The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
A trend we’ve been noticing at Go Fish Digital[1] is that more and more of our clients have been using the Shopify platform. While we initially thought this was just a coincidence, we can see that the data tells a different story:
The Shopify platform has been steadily rising in popularity throughout the years. Looking at BuiltWith usage statistics, we can see that usage of the CMS has more than doubled[2] since October 2017. Currently, 4.24 of the top 10,000 sites and 3.02% of the top 100,000 are using Shopify.
Since we’ve worked with a good amount of Shopify stores, we wanted to share our process for common SEO improvements we help our clients with. The guide below should outline some common adjustments we make on Shopify stores.
What is Shopify SEO?
Shopify SEO is a set of SEO adjustments that are unique to the Shopify platform. While Shopify stores come with some useful things for SEO, such as a blog and the ability to redirect, it can also create SEO issues such as duplicate content.
Some of the most common Shopify SEO recommendations are:
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Remove duplicate URLs from internal linking architecture
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Remove duplicate paginated URLs
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Create blog content for keywords with informational intent
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Add “Product,” “Article,” & “BreadcrumbList” structured data
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Determine how to handle product variant pages
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Compress images using crush.pics[3]
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Remove unnecessary Shopify apps
We’ll go into how we handle each of these recommendations below:
Duplicate content
In terms of SEO, duplicate content[4] is the highest priority issue we’ve seen created by Shopify. Duplicate content occurs when either duplicate or similar content exists