivalent of missing, as it’s auto-filled
based on the product description.
My suggestion is to create a template for each type of product, auto-fill the

details, then bulk upload with an app like Matrixify.
Is this that important? Not until you’re ranking first page. But it’s pretty easy
to do in bulk and will help once the page starts ranking.

While you’re writing these meta descriptions, be sure to include the main
keyword as always.
In many cases this will be as simple as writing the product name.

To increase clickthrough rate on product pages you can:
1. Show you actually have this product by clearly stating the name (main
keyword usually)
2. Mention features and benefits of this product
3. Mention benefits of your store specifically (remember there’s probably
100 other stores they can buy from)
4. Include a call to action

As with any page, there should only be one H1 on the product page.
This should be the name of your product with optional additional

keywords added.

In most cases, your product pages won’t target a keyword besides the prod-
uct name, but if this page does then be sure to include that keyword in exact
form in the H1.
5.8. Keywords are not cannibalising

collection pages
This is an issue a lot of stores run into when they start doing SEO in-house.
Keyword cannibalisation is where multiple pages are attempting to rank for

the same keyword(s), this can cause inconsistent rankings as they may rotate
between the different pages.
This can easily happen if you’ve got say a collection named “Chocolate Protein
Powder”, but also a product named “Chocolate Protein Powder”. Even if that
product is actually more like “Chocolate Protein Powder – Whey”.
Now this isn’t a problem if the collection page is better optimised, with more
content, FAQs, and better optimised <title> and <h1>. But just be careful of
it, don’t try to rank two pages for the same keywords.
5.9. Structured data

Run a test on multiple product pages with Google’s Rich Results Testing tool.
Double check there’s no issues, but also check to see what you’ve got setup.
I recommend:
• BreadcrumbList: Your breadcrumb should link back to the homepage
along with any collections and sub-collections, make sure this is marked
up with schema.
• Product: Describe the product details for search engines.
• Offer: Describe the product’s pricing options and stock.
• AggregateRating: Summarise the overall rating and reviews for
this product.
5.10. Unique product descriptions

Make sure you’re not copying product descriptions from suppliers or vendors,
otherwise the original writers of the content will likely get priority over you in
search engine rankings.
Instead you should be writing a unique description for every product.
That doesn’t mean you can’t copy anything, there’s no penalty for this. I’d
highly recommend copying all the product specifications in.
But add unique content also such as the description and product FAQs.
5.11. Decent depth of content

Generally speaking, the more quality content you have, the easier it’ll be to
rank the page. This also applies to product pages.
If you want to rank this product page, add a description that sells the product,
list out the features/benefits, and add an FAQ section to help seal the deal.
The name of the game here is prioritisation.
You don’t want to do this for thousands of products, or more likely, you have
neither the time nor the budget to do so.
Therefore the important thing is to do proper keyword research and data

analysis to identify which products to focus your efforts on.
5.12. Image alt text

Make sure all your product images have alt text. It’s a simple thing to add,
may help a little with SEO, but very important for accessibility users too.
6. Blog Posts
Blog posts allow a lot more flexibility with the H1, which if not optimised,
may be used for your title tag by default.
Make sure you’re keeping this under 60 characters, but ideally 50-60 to
maximise the opportunity.

Include the full keyword, which may be longer in this case.
For blog posts, it could be as simple as:
“Best Coffee Machine – Logeix”
But even then it’s likely people searching for longer versions and modifi-
ers, such as:
“What is the Best Coffee Machine in 2021? – Logeix”

Your blog content is likely to be the biggest organic traffic driver to your busi-
ness if done right, so it’s important you’re using an optimised meta description.
Keep this in the 130-160 characters range.

Include the main keyword so it stands out in bold and helps click-through rate.

Write your meta description as an ad to create interest and drive clicks.
Here’s an example from our blog:
Is blogging on Shopify worth it? And if so, how do you use it to increase traffic and
sales? Here’s a full guide to starting and growing your Shopify blog.
There’s no call to action here, but it includes the main keyword and is written
to create interest and show we have the content they’re looking for.

