Reviewed by Leila De La Fuente, Brandography’s Digital Marketing Consultant and SEO Specialist.
If you’re running a business online, you probably already know how essential SEO can be to growing your presence. But how easy is it to get organic traffic when your business runs on Shopify? Does SEO work differently on that platform?
The short answer: Yes, there are differences, but these can help you get seen more easily. Understanding how Shopify SEO works can help you make more informed decisions when optimizing product pages or planning content strategy.
Read on to make sure your store is found, seen, and shopped.
The Art and Science of Regular SEO
Regular SEO is the art and science of helping websites rank higher on search engines like Google. It includes:
- Keyword research
- On-page optimization (title tags, meta descriptions, image alt text, etc.)
- Content creation
- Backlink building
- Technical SEO (e.g., site speed and mobile-friendliness)
Whether you’re using WordPress, Squarespace, or building from scratch, these fundamentals are the same from platform to platform.
How Shopify SEO Differs
Because Shopify is an eCommerce platform, SEO functions a bit differently:
- Built-In URL Structure
Shopify automatically creates a certain URL structure for products, collections, and blogs. For example, URLs often include /products/your-product-name/, /blog/your-blog-title/ or /collections/your-collection-name.
This predefined parent folder structure is helpful in ensuring the website’s organization stays consistent and easily readable for search engines and significantly reduces the issue of “orphaned” pages, which occur when URLs are not created with a parent-child relationship. While this guided URL structure is beneficial for SEO, it can limit customization options because you can’t easily customize or remove these parent folder URLs.
- Focus on Product Pages
Because Shopify is an eCommerce-focused platform, Shopify’s SEO strategy leans heavily into product and collection pages. Optimizing these pages with thoughtful keywords, structured data, and strong calls to action is key.
“I highly recommend implementing product schema on product pages, which can substantially improve the visibility of your product pages in search. This schema will help visually showcase specific product information, such as price, availability, and customer ratings, directly in search results, which encourages clicks and purchases. A Shopify developer can manually implement this, or you can leverage a schema-specific app from the Shopify App store.” – Leila
- App-Heavy Optimization
Many SEO features (like image compression, redirects, and schema markup) are handled through apps in Shopify’s ecosystem. That’s convenient, but also means you need to vet those apps for performance and compatibility.
- Limited Access to Backend
Unlike a custom site, where developers can tweak every line of code, Shopify limits access to certain backend files, making it harder to implement some advanced technical SEO strategies.
- Duplicate Content Challenges
Out of the box, Shopify may create multiple URLs for the same product (e.g., a product listed in multiple collections), which may lead to duplicate content. Canonical tags can be helpful, but you’ll want to be intentional about how you manage them.
“The good news is that this issue is easily solvable with a little dev work. As part of our typical Shopify builds, our developers update this setting to eliminate any duplicate URL issues.” – Leila De La Fuente, Brandography’s Digital Marketing Consultant.
Which One Is Right for Me?
The good news is that you don’t have to choose between “regular” SEO and Shopify SEO—the two can work together to help your target audience find you. But your platform should affect your approach. If you’re selling products on Shopify, your SEO strategy should be tailored to how Shopify works, how people shop, and how search engines crawl eCommerce websites.
Drive Organic Traffic Shopify SEO
Our team Brandography helps brands navigate both the technical and creative sides of SEO, whether you’re on Shopify, WordPress, or another platform. From optimizing product pages to creating search-friendly content, we help you turn casual browsers into loyal buyers. If you’re looking for help with your Shopify site, we’re here. Reach out and connect with our team.
