13 Shopify SEO Problems and How to Solve Them

If you run a Shopify store, you know how important having a strong online presence is. Yet, even with the winning products and content, you could still end up having zero visitors at your online store if it lacks optimization for search engines. 

That's where Shopify SEO becomes a concern. From sluggish page loads to subpar title tags or poor URL structures to limited redirects, many things can hamper your store's visibility and impact sales. 

So, here, we address 13 such Shopify SEO problems and how you can overcome them. If implemented right, these fixes can enhance your store's visibility, drive more traffic, and boost sales.

13 Common Shopify SEO Problems and Solutions

SEO, be it Shopify stores or anything on the web, is all about showing up high on Google, Bing, and similar search engines. But that feat can be hard to achieve if your online shop isn’t set up right. 

Check out these 13 common SEO problems many startup owners face while setting up their Shopify store and how to fix them.

1. Slow Page Load Speed

Let’s begin with arguably the most critical aspect of user experience and SEO. When your page takes longer to load, it increases the bounce rate, as potential customers may lose patience and click away. 

This, in turn, can harm your rankings since search engine algorithms take bounce rates into account. So, to improve your page load speed, here are a few things you should try:

• Optimize your images: The longer it takes to generate larger images, the higher the page loading speed. So, what you can do is compress your images to reduce their file size. You can use sites like tinypng.com to do this without sacrificing the quality.
• Minimize HTTP requests: Every time a visitor loads a page, their browser sends a request for every element on the page. That’s why minimizing these requests can increase the site load speed. This is possible if you decrease the count of photos, programs, and stylesheets that appear on your page.
• Utilize browser caching: Browser caching stores elements of your web page in a cache, reducing load times for returning visitors. You can enable this with a caching plugin like Hyperspeed or by adding code to your .htaccess file.
• Use a content delivery network (CDN): A CDN stores your website's files on multiple servers worldwide. It can help reduce the distance data needs to travel and speed up load times for visitors. So, consider using one.
• Optimize your code: Minifying your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, eliminates unnecessary characters like whitespace, line breaks, and indentation. And stripping these out cuts the files in size, making the pages load a lot faster. Most compression tools provide options to minify code.
• Choose a fast, responsive theme: Not all Shopify themes have the same speeds or are equally responsive. So, do your research to choose a theme that balances aesthetics with performance.
• Avoid using too many apps: Each app you add to your Shopify store can potentially slow down your page load time. Hence, you must be selective with the number of apps you install and keep track of their impact on your site's performance.

2. Lack of Unique and Compelling Product Descriptions

To draw in customers and amp up your store's visibility on search engines, creating distinctive and captivating product descriptions is vital. These not only offer key details about your products but also set your store apart from the competition.

Here are some strategies to create unique and compelling product descriptions:

• Focus on benefits: Instead of just naming what your products can do, spotlight the perks they bring to potential customers. For example, instead of saying, "This shirt is made of 100% cotton," you could say "Experience ultimate comfort in this breathable and soft cotton shirt."
• Use storytelling: Engage your audience with creative storytelling that highlights the unique qualities of your products and brand. For instance, if you sell handmade jewelry, share the tale of the artisans who meticulously craft each piece with passion and attention.
• Be descriptive: Always use expressive words that create a clear image and sense of purpose for your products. Steer clear of generic phrases or cliches. Instead, try to give precise details about size, color, texture, and other features.
• Make it scannable: Keep in mind that many online shoppers prefer to scan product descriptions quickly. Use bullet points, short paragraphs, and headers to make your descriptions easy to read and navigate.

3. Poorly Optimized Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Tweaking your title tags and meta descriptions is ever plays a big role in boosting your Shopify store’s presence on the SERP. No matter how small, they share key info about your product page with both users and search engines.

That’s why you should always look to craft concise and descriptive title tags, incorporating primary keywords. Try to stick to around 60 characters to ensure visibility in search results. Also, steering clear of duplicate tags across pages is vital for avoiding confusing search engines and hurting your SEO.

Likewise, you should keep meta descriptions as brief as under 160 characters. But they should be summarizing your page's content with relevant keywords. And you must skip duplicate descriptions and include a call to action to prompt users to click through.

4. Inadequate Keyword Research

Your Shopify store's SEO performance is hard to improve without conducting effective keyword research. But when done right, it can unveil what your audience is searching for and guide you to the key terms that matter.

You can try these steps for proper keyword research for your products: 

• Start with broad primary keywords: Begin your keyword research by thinking of general key terms connected to your store and what you sell. These words should cover the main topics and themes of your business. 

For example, if you're into handmade jewelry, your key terms could be "handmade jewelry," "artisan jewelry," or "unique jewelry."

• Use keyword research tools: Make the most of tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to broaden your keyword list. These tools offer useful information on search volume, competition, and keyword difficulty. And that can help you spot opportunities and organize your priorities.
• Analyze search intent: When picking keywords, think about what users may want. Are they seeking info, products, or services? Do they want a specific brand or do some comparison shopping? Knowing these sorts of intents can help you craft the right content and fine-tune your Shopify store.
• Prioritize long-tail keywords: Besides primary keywords, you should also ocus on longer, more specific phrases. They might not get as many searches, but they often lead to more conversions. 