The H1 should be the title of the blog post. Make sure you’re not using it for
the logo or any subheadings.

Include the main keyword in the H1 and optionally secondary keywords. I’d
usually put this at the beginning.
For example our main keyword on our Blogging on Shopify post has the
keyword at the beginning with secondary keywords and context for readers
added after:
Blogging on Shopify: How To Do It For SEO Traffic
6.8. Good usage of subheadings

Include lots of subheadings (H2’s and H3’s) within your content to dive deeper
into the topic.
I’d highly recommend doing this in 3 ways:

1. Look at your competitors for direct inspiration
2. Look at Google “People Also Ask” for this keyword
3. Look at Google’s recommended searches at the bottom of this SERP
This will give you several ideas for how to expand this content, from topics
to cover to FAQs to add.
Bonus Tip: Don’t forget to wrap those FAQs in FAQPage schema.
6.9. Internal links to collections

The main purpose of blog posts is to drive traffic back to your collections
and products.
One way is to link to your collection pages, which also has massive SEO ben-
efits. Internal linking is a powerful ranking factor.
Make sure you’re always linking to relevant collections to the blog post topic.
I’d suggest linking to 1-4 of them, if you can.
6.10. Related products

Take the opportunity to recommend some related products in your post,
unless you’re building an email list, this will be your main call to action.
Here’s an example from Luxy:
6.11. Image alt text

Blog posts are an easy place to forget to add image alt text, I’m very guilty
of this myself. But I’d suggest setting an alt text for all the images in your blog
post, this again helps for SEO and for accessibility users.
Don’t over-optimise these with keywords, just describe the image and
what it shows.
6.12. Keywords are not cannibalising

collection pages
Similar to product pages, a common issue is that webmasters will create a
new blog post that directly competes with a collection page.
This is called Keyword Cannibalisation, where more than one page attempts
to rank for the same keyword.
A relevant example would be if our agency website here had:

• A service page attempting to rank for “Shopify SEO” to sell our services
• A blog post attempting to rank for “Shopify SEO” to teach our process
These two pages are now targeting the exact same keyword, which makes it
difficult or inconsistent to rank.
But do some research here because in this case “Shopify SEO Services” is
a separate keyword and intent altogether, so we can still keep both of these
pages if we make that distinction.
7. Site Speed Optimisation

7.1. Image file format
Different file formats have different benefits in terms of quality and file size
therefore loading time.
As a general rule, product images should be in WebP or JPEG format for

the lowest file size as quality isn’t as important. But will still look great if com-
pressed well.
For hero images and other images with text inside them, you’re usually going
to use a lossless format like PNG, though again WebP is suitable here.
And for your logo and theme icons, make sure you’re using SVG format for
high quality and scalable images.
The main consideration here is both quality and size.
7.2. Compressing images

Choosing the right file format is only part of the battle, next you need to
compress your images.
I did a quick test of 3 random images to see how much smaller the files were
after compression:
You can see they ranged from 49-77% smaller files, which is a massive reduction.
Thankfully, this is extremely easy to do with a Shopify App, you can automate
the entire process.
Just install a compression app like Crush.pics and you’re off to the races.
Or if you have any difficulties or want to do it manually, you can use a free
website like TinyPNG.
7.3. Correctly sized images

The process here is in two parts:
1. Resize images on upload to the max size needed (this may be 2x the
dimensions shown to cover for retina displays)
2. Use srcset to selectively show different image sizes
Read this guide for using srcset
7.4. Lazy loading

Typically when a page is opened, every script, image, and resource is loaded
immediately on load to ensure things are displayed correctly. But is that al-
ways necessary?
Collection pages, for example, could easily have 24+ product images, but how
many of them are visible even after the page loads. Many are further down the
page and require scrolling to even see.
Lazy loading is where you defer loading of images until they’re actively visible.
This could be not loading images until they’re almost visible on the screen.
Or only loading the first 2 product images in a carousel, then loading the rest
as you click.
Instructions for setting this up here.
7.5. Uninstalled unused apps

Make sure to uninstall any apps you’re not using, including removing any left
over code on your site.
Best to have a developer review and implement this.

