How do you do SEO on a Shopify store?

Shopify gets your store online quickly and handles more of the technical groundwork than most owners realise. It hosts your site, issues the SSL certificate, writes the XML sitemap and adds canonical tags to duplicate product addresses without anyone asking. That's also why so many Shopify stores stall: the platform covers the basics, the owner assumes it's covered SEO, and nobody does the work that actually decides rankings.

That work isn't complicated, but it's specific to how Shopify builds a store. Below is what Shopify does for you, what it leaves to you, and the order we tackle it in on the Shopify stores we look after.

What Shopify handles for SEO, and what it leaves to you

Shopify is the second most common ecommerce platform on the web. The HTTP Archive's 2024 Web Almanac found it on 19.6% of the ecommerce sites it detected, behind WooCommerce on 35.8%, and W3Techs puts it on 5.4% of all websites. Shopify's own SEO documentation lists what the platform does automatically. The split looks like this:

Read down the right-hand column and you'll see a pattern. Shopify protects you from the worst technical mistakes, but every decision about what your store should rank for, and how well each page answers that search, is still yours.

Shopify settings to check before any other SEO work

Six settings in the Shopify admin decide whether Google can see your store properly at all. They'll take you minutes to check, and a wrong one undoes everything else on this page.

1. Store password protection is off. While the storefront password under Online Store, Preferences is on, search engines see a password page instead of your store.
2. The homepage title and meta description are written. You'll find them in the same Preferences screen, and many stores still show the store name and nothing else.
3. One primary domain, with the others redirecting to it. Under Settings, Domains, your store should serve one address and send the myshopify.com and any spare domains to it.
4. Search Console is verified and the sitemap submitted. Shopify builds your sitemap at /sitemap.xml; Search Console is how you see what Google does with it.
5. Every priority product and collection has its search engine listing edited. The Edit website SEO panel on each one sets its page title, description and URL handle.
6. Product images carry alt text. You set it image by image in the product's media, and it's the text Google reads when it can't see the picture.

Why Shopify creates duplicate product URLs

Every Shopify product lives at /products/product-name. It can also be reached inside each collection it belongs to, at /collections/collection-name/products/product-name. A product in five collections has six working addresses.

What the canonical tag already fixes

Shopify adds a canonical tag to the collection versions pointing back at the plain /products/ address. That's Google's recommended way of consolidating duplicate URLs, and it works. We checked it on a live store while writing this: the collection address of an Allbirds product returns a canonical pointing to the product address.

What the canonical tag does not fix

A canonical is a hint, not an instruction, and it doesn't do anything about crawling. If your theme's collection grid links to the collection version of every product, Google still follows those links, crawls every duplicate and only then reads the canonical. On a catalogue of a few thousand products that's a lot of wasted crawling, and your internal links pointing at each product are split across several addresses instead of landing on one.

How to check your own theme

1. Open a collection page and hover over a product. If the link contains /collections/, your theme is linking the duplicate.
2. Look for within: collection in the product card snippet of your theme code. That filter is what builds the collection path.
3. Remove it so every product link points at /products/. Modern Shopify themes already do this; older and heavily customised ones often don't.

How to make Shopify collection pages rank

For most stores, collections are the pages that should win the valuable searches. Someone typing "linen shirts men" wants a range to compare, which is a collection, not a single product. Yet on many Shopify stores the collection page is a heading and a product grid with nothing for Google to rank.

Map searches to collections before writing anything

Start with the searches, not your navigation. Group the terms your shoppers use into intents, then give each intent one collection. If an intent has no collection, that's a gap to build; if two collections target the same intent, one of them should go. This keyword map is the single most useful document in a Shopify SEO project, and it's the first thing we build in our Shopify SEO work for Australian stores.

Write above and below the grid

• A short introduction above the products, two or three sentences, saying what the range covers and who it suits.
• Buying guidance below the grid: fit, fabric, sizing, care or whatever your shoppers compare before choosing.
• Three to five FAQs answering the questions your customer service team already gets about that range.
• Links to the related collections and guides, so Google and shoppers can move sideways through your catalogue.

Decide which filters deserve a page

Filters and tags can turn one collection into hundreds of addresses. Google's guidance on managing faceted navigation is blunt about the cost: crawlers spend their time on filter URLs and have less left for the pages that matter. A handful of filters match real searches, such as "white linen shirts", and you're better off building those as proper collections. The rest should stay out of the index. Shopify's default robots.txt already blocks some sort and filter combinations, and you can add rules through the robots.txt.liquid template for the ones it misses.

How to optimise Shopify product pages

Your product pages win the specific searches: a model name, a brand plus product, a colour. They rarely need long copy, but they do need the right copy.

• Titles that match how people search. Brand, product type and the distinguishing detail, not an internal SKU name.
• Descriptions written for your store, not pasted from the supplier. The same manufacturer text on forty other stores gives Google no reason to prefer yours.
• One product page per product, not per colour. Variants belong on one page with the options selectable, so reviews and links build up on a single URL.
• Clean structured data. Shopify's structured_data filter outputs product markup in most modern themes. Check that no reviews or SEO app prints a second copy with a different price or rating.
• Image alt text that describes the product, including the colour and angle, because image search sends real shoppers.

When you discontinue a product, redirect its URL to the closest replacement or its collection rather than deleting it. Shopify offers to create a redirect when you change a handle, and has a URL redirect tool for everything else, but that only helps if someone uses it.

How Shopify apps slow a store down

Speed is where Shopify stores lose ground quietly. Google measures the experience of real visitors through Core Web Vitals, and web.dev sets the thresholds at 2.5 seconds for the largest content to load, 200 milliseconds to respond to a tap and a layout shift score of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of visits.

Shopify's hosting is fast. What slows your store down is what gets added to it:

• Apps that load scripts on every page, including pages where the app does nothing.
• Leftover code from uninstalled apps. Removing an app doesn't always remove the snippets it added to your theme.
• Hero videos, sliders and large images above the fold on collection and product templates.
• Third-party review, chat and pop-up widgets that each bring their own fonts and tracking.

How to audit your apps

1. List every app you've installed and write down what it's for.
2. Search your theme code for snippets belonging to apps that aren't installed any more, and remove them.
3. Test a product and a collection page on mobile before and after each change, using the field data in Search Console rather than a single lab score.
4. Replace any app whose job your theme can now do natively.

What to do about Shopify blogs and buying guides

Every Shopify store gets a blog at /blogs/news/ by default, and most use it for announcements nobody searches for. The posts that earn rankings answer the questions your shoppers ask before buying: how to choose a size, which material suits which use, how two options compare.

Each guide you publish should link into the collection it supports, which is how a guide passes its visibility on to the page that sells. Guides are also what other sites link to: nobody links to a product grid, but a genuinely useful comparison gets cited. That's the thinking behind earning links an online store can actually get, and the same pages are what AI answers tend to quote when someone asks which product to buy. We cover that side in getting products named in AI answers.

How to handle Shopify SEO when you sell overseas

Shopify Markets can serve each country from its own domain or subfolder, such as /en-nz/ for New Zealand. According to Shopify's Markets documentation, it adds hreflang tags automatically for markets set up with their own domains or subfolders, which tells Google which version belongs to which country.

The tags only help if your markets are genuinely different. Check that each market has its own currency and pricing, that your content is written for that country where it matters, and that your internal links stay inside the market rather than jumping back to the Australian version.

Shopify SEO compared with WooCommerce

Store owners often ask whether they'd rank better on another platform. The honest answer is that the platform rarely decides it.

Moving platforms for SEO alone rarely pays for the migration. If you're weighing it up anyway, we lay out the other side in our SEO for WooCommerce stores page, and either way you'll need to map your redirects before anything moves.

How to measure whether Shopify SEO is working

Rankings are a means, not the result. The numbers that matter to your store are organic orders and organic revenue, split between branded and non-branded searches so that a rise in brand demand isn't credited to SEO. Connect Search Console and GA4, check that your GA4 purchase events match Shopify's own order count, and report on both.

Two Shopify stores with published case studies show what the work can add up to. CheekyGlo's campaign recorded a 149% increase in organic traffic and a 332% increase in top three keyword positions. Incompletegl's results include a 530% increase in organic traffic. Both engagements combined SEO with paid media and conversion work, and each case study sets out the full picture.

Budget for it the same way: the work is priced on the size of your catalogue and how much copy it needs, and what SEO costs in Australia covers the market ranges. Paid search isn't a substitute, but it's a useful comparison. Ahrefs estimates advertisers pay around US$13 a click for "shopify seo services" in Australia, which is one way to value the organic clicks your store earns for free.

A Shopify SEO checklist, in the order that pays off

1. Connect Search Console and GA4 and confirm your organic orders are being counted correctly.
2. Fix the theme's product links so they point at /products/, not the collection path.
3. Audit apps and remove leftover code, then retest your mobile speed.
4. Build the keyword map: one intent, one collection.
5. Rewrite your priority collections with an introduction, buying guidance, FAQs and related links.
6. Tidy product titles, descriptions and alt text, starting with your best sellers.
7. Handle filters and tags: build the few with demand as collections and keep the rest out of the index.
8. Set up redirects for every discontinued product and changed handle.
9. Publish buying guides that link into their collections.
10. Earn links and mentions from the publications your customers read.

You can do most of this in-house with time and care. Where your store needs it done at scale, or your theme and apps need a developer's eye, that's the work a Shopify SEO specialist should be doing, and it's part of how we work as a digital marketing agency for online retailers.