Shopify SEO.

Shopify brings a lot to the table for SEO: an automatically generated XML sitemap, canonical tags, HTTPS, editable titles and meta descriptions for products, collections and pages, and a customisable robots.txt via the robots.txt.liquid template. Technically, a shop is therefore not badly set up. The levers lie mainly in structure, content and theme.

One peculiarity is the fixed URL structure. Products always sit under /products/, collections under /collections/, pages under /pages/ and blog posts under /blogs/. In addition, a product is often also reachable under /collections/name/products/product. Shopify sets a canonical to the main address for this, but many themes link internally to the long variant. It is cleaner if the theme links directly to /products/, so that crawlers do not have to process duplicate paths.

A shop's most important ranking pages are usually the collections, not individual products. Someone searching for 'made-to-measure suit Zurich' or 'children's bike helmet' wants to see a selection. Collection pages therefore need their own introductory text, sensible sub-collections and clear titles. Product pages need original descriptions instead of manufacturer texts that appear identically in dozens of other shops, as well as complete product data with price, availability and images, which Google uses via structured data for product rich results and Google Shopping.

A common brake is apps and overloaded themes. Every installed app can load additional scripts; after uninstallation, code remnants sometimes remain in the theme. That worsens loading time and Core Web Vitals. Regularly checking installed apps and the loading time of the most important pages is part of looking after a shop.