How to Fix SEO Problems with Shopify

Fix SEO Problems with Shopify

Last updated - March 1, 2022

You must have set up your online store with Shopify or about to set it up. Shopify has emerged as one of the leading eCommerce platforms. It has changed the way businesses used to reach their clients. Like the next-door shop! You can open your store in just a few clicks. Everything is so streamlined and easy with Shopify that doing eCommerce business is like a Cakewalk now.

Furthermore, SEO is the most critical tool for ranking your business on the internet. Do you know that SEO helps for getting the attention of their target audience SEO is quite handy? It not only attracts genuine high traffic but also increases your online presence. 

SEO can take your business journey to a completely different level. But, Shopify has so many stores in one place. It comes with some SEO problems. You must be wondering how to detect and solve them. Let’s discuss it in detail.

What are the Top common SEO problems with Shopify, and how to fix them?

Image optimization

Image optimization

Optimizing your image quality and its number gives the best user experience. Shopify auto-generates the images. With this, the quality of the image gets affected. It can generate either a very high-quality image like full-HD that reduces the site’s loading speed or a low-quality image that affects user understanding of the image. 

Further, Shopify doesn’t provide an accurate description of the image. It makes users know instantly what a picture wants to convey. The issue is that many stores don’t know about this problem. And even if they know, they don’t know how to take care of it at the backend.

Fixing the problem

The core of the issue lies in the theme. It is the theme of the store website that doesn’t allow proper description, maintain the quality and number of images. You need to select the theme that enables you to edit the pictures the way you want. 

Another thing could be the absence of source code. So, it is essential to add the source code to the template editor. In this way, you can edit your pictures with ease. You can keep slideshow images at the top front. For this, follow these steps:

  1. Click Theme from the left side menu.
  2. Select Theme settings and move to the homepage option.
  3. Check out if it has a slideshow banner in it. Otherwise, it’s better to choose another theme.
  4. Then, Select the Alt text option. 

Additionally, you can change the quality of the image by compressing it. You can even choose the image of your choice if its quality is low. If the description seems to be spammy, head to the alt text option and change it.

Default URL structure

Default URL structure

Shopify comes with a standard URL structure. Do you know that Shopify doesn’t have much space for store owners to change the URL structure? Shopify categorizes your product into two ways, products and collections. Shopify follows the subcategory structure. 

It forms the structure of the URL like www.company.com/collection/category or www.company.com/product/subecategory. So, it is like Shopify users have to adopt this URL even if they want to or not. The editing of URLs is not possible even for premium users as well. 

Fixing the problem

The best thing that you can do is to use optimized keywords in the slug area. Check out what is the best match for your products, subcategories, or collections. In this way, it will maximize the chances that your clients can find your product online.

Duplicate content

Duplicate content

Content is like the soul of the whole website. Store developers add products to a particular category and assign tags to it. Shopify generates duplicate content for every tag. It results in the presence of canonical URLs. Worst SEO and digital marketing case! Search engines can’t make out the actual content and may display altogether different content for a product.

The duplicate content problem generally comes from the blog writers. They have a habit of assigning 10-20 tags for each blog. For example, products like a tunic, shirt, and coat may require categories based on their sleeve length. Shopify CMS can intermix the content between all three.

Fixing the problem

SEO marketers can make a full-proof strategy to address this issue:

  1. Use max up to 5 tags for every product. 
  2. Make a list of tags and make sure to have a difference between those tags. The difference need not be huge; It can be as minute using plural or some synonyms.  
  3. You can even remove tags to remove this problem from the root itself.
  4. You can edit the liquid theme file and add ‘noindex’ code in the HTML. By doing this, Google will not be able to crawl on tag pages.

Further, you can even access SEO company India for addressing the issue of duplicate content.

Mobile-friendliness

Mobile-friendliness

Google is a die-hard fan of Mobile-friendliness. And there is nothing wrong with this. More than 90% of the world’s traffic comes from smartphones, iPhones, or tablets. If you’re a theme that is not mobile-friendly, it is like you’re losing so many clients. 

Shopify store owners generally ignore push notification alerts. They are quite influential in making your clients aware of your latest deals, coupons, and discounts. And even they push for better user engagement. 

Other than that, by making your store website and app mobile-optimized, you can channelize a big bunch of opportunities. Do you know that only 21 percent of eCommerce customers come from mobile?

Fixing the problem

Let’s see how can we cover this issue by following these tips:

  1. The mobile-friendly theme is a foremost requirement for making your website Mobile-friendly.
  2. Extra data reduces the space for the products. It is advisable to use as minimum content as possible for the product pages.
  3. Enable push notifications options for your increasing your sales.
  4. Make your store navigation easier by putting fewer buttons in the menu and not overcrowding it.

Title and Meta descriptions

Title and Meta description are two strong pillars of SEO. There is a limit of the number of characters for the. For the title, it is 70 and meta description 320. But, Shopify has space constraints; even 70 characters for tile is too much. 

Fixing the problem

Some quick tips are:

  1. Be quite smart in making a choice of your words for the Title. Use product-specific words and those that relate to customer requirements.
  2. Long meta descriptions are also a big no-no. Nobody wants too many details in eCommerce. Using to-the-point information is more than enough.

Other essential SEO considerations for Shopify are:

  • Shopify picks up the manufacturer description. It is better to write your description as per recent trends and customer demand.
  • Google Analytics is one thing that allows you to track your customer behavior and track website activities like bounce rate, time spent per session, etc. Shopify doesn’t take care of these factors. Make your account in the Google analytics, copy tracking id, and paste the same at the backend of Shopify.
  • Sitemap eases out customer navigation and search engines to track your website. Follow standard sitemap structure with a max of four clicks to reach the homepage.
  • Add robot.txt file in the coding of Shopify. It will enable search bots to crawl on your site.
  • Uninstall unwanted apps to improve the functionality and speed of your website.

Conclusion

Let’s wind up the article! There is definitely no escape route for running away from SEO. SEO is the most effective digital marketing technique. Check the critical SEO areas on your Shopify stores like image alt tags, title, sitemap, and genuine content. Solving these issues is not a big deal; it just requires little effort and periodic monitoring. So, what is the first step for making your Shopify store optimized?

Further reading

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