If you aim for long-tail keywords related to your business you can bring in focused traffic and boost conversions.

• Analyze your competition: Always keep an eye on what your competitors are doing with keywords. It can be the goldmine of ideas for your own research. Look for the keywords they focus on, find where they might be missing out, and discover chances to set yourself apart.

5. Duplicate Content Problems

Having the same content in multiple places can badly hurt your Shopify store's SEO. It not only damages your page rankings but also confuses search engines. Hence, to boost your store's visibility and authority, finding and fixing these issues is crucial.

One common type of duplicate content is when you have the same product page linked from different URLs. This might occur if your products are in multiple collections or if you offer different versions of the same product.

Here are three common scenarios that you may encounter and how you can tackle them.

6. Pagination Problem

Even when your store has no duplicate content, Shopify's way of organizing pages can create the problem of having the same content on different pages. 

Moreover, they don't support tags like rel=”next” and rel=”prev,” which tell search engines about the connection between pages in a series. It's worth noting that Google moved on from these tags a while back, though some other search engines might still use them. 

The thing is, pagination can make search engines see the same products on multiple pages, confusing and potentially lowering your rankings in search results.  

To tackle this issue, you can take up these strategies.

To tackle pagination problems, you've got a few options:

• Optimize all pages separately: Make each paginated page unique by following search engine rules. Use distinct titles, descriptions, and headings for each page to treat them as standalone.
• Stick to the 'View All' page: Canonicalize the 'View All' page, where everything is in one place. You can stop search engines from indexing paginated pages using noindex tags or robots.txt. This helps avoid duplication and consolidates your ranking signals into a single page.
• Try infinite scrolling: Use AJAX and JavaScript for loading more content as users scroll. It boosts user experience but can be tricky for search engines. 

Create fallback URLs for each content section and link them with rel=“next” and rel=“prev” to help search engines crawl and index your content smoothly.

7. Poor URL Structure

Oftentimes, search engines struggle to understand your page content if you don’t organize the URLs properly, which can impact your rankings massively.

How to Create SEO-Friendly URLs for Your Shopify Store

To improve your store's URL structure, you can follow this simple checklist:

• Keep URLs short yet descriptive.
• Use hyphens to separate words in URLs.
• Always use lowercase letters.
• Avoid using underscores.
• Try to include the main keyword in the URL.

For example, if you sell shoes on your Shopify store, an SEO-friendly URL for a product page could look like this:

As you can see, the poor URL structure uses a generic product ID number, which barely tells search engines or users anything about the item being sold. The SEO-friendly URL, on the other hand, contains descriptive keywords that clearly hint at what the page is about.

8. Limited Redirects

Shopify only does permanent redirects with 301s—those send your customers from one URL to another permanently. It doesn't do the temporary redirects, like 302s or 307s. This can make it a bit tricky when you want to shuffle things around on your online store.

Most SEOs love using 301 redirects. They're like the go-to move. But there are times when you might want to do a quick, temporary switch. Without that option for temporary redirects, it could be a bit tough to fine-tune your store from a techy SEO perspective.

Shopify doesn't do temporary redirects by default, but you can make it happen with an app like Easy Redirects (they've got a free plan). This app lets you set up both 301 and 302 redirects and handle your site's redirects as you want.

9. Canonical URLs

The HTML link element includes a crucial part known as the canonical URL. This URL helps Google and other search engines explore and organize the page effectively. If there's an issue with the canonical URL, Google might receive duplicate content, leading to potential harm to SEO. 

For example, these product URLs are quite similar, making it challenging for Google to identify the most relevant one:

• example.com
• www.example.com
• https://m.example.com
• https://amp.example.com
• https://example.com?ref=twitter

Dealing with canonical URL problems means handling pages that can be reached through different web addresses. While Shopify offers a redirect tool, it may not work well if the targeted site is already in existence. Plus, for those not well-versed in SEO, finding the most effective approach for desired results can be challenging.

But the good news is, fixing this issue is pretty straightforward. Just tweak your Shopify theme file a bit, and you're good to go. Here's a quick guide:

Step 1: Go to Online Store => Shopify Themes on your left sidebar.

Step 2: Click the Actions button => Edit the code.

Step 3: Look for "product-grid-item.liquid" in "Snippets" and click on it.

Step 4: Make this change

<a href=”{{ product.url | within: current collection }}” class=”product-grid-item”>

Step 5: Change it to this code

<a href=”{{ product.url }}” class=”product-grid-item”>

With this code adjustment, all your links to product pages will use the correct URL path.

10. Inefficient Internal Linking

Are you interlinking between the pages of your Shopify store? When used effectively, internal links can help distribute link authority, enhance user navigation, and, thus, improve the overall SEO performance. 