7.6. Conditionally loading app scripts

By default, most app scripts are added to your theme.liquid file so they load
across every page – this is convenient. But it’s also slow.
It’s the equivalent of carrying an umbrella with you 24/7 for the off-chance
it may rain – some day. Wouldn’t it be more effective to only have an umbrella
when it rains?
With apps this can be achieved with conditional loading.
In short, if a condition is met, the app script is loaded.
Here’s how to do that.
7.7. Minified JS and CSS

Minifying refers to the process of eliminating styling from CSS and JS files,
as it’s unnecessary for robots, which will in turn reduce the size of the file.
For non-developers, there’s apps that can minify these files for you such as
File Optimizer.
Otherwise you can do this manually with JSCompress, and let Shopify do it
for you automatically with CSS files by turning them to .scss.css format.
7.8. Async/defer non-essential scripts

If you have scripts that aren’t essential for the initial page load, you can defer
them so they’re loaded last, or load is asynchronously so the full script is loaded
in the background before being executed.
This diagram explains the differences in how these are loaded:
This is something you should have a developer implement for it, but it’s rel-
atively simple again by adding defer or async to your script tags.
7.9. Resource hints / preloading

Resource hints including preload, prefetch, dns-prefetch, or preconnect;
are used to optimise the loading of important resources.
Each has a different purpose as follows:

• Preload: Fetch a critical resource for the current page before the page
begins rendering
• Prefetch: Fetch resources not needed on the current page, but likely
needed on next page e.g. stylesheet
• DNS-Prefetch: Reduces latency by performing a DNS lookup ahead of
time to a domain you will load resources from. Note this is performed
after the current page has loaded.
• Preconnect: For when you plan to fetch content from a specific domain
within 10 seconds. Similar to DNS-Prefetch but also does TCP hand-
shake and TLS negotiation.
Examples of how to implement this here.

8. Backlinks
8.1. No spammy backlinks
Check the backlink profile in a tool like Ahrefs.
You can do that with their Site Explorer tool, then navigating to the Back-
links section:
I’d suggest looking for:

• Lots of foreign links (foreign domains or anchor text)
• Blog comments, forum links, profile links, or other easy to mass-built
and replicate links
• Links from low quality sites (low quality / not much content, spammy
looking, PBNs, etc)
This takes a bit of experience to understand the quality of a link, but if it seems
really spammy, it probably is. Some of these will happen naturally, so don’t freak
out. But it’s worth checking for, then probably having an SEO review it for you
to decide if action needs taken.
8.2. Anchor text are not over-optimised

Another thing you’ll want to look at is the backlink anchor text, this is the
text people use when linking to your website.
This is another place you can find spam, but can also reveal if your backlink
profile has been over-optimised before.
Navigate to the Anchor section in Ahrefs site explorer:

Now look through this list and check what you see, the most common links
should be your brand name and URL.
If on the other hand you’re seeing keywords here with a lot of referring do-
mains, it’s possible you’re over-optimised.
For example, let’s say you have 300 referring domains in total and 50 of them
are “gym clothes”, this is a massive case of over-optimisation.
Be careful of using keywords too often, and the same keyword repeatedly,
as the anchor text when building links.
Final, Final
Thoughts
286 | Final, Final Thoughts Shopify SEO - Logeix
Congratulations on making it to the end of this eBook.
But like Jeff Bezos says, it’s now day 1.
Next you need to figure out how to take these hundreds of pages of strategies,
then condense that into a strategy for your store.
For my clients, a typical strategy looks like:
That’s a heavily simplified version, but it should give you some direction to
get started.
287 | Final, Final Thoughts Shopify SEO - Logeix
Now you have two choices from here:
1. You can hire an agency like my team to help you with this at logeix.com
2. You can manage this yourself if you’re on a lower budget, but I’d suggest
the following resources at a minimum: Writer(s), developer, and link
building service.
If you’re interested in the latter option, I hope this eBook helped you strat-
egise how to do that. Maybe we can work together in the future.
For option 1 though, let’s have a chat.
You can book a call with me here or request a video audit at https://logeix.com/.
A video audit is where you’ll have me personally review your website for
10 minutes and share my thoughts, strategies, and ideas to grow your organic
search traffic. Even if you plan to do it yourself, this will likely help you a lot.
I hope you learned a lot from this eBook.
A big thank you to my designer, Khang, who put this all together in this lovely
PDF you’re reading.
See you next time.

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LOGEIX.

Shopify SEO - Logeix

Chapter 1: Is Shopify good for SEO?

Chapter 2: Keyword Research for Shopify

Chapter 3: On Page SEO for Shopify

Chapter 4: Technical SEO for Shopify

What is Technical SEO?  59

Chapter 4.1: Rich Snippets 

What are Rich Snippets?  90

Shopify's default URL structure  112

Chapter 4.3: Product Variants

Chapter 4.4: Product Tags 

What are Shopify Product Tags?  131

Chapter 4.5: XML Sitemap 

What is a Shopify Sitemap?  141

Chapter 4.6: Editing Robots.txt

Chapter 5: Blogging on Shopify

Why you need a blog  165

What is link building?  197

Chapter 7: Shopify Speed Optimisation

Chapter 8: SEO for International Shopify Stores

Is Shopify / Shopify Plus suitable for international stores?  228

Chapter 9: Shopify Plus SEO

Chapter 10: Shopify SEO Checklist

Final, Final Thoughts 286

About Daryl Rosser

Call it a mixture of short-term marketing tricks and a handshake business

After 2 years of living on savings and struggling to bounce back, he ended

His approach is simple, straightforward recommendations based on strate-

Can I make a confession?

I've personally worked with several clients, reviewed hundreds of sites,

Which is where YOU come in. And this eBook.

You'll see my processes, code snippets, hacks, tricks, and everything we do

If you're a beginner or own a store yourself, pay attention to the fundamen-

Also, don't forget to request a video review of your Shopify store at my

Shopify SEO Features

Easy title tag and meta description customisation

This makes it extremely simple to customise these fundamental On Page

Default Robots.txt setup

By default, Shopify does a fantastic job of this by disallowing access to pages

But if you'd like to modify it, it's now possible too.

Our Shopify Robots.txt guide explains how.

Easy 301 redirects

Start by going to Online Store > Navigation:

Click View URL Redirects:

Then you can choose to Import or Create URL Redirect:

Import is amazing for importing hundreds or even thousands of 301 re

For most cases though, you'll just do one at a time:

With Shopify it's already done. That's it.

Take a look for your store here:

Default server setup

Most themes are SEO friendly

This includes a proper heading structure, structured data, breadcrumbs, etc.

Great app selection

Shopify SEO Limitations

Directory URL Structure

Product Category pages are accessible under

Product pages are accessible under

Chapter 1: Is Shopify good for SEO?

Chapter 4: Technical SEO for Shopify

What is Technical SEO? 59

Chapter 4.1: Rich Snippets

What are Rich Snippets? 90

Shopify's default URL structure 112

Chapter 4.4: Product Tags

What are Shopify Product Tags? 131

Chapter 4.5: XML Sitemap

What is a Shopify Sitemap? 141

Chapter 5: Blogging on Shopify

Why you need a blog 165

What is link building? 197

Chapter 8: SEO for International Shopify Stores

Is Shopify / Shopify Plus suitable for international stores? 228

Final, Final Thoughts 286