What is Shopify SEO Limitations ?
It’s not all good though, there are a few limitations that you should consider. I’ve also written about this in detail for Shopify Plus SEO, though the same limitations apply to both
Directory URL Structure
The inability to modify the directory URL structure is an annoying restriction. Product Category pages are accessible under example.com/collections/name-of-category Product pages are accessible under example.com/products/name-of-product.
(Well, presuming product internal links are fixed)
Just that; there are no subcategory directories or ways to alter or delete /collections/. It’s really constrained.
Normally, you’d like a URL structure along these lines: /sofas/leather/ With Shopify, this needs to become: /collections/leather-sofas It won’t change how it works; it’s just less customizable.
Read my blog on the Shopify URL structure for more information on this.
Filter Pages
As has already observed, Shopify’s lack of subcategories can be a major issue.
Using filters called Product Tags, some stores try to get around this.
For example:
Even from the perspective of the URL, it appears to be a subcategory:
The issue is that these pages cannot be altered without manually adjusting the theme each time, which is inefficient, and as a result they produce a significant amount of waste.
number of thin content pages:
In short, the best course of action is to manually build additional collections for subcategories and ensure that Product Tags are properly canonicalized to the main collection.
This is covered in my Shopify Product Tags SEO guide.
Multi-Store Setup
One major thing to consider is whether you’ll need a multi-store/international
setup. If so, managing this with Shopify can be challenging.
True multi-store functionality is not available by default with Shopify.
You are free to open as many stores as you want, but there is no connection between them. This makes it challenging to maintain stock levels and other aspects, and it also makes SEO more challenging.
Using a Hreflang tag to describe the various pages for various locales and/or languages is the normal procedure for international stores.
As an illustration, your French version’s hreflang tag would be as follows:
When you can’t automate this since each store has a varied selection of products, things get tricky.
There’s workarounds with a little development, but it’s something to consider.
My Shopify International SEO guide explains more.
<link rel=”alternate” href=”https://fr.logeix.com/shopify-seo/” hreflang=”fr” />
No Server Log File
Servers by default will keep a “log file” to keep track of every request by robots or users to your website.
For SEOs, this can be useful when combined with a log analysis tool for measuring how often your website is crawled, which pages/resources are crawled most or lead often, etc.
Unfortunately this isn’t an option with Shopify as we’re not given access to the log file.
Is this a big deal? Not particularly.
The additional data is helpful to measure the impact of technical SEO changes, but between Google Search Console data and following best practices, you
can cover things anyway.
Product Variants
The 100 variants and 3 choices limit on Shopify may cause problems if your company sells a lot of different product options or variations.
It is fairly simple to address this by making distinct goods for different possibilities, such as colours or materials, but doing so may result in thin content because search engines will index many different product versions.
This isn’t a problem because it’s simple to correct with canonical tags, as I discussed in my piece about a workaround for the product variations limit, but you’ll still need to do it.
Other downsides that can be fixed
Removing pages from sitemaps, product internal links, breadcrumbs, etc. is difficult.
Additional soft restrictions exist, but they may all be worked around with a little development and customization.
The sitemap should be updated, internal links should be canonicalized, there should be no broken breadcrumbs, and there should be a lot of automated sites that are automatically indexable.
All of issues are discussed in my technical SEO for Shopify guide, along with solutions.
