It doesn’t matter if you’re a Junior SEO, looking to learn SEO on your own, or it’s your first time taking on a Shopify project, in all cases an initial security check or SEO audit for Shopify will be essential to avoid setbacks.
I see many inexperienced SEOs who don’t pay attention to simple details that go unnoticed or are easier to notice in other CMS like WordPress.
This article will help you if:
- You want to check if the Shopify project is okay to start
- If you want to learn how to check SEO aspects that don’t appear in SemRush reports or other common tools.
I invite you to continue learning with Dysart Team, the reference SEO agency in Venezuela.
Initial SEO audit for Shopify: Beyond the tools
I’ll assume that you already do reports with SEO tools, I really like Semrush, but there’s also Screaming Frog, AHREFS, DinoRank, and more. But I want to focus on something beyond that, something that can be useful to you as a Junior SEO or SEO apprentice.
1- Check if Canonicals are being applied correctly
A canonical is an HTML tag used to tell Google the URL of importance for indexing. It is useful in E-Commerce where there are multiple similar URLs, or with very similar content, where we do not want Google to associate it as duplicate content.
In WordPress with SEO plugins they are generally self-referential by default, but in Shopify, in my experience, it does not have this tag, which can cause problems.
2- Check the path of the URLs so that products are not duplicated for each category
We could say that Google is very jealous of authority, and it is very difficult to concentrate a good authority when we have different accesses to the same product.
In Shopify it looks like this, when you have a product in 2 categories, such as a gold necklace for men, which belongs to the categories “Gold Necklaces” and “Men’s Necklaces”, in Shopify 2 routes are usually created.
- .com/Gold Necklaces/Gold Necklace for Men
- .com/Men’s Necklaces/Gold Necklace for Men
By creating this by default we are diluting the product’s page rank, as well as creating content cannibalizations since their canonical points to themselves.
3- Problems when implementing Hreflang with different domains
Yes, Shopify makes a good attempt to compete as an E-commerce for this 2024, but international SEO is not its greatest strength. I have already talked about this on other occasions, the hreflang problems in Shopify, but if you want to move on to a solution, I leave you this article to implement hreflang for free with meta fields.
When we have several domains that do not belong to Shopify, Hreflang cannot be applied dynamically as this cms does, which prevents us from placing the correct tags, and we must proceed to pay or modify the Liquid Theme code.
4- Check the parameterized URLs
Shopify by default has problems with these URLs and Google in some cases ends up indexing these URLs. As I have already mentioned above, all this is a chain, in this case the parameterized URLs prevent the positioning of the URL we want since it is considered duplicate content and cannibalization.
If you don’t know what parameterized URLs look like, usually at the end of the URL there is a “?” followed by other parameters such as size, color, to name a few, all of this will help you improve Shopify SEO without being an expert.
Conclusion
This initial checklist or audit starts for SEO in Shopify, it is just a small addition that you can add to your reports with any of your SEO tools, in addition to adding more value to your reports, it will prevent you from spending hours looking for possible solutions to cases that are not visible to the naked eye.
This is where we come today, it has been a pleasure to share with you my experience as a professional of the SEO agency in Venezuela, Dysart Team
