Shopify is a suitable venue for people who are new to online selling. It’s relatively easy to use, and it’s easily scalable as well.
Although it’s an excellent e-commerce platform, it is not without drawbacks. Sometimes, you might encounter SEO problems that can affect the way you promote your store on the world wide web.
That said, here are five ways to overcome the most common Shopify SEO problems:
Problem 1: No Idea About Shopify SEO Problems
As a new seller, you probably have no idea about what problems your store might have.
Sure, it might look like it’s running fine, but SEO problems are not visible to the naked eye. Once you get to know it, it might be too late. Your store might have lost much profit by then.
Solution: Install the Google Webmaster tool.
With this suite, you can play detective with your Shopify SEO problems.
It works by crawling your website, thereby alerting you of SEO errors and issues that search engines might find.
Through the Webmaster tool, you can determine the traffic you’ve been missing because of your 404 pages and lack of redirects.
As it also shows your duplicate content, you can weed them out before they can affect your site’s health.
Problem 2: Duplicate Title Tags
Now that you have your Google Webmaster tool, go to ‘HTML improvements’ under ‘Search Appearance.’
Here, you will see that your website has several duplicate tags. This is because Shopify relies on grouping products into collections.
Solution: Set Up Canonical Tags
To remove the duplicates, you need to add the rel=”canonical” tag to your website.
You can do this by going to the Webmaster tag of your liquid.theme file. Type in <link rel=”canonical” href=”{{ canonical_url }}” /> before the /head tag.
Likewise, if you don’t want to index your sub-collections or tag pages, make sure to add this code:
{% if template contains ‘collection’ and current_tags %}
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” />
<link rel=”canonical” href=”{{ shop.url }}{{ collection.url }}” />
{% else %}
<link rel=”canonical” href=”{{ canonical_url }}” />
{% endif %}
Problem 3: Similar Meta-Descriptions
Duplicate meta-descriptions are bad for your website as Google may flag this down as plagiarized material.
But before you panic, make sure that you have added the rel=” canonical” tag mentioned above.
If you continue to have this problem even with the said tag, you need to follow the solution below.
Solution: Write your own product information.
Yes, this can be quite time-consuming, especially if you have hundreds of products on your page. But trust us, it’s worth it.
More than just producing the unique content that Google loves, it’s a chance for you to improve your website’s rank as well.
Here, you can use hot and trending keywords that buyers use to search for their desired items. Make sure to avoid keyword stuffing, though, as search engines can easily pick up on this.
If you’re extremely busy, you can consider using a product information manager. Here, you can create and edit data in bulk.
That way, you can export the same descriptions to other e-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay without the need to copy every product detail from Shopify.
Problem 4: Garbled Shopify Store Structure
A bad site structure is one of the Shopify SEO problems that affect the customer experience.
Think of it as real-life shopping. You may have walked through several rows to get to your chosen store. But now that you want to head back to the exit, you can’t because of the many turns you made.
This is the same thing that happens to online shoppers. If you lead your clients to several product branches, they may find it hard to navigate your website.
More than just being harmful to the customer experience, a bad site structure can affect your SEO München as well. Since Google uses this to determine the more essential parts of your website, a garbled structure may end up pulling your rankings down.
Make your navigation a clear linear path rather than a jumbled spiderweb.
It’s as easy as making your structure like this: Home > Category > Sub-category (if necessary) > Product.
Problem 5: Slow Website
A slow website is one of the worst Shopify SEO problems you could have. That’s because a 100-millisecond delay can lead to a 7% drop in conversions.
If you want to make as many sales as you can, you need to work on your store’s speed.
Solution: Check your images and apps.
A big picture can slow down your site, so make sure it’s optimized to a size that doesn’t forego quality.
As for your apps, remove those that you aren’t using. If your site continues to run slow even after these changes, you should consider changing your Shopify theme.
There you have it – the five most common Shopify SEO problems and how you can solve them. By making the necessary changes to solve these issues, you can land your store into better search engine heights.