Shopify does a decent amount of SEO for you and then quietly gets in the way on the rest. The platform handles the plumbing that used to break sites, and creates a specific set of its own problems that no other platform has.

This is what Shopify already covers, what it works against, and what to change first.

Updated September 2026.

What Shopify handles without you

Worth knowing so you do not pay someone to do it again:

  • HTTPS on every store, no configuration.
  • A sitemap at /sitemap.xml, generated and updated automatically.
  • Mobile rendering, on any theme from the last several years.
  • Canonical tags on products, pointing back to the clean /products/handle URL.
  • Reasonable hosting speed. Not fast, but consistent, and not something you can improve by switching hosts.
  • Structured data for products in most modern themes, including price and availability.

That covers a large share of a technical SEO checklist. The remaining problems are the ones Shopify creates.

Problem one: the same product at several addresses

This is the big one and it is baked into the platform.

A product is reachable at /products/leather-jacket and also at /collections/outerwear/products/leather-jacket, and at /collections/sale/products/leather-jacket, and at every other collection it belongs to. Same product, several URLs.

Shopify sets a canonical tag on all of them pointing at the clean /products/ version, which is the correct fix and is already done. The problem is that your internal links usually point at the collection versions, because that is what the theme generates when you click through from a collection page. So every link in your own navigation votes for a URL you have told Google to ignore.

The fix is in the theme. Find where product links are built in your collection templates and make them output /products/handle directly rather than the collection-scoped path. On most themes this is a single Liquid change, using the product's own URL rather than the one scoped to the current collection. If you are not comfortable editing the theme, this is a small job for a developer and it is the most worthwhile hour you will spend on a Shopify store.

Problem two: filter and sort URLs multiplying

Every filter combination and every sort order generates a URL. Color, size, price band, sort by newest, sort by price. A collection with four filters produces dozens of near-identical pages, and Google will happily crawl all of them instead of the pages you care about.

Two moves:

  • Edit robots.txt.liquid. Shopify lets you customise this from the theme editor now. Disallow the parameter patterns you never want crawled: sort parameters, view parameters, and tag-based paths. Be conservative. Blocking too much is a real way to hurt yourself.
  • Decide which filter pages deserve to exist. If "black running shoes" is something people actually search for and you have enough products, that page is worth having, with its own written introduction. If nobody searches for it, canonical it back to the parent collection.

Most stores should index the collections and nothing below them.

Problem three: collection pages with nothing on them

A collection page that is a grid of products and a heading is thin content, and it is competing against retailers who wrote something.

The collections you actually want traffic for need real text: a short introduction saying what the category covers and who it suits, a buying guide or a few frequently asked questions underneath the grid, and internal links to related collections.

Three or four of your most important collections is enough. Do not write filler for all ninety.

Problem four: product descriptions from the manufacturer

If you sell other people's products and you paste in the supplier's description, you are one of two hundred stores with identical text. There is no ranking available on that page at all.

Rewriting every product is unrealistic for a large catalog. Rewrite the twenty that matter. For everything else, add whatever is genuinely yours: your own photographs, your own sizing notes, why you stock it, what it goes with, real reviews.

Problem five: the blog nobody reads

Shopify's blog lives at /blogs/news/post-name by default, which is fine, and gets used badly almost universally.

If you are going to write, write the things customers ask before buying: how to choose between two options, sizing and fit, care and maintenance, what goes wrong. Those pages catch people earlier in the decision and they link naturally to the products.

Announcements about your new website do not do this.

The apps question

Shopify's app store will sell you SEO apps. Most of them do three things: bulk edit metadata, add structured data your theme may already output, and generate a report with a score in it.

Before installing one, check whether your theme already outputs product structured data, because doubling it up creates errors. And be aware that SEO apps are a common source of injected scripts that slow the store down. An app that adds 200ms to every page load to give you a score out of 100 is a bad trade.

Bulk metadata editing is the one genuinely useful feature in that category, and it matters only if you have a large catalog.

Speed on Shopify

You cannot change the hosting, so the levers are:

  • Images. Serve them at the size they display. This is still the single biggest factor on most stores.
  • Apps. Every app adds script. Audit what is installed and remove what you are not using. Uninstalling an app does not always remove its code from the theme, so check.
  • The theme. Sliders, video backgrounds, custom fonts loaded four weights deep. A heavy theme is heavy on every page.

Measure with PageSpeed Insights, which reports real Chrome user data rather than a lab test.

In what order

  1. Fix the internal product links in the theme so they point at clean product URLs.
  2. Add real content to your three or four most important collection pages.
  3. Rewrite the descriptions on your twenty best sellers.
  4. Handle filter and sort URLs in robots.txt.liquid.
  5. Compress the images.
  6. Then, and only then, think about the blog.

The honest caveat

Shopify SEO is a competitive space where you are up against Shopify's own documentation, every major SEO publisher, and retailers with budgets. The technical work above is worth doing because it removes obstacles, but it does not create demand on its own.

For most stores, the constraint is not the platform's SEO defaults. It is that there is no reason to buy from you rather than from Amazon. Fix that first, and the technical work compounds. Fix only the technical work, and it does not.

SEOEcommerce