So, you decided to start an online e-commerce store using Shopify and wondering Shopify is SEO friendly enough. Let’s find it out how Shopify can help to reach your SEO goals or you should use different platforms for your e-commerce store.
Shopify is a great SEO friendly platform to build your e-commerce store. The advantage of Shopify is that Shopify is only built to power e-commerce stores. Due to this, the platform itself is SEO friendly and avoids lots of critical SEO technical mistakes. However, if you are thinking of expanding to global business, Shopify is not the best option. Read Shopify limitation below to learn more.
However, there are pros and cons just like any other platform with Shopify.
Why Shopify Is SEO Friendly?
The Shopify platform site structure is built to support e-commerce stores to thrive in search engines. The best SEO practices are automatically followed because they are already built-in within Shopify.
- You will have SEO friendly readable URLs.Its is standard and simple, not unreadable URL parameters.
- You can add a hierarchy of product categories.
- Because its hosted service, you do not have to worry about hosting or website security.
- Shopify optimise product image optimisation itself and offer shopify hosted CDN service. This will help to load your images faster.
- XML sitemap files are automatically generated. This will certainly avoid lots of SEO technical mistakes done by some web developers.
- Shopify managed – Robots.txt file – This is where Shopify instruct Google to what pages to crawl and what pages to not to crawl and index. This is another area most of the web developers do mistakes.
- Shopify does offer very user friendly interface to update category title and descriptions and product metdadata.
SEO Limitation of Shopify
Before talking about limitations for SEO, you should know that there are more than 1.75 million merchants using the Shopify platform. ( Source: Backlinko )
Common Issues Within Shopify
- Shopify use forced URL structure, which means you don’t have the full control over editing your URLs other than the collection names or product names. For example you can not delete the sub-directory “Collection” from URL.
Domainname/collections/mens-watches
Domainname/collections/women-watches - No access to root folder – Because its a self hosted platform, you can not upload any files to the root folder. You can not edit files like Robots.txt file when needed.
- International Targeting – When you want to expand your store to other regions or languages, you have to use a sub-domain or separate domain approach. Generally it is recommend to use the same domain and use sub-directories to target different countries for international SEO.
For example : samsung.com/au/ - International domain with sub-directory
Can not use sub-directory approach in Shopify Within Shopify, you have to use a different domain to target.
For this example, to target “Australia” you have to use au. your domain ( sub-domain ) or use a totally new domain to target Australia.
This is the biggest drawback with Shopify as when you use a different domain or subdomain approach you will need to invest significantly more in website setup and optimisation.
So, Shopify Good For SEO ?
Shopify offers an excellent platform to thrive your store in Search Engines. And that is why it is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms in the world.
It has all the basic functions for SEO and If you need advanced SEO features, you can use Shopify apps, just like plugins in WordPress.
Read more on – 20 Best SEO Apps for Shopify in 2022