So, if you've yet to create SEO-friendly internal links, here’s how to get started:

• Use descriptive anchor text: When you use generic terms like "click here" or "read more" as anchor texts, they don’t quite intrigue the reader to follow. So, instead, use descriptive text that perfectly describes the content you are linking them to.
• Link to relevant pages: Your internal links should always point to pages that are relevant to the content of the current page. After all, it’s highly unlikely someone searching for shoes would also be interested in candles. 

But more importantly, interlinking this way helps search engines understand your Shopify store's content structure.

• Avoid excessive linking: Are you using too many internal links? You need to put a halt to that, too. This is because you don’t want to overwhelm or confuse the users. Limit the number of links to only the most relevant and necessary pages.
• Use a clear navigation structure: Your site must have a clear and organized navigation structure if you want your visitors to find what they are looking for easily. Besides, it also distributes link authority throughout your site.

11. Not Using Enough Alt Texts for Images

Alt text, or "alternative text," contributes heavily to image SEO. It helps search engines understand what an image is about, which may lead to your store being more visible on search engines.

Including alt texts is particularly important because:

• It aids in better image indexing by search bots, as they can’t "see" images like humans do.
• It improves the user experience, especially for visually impaired persons who use screen readers.
• It can impact your store's performance in image searches, driving more traffic to your site.

How to Add Alt Text to Your Images

Adding alt text to your images on Shopify is as easy as following these four steps:

• Navigate to that particular image in your Shopify Admin dashboard.
• Click on the "Alt text" field.
• Write the alt text.
• Save the changes.

When writing alt texts, remember to -

• Be descriptive and concise.
• Include keywords naturally, where appropriate.  
• Avoid keyword stuffing as it can lead to a negative SEO impact.
• Use unique alt texts for each image to ensure individual indexing of your pictures.

Optimizing Your Images for SEO

While adding alt text is essential, optimizing your images for SEO goes beyond just adding descriptions. Check out these additional tips for optimizing your Shopify images:

• Use clear, high-quality, images relevant to your product or content.
• Compress your images to reduce file size and improve page load speed.
• Rename your image file with descriptive, SEO-friendly filenames.
• Use image captions to provide additional context.

12. Lack of Rich Snippets and Schema Markup

Is your Shopify store lacking in rich snippets and schema markup? That's another reason that could be costing your site search engine traffic and visibility. 

Many believe they’re only used for better looks. In reality, though, when you use these tools, your store not only looks better in search results but also gives users helpful information. 

So, first, let's talk about what rich snippets and schema markup are before we go into how you’ll implement them.

What are Rich Snippets?

Rich snippets are special data that give search engines extra details about your store's content. This info can cover things like product ratings, reviews, prices, and availability. Rich snippets can boost how many people click on your site and bring in more focused visitors by showing more details in search results.

What is Schema Markup?

Schema markup is like a special code that helps search engines get what your store's pages are all about. When you put schema markup on your pages, you're giving search engines extra details about your store's products, services, and content.

How Do You Implement Rich Snippets and Schema Markup?

Shopify supports rich snippets and schema markups either through apps or through theme modifications. Here are some steps you could follow:

• Choose a Shopify app: You can use apps like SEO Manager Venntov or JSON-LD for SEO to simplify the whole setup process. All you’ll have to do is install the app and follow the on-page instructions.
• Modify your theme's HTML: If you are comfortable with coding, you can add schema markup to your Shopify theme directly as well. Check out Shopify’s documentation on how to do this.
• Test your markup: After adding the schema markup to your store, you can use Google's Rich Results Test to see if you’ve done it right.

13. Ignoring Mobile Optimization

Did you know that over 57% of online traffic comes from mobile devices? 

This means if your Shopify store isn't tailored for mobile, it hurts your Shopify store’s SEO ranking. And let’s not forget the substantial pool of potential customers you’re overlooking.

So, here are a few tips for creating a mobile-friendly and responsive Shopify store for both SEO and sales boost.

• Choose a responsive theme: Shopify has a wide range of themes to suit different screen sizes. You must choose a theme that works well on all devices, including mobile devices.
• Minimize load times: Mobile users always expect fast loading times. So you have to keep them engaged. That’s why reducing plugins, optimizing images, and compressing files are all important. You can use Shopify's built-in speed report to identify and fix such issues.
• Design for small screens: Don’t forget to keep small screens in mind when designing your Shopify store. For instance, you should use large fonts and buttons to make it easy to navigate. Also, avoid using too much text or cramming too many elements onto the screen.
• Optimize for touchscreens: Mobile users interact with your site using only their fingers. So, you need to ensure that buttons are spaced out to avoid accidental clicks and use larger touch targets for elements that matter.
• Test your store on multiple devices: Testing the store on multiple devices is always a good idea. That way, you can ensure it works well on different screen sizes and resolutions. For this, you can use Shopify's device view feature to see how your store looks on different devices.

Conclusion

And there you have it, a comprehensive guide on some of the key factors leading to common Shopify SEO problems. Remember, implementing these strategies isn't a one-time event but an ongoing process. 

So, continue testing and refining your approach utilizing tools like Google Analytics to monitor your website's performance and customer behavior insights. And don’t shy away from seeking help from SEO experts or using supportive resources that Shopify offers.