Shopify is the most popular e-commerce platform, making it easier than ever for businesses to sell their merchandise online. Its easy-to-use CMS has made it particularly beneficial for smaller retailers during the pandemic, allowing them to claw back around 94 percent of what would have otherwise been lost sales.
A new Shopify store, like any new website, would necessitate a significant amount of work on the part of the webmaster to create the required exposure for visitors to reach the product, let alone turn into customers. And, as with any CMS, there are a few SEO barriers that shop owners must overcome to ensure that their website reaches its intended audience.
Some of these roadblocks are more entrenched than others, so we've broken down the most popular Shopify SEO issues and how to solve them for your online store with the help of Shopify SEO Expert.
Restricted and Forced URL structure:-
Without a question, one of the greatest pet peeves about the Shopify app is that it allows users to use a subfolder layout.
In a typical e-commerce platform, the returns policy URL will be exampleshop.com/returns/, but due to the forced format, this becomes exampleshop.com/pages/returns/. These are forced into exampleshop.com/collections/category/ and exampleshop.com/products/product-title/ for the product and product category sections. Even on Shopify's most expensive package, you won't be able to solve this.
In the same way, as WordPress divides content into articles and sites, Shopify CMS helps you to segment your product lists into two major divisions — items and collections — in addition to more general posts, pages, and websites. Creating a new product on Shopify allows you to list the individual goods you have for sale, while collections allow you to group the diverse products and organize them into conveniently searchable categories.
The issue that most users have with this imposed method of content organization is that Shopify often enforces a fixed organizational hierarchy with minimal customization choices. Any new product or set you upload must contain the subfolders /product and /collection in the URL.
Although it is a major source of contention for its customers, Shopify has yet to fix it, and there is currently no workaround. As a consequence, you must be highly cautious of the URL's slug. To give your goods the highest chance of being discovered, make sure you use the correct keywords in the slug and categorize your posts wisely.
Automatically generated duplicate content
When consumers add a new product to a list, they encounter yet another vexing problem of classifying their material as a product or collection. This is because, although the product page would still have a URL, connecting a product to a list provides an extra URL for it inside the collection. When it comes to internal connections, Shopify considers the list URL as the canonical one rather than the product one, which can make things incredibly complicated when it comes to ensuring that the correct pages are indexed.
However, in this case, Shopify has provided for fixes, but they do include editing code in the back end of the store's theme. Following these steps would instruct the Shopify site's collections pages to only internally connect to the canonical /product/ URLs.
No trailing slash redirect
Another problem with Shopify's redundant material is the trailing dash, which is essentially a '/' at the end of the URL used to indicate a directory. Google considers URLs with and without a trailing slash to be distinct websites. Shopify ends URLs without a trailing slash by default, but versions of the same URL with a trailing slash are available to both users and search engines. Normally, this can be avoided by implementing a site-wide trailing slash redirect through the website's htaccess file, but Shopify does not permit access to the htaccess file.
Instead, Shopify advises webmasters to use canonical tags to tell Google which edition of each page is favored for indexing. It would have to suffice as the only solution possible so far, but it is far from optimal and often contributes to data attribution problems in Google Analytics and other monitoring apps.
No control over the website’s robots.txt file
In addition to requiring users to build identical copies of pages against their will, Shopify forbids webmasters from making manual changes to their store's robots.txt code. Shopify seems to see this as a benefit, taking care of the bothersome technological SEO problems on your behalf. However, when items go out of order or collections are withdrawn, you cannot noindex or nofollow the outdated pages that are left behind.
In this case, you can modify your store's theme by inserting meta robots tags into the head> portion of each related tab. Here is a step-by-step guide from Shopify on how to cover redundant pages from a quest.
Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
One of my pet peeves with the Shopify CMS is that it has a Twitter-like tracker for the number of characters used in title tags and Meta details, and it's incorrect.
Seventy characters for a title is a deceptive number since Google determines width by counting pixels, and analysis indicates that this is usually 600 pixels. This equates to about 60 characters.
Many Shopify websites I come across fall into this pit because not everyone who uses the platform deals with or has a strong understanding of SEO fundamentals, and as a result, they are not completely optimizing their title tags.
Shopify, on the other hand, has reduced these to 160 characters, which is usually considered a safe amount to keep under to prevent truncation.
One of the simplest and safest ways to see if the title tags and/or Meta definition is too long (in terms of pixels) is to go to Google and run a site: command. Instead, if you want to know if a certain URL looks in Google, use the same URL after the site: operator. Any updates can take a few minutes to spread inside Google, so don't expect instant answers all of the time.
Setting Image ALT Tags
Although the SEO value of image ALT tags is debatable, they do have consumer value.
If an image fails to load because of a slow link, a timeout, or an error, the browser will display a box containing the image and its ALT attribute. They are often used by screen reader users who have difficulty reading video.
Shopify, unlike other sites such as WordPress, requires you to set the ALT text at the picture level. This means that if I use the same product picture or model image in several sections of the website, I must keep entering the ALT variable.
Shopify Handling Redirects
To conclude on a good note, and to Shopify's credit, the app can handle redirects well and has made them easy to introduce.
Sum-up:
When you first start, SEO will seem to be extremely difficult. It needs time to study and comprehend how SEO works. There is still space for advancement. hire shopify SEO expert from Cartcoders to assist you in setting up your Shopify store and providing Shopify SEO Services.
I know that it will seem intimidating at first, but you'll get the hang of it quickly!
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