Shopify SEO basics for product and collection pages
Most SEO work on a Shopify store happens on product and collection pages. What to set yourself, and what Shopify already handles.
Shopify takes care of a good part of technical SEO out of the box: a sitemap at /sitemap.xml, a robots.txt file, canonical tags and clean URLs. What it can't do is write your content or structure your catalog. That part sits with the store team.
Titles and meta descriptions
Every product and collection has a search engine listing section at the bottom of its page in the admin. If you leave it empty, Shopify uses the title and the start of the description. That's fine for most products, but for your main collections it's worth writing a title that matches how people search, and a description that gives them a reason to click.
One main heading per page
The product title should be the only H1 on a product page. Some themes also use an H1 for the logo or for a banner. It's a small thing, but worth checking whenever you change themes.
Collection pages need some text
A collection that is only a grid of products gives Google very little to read. A short paragraph at the top, and sometimes a longer one at the bottom, saying what the collection is and who it's for, helps the page rank for the category.
Duplicate product URLs
Shopify can show the same product at /products/name and at /collections/category/products/name. The canonical tag points to the first one, so Google knows which address is the main one. We still prefer themes that link