Shopify SEO Expert
I provide SEO consultancy for Shopify stores, helping ecommerce businesses increase their organic visibility through technical SEO, collection and product optimisation, site architecture, internal linking and content strategy.
My Approach to Shopify SEO
Shopify provides a strong foundation for ecommerce, but there are also some platform-specific limitations and technical quirks that need to be considered when developing an SEO strategy.
My focus is on working within those limitations to create a Shopify store that is easy for search engines to crawl and understand, while providing relevant landing pages for the different ways your customers search for your products.
For most Shopify stores, I believe collection pages should be at the centre of your SEO strategy.
Product pages are obviously important, particularly for searches for specific products, brands or models. But collection pages give us the opportunity to target the broader product searches that potential customers make before they know exactly what they want to buy.
Rather than simply having a handful of broad collections, I'll look at how people actually search for your products and identify opportunities for more specific collections based on product type, brand, features, attributes, use cases and other relevant search intents.
The objective is to create useful ecommerce entry points for as much relevant search demand as possible – while avoiding unnecessary duplication or the creation of low-value collection pages.
My Approach to Shopify SEO
Shopify provides a strong foundation for ecommerce, but there are also some platform-specific limitations and technical quirks that need to be considered when developing an SEO strategy.
My focus is on working within those limitations to create a Shopify store that is easy for search engines to crawl and understand, while providing relevant landing pages for the different ways your customers search for your products.
For most Shopify stores, I believe collection pages should be at the centre of your SEO strategy.
Product pages are obviously important, particularly for searches for specific products, brands or models. But collection pages give us the opportunity to target the broader product searches that potential customers make before they know exactly what they want to buy.
Rather than simply having a handful of broad collections, I'll look at how people actually search for your products and identify opportunities for more specific collections based on product type, brand, features, attributes, use cases and other relevant search intents.
The objective is to create useful ecommerce entry points for as much relevant search demand as possible – while avoiding unnecessary duplication or the creation of low-value collection pages.
Collection Pages & Site Architecture
One of Shopify's limitations from an SEO perspective is that it doesn't support nested collections in the same way that many other ecommerce platforms support traditional categories and subcategories.
You can create a logical relationship for users through your navigation and internal linking, but the collections themselves remain at the same URL level:
- /collections/mens-clothing/
- /collections/mens-shirts/
- /collections/linen-shirts/
rather than a traditional nested category structure.
This makes navigation and internal linking particularly important.
I'll look at how your collections relate to one another and ensure important subcollections are linked from broader parent collections where appropriate. This helps users move through the catalogue while giving search engines clearer signals about the relationship and hierarchy between different areas of the store.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is one of the areas where Shopify stores can often be improved significantly.
I'll look beyond the main navigation at how authority flows between collections, subcollections, products and supporting content, making sure your most important SEO landing pages aren't buried or dependent on search engines discovering them through a sitemap.
For example, if a broad Women's Clothing collection is supported by more specific collections for Dresses, Jackets, Knitwear and Trousers, those relationships should be reinforced through contextual HTML links rather than relying entirely on the main menu or product links.
The result is a clearer site hierarchy even where Shopify's underlying URL structure doesn't provide one.
Technical Shopify SEO
Shopify takes care of many technical SEO fundamentals automatically, but that doesn't mean technical problems can't occur.
One issue I regularly look for is a canonical mismatch between product URLs and the URLs being used within internal links. Shopify can generate contextual product URLs such as:
- /collections/shoes/products/product-name
while the canonical URL points to:
- /products/product-name
This can result in a store repeatedly internally linking to one version of a product URL while telling search engines that another version is the canonical page. Fortunately, this is usually a relatively straightforward issue to resolve with a small change to the theme – commonly within theme.liquid or the relevant theme link markup – so that internal links consistently point towards the canonical product URL.
I'll also review crawlability and indexation, structured data, faceted/filter URLs, redirects, sitemaps, theme implementation and other technical issues that could be affecting organic performance.
Product Pages
I'll review how Shopify product pages are optimised and how they fit into the wider structure of the store. That includes product titles and content, structured data, indexing, internal linking and ensuring products are appropriately connected to the collections and other products around them.
The objective isn't necessarily to make every individual product page an SEO landing page. It's to understand which products have genuine search potential while ensuring the wider product catalogue supports your collection-level SEO strategy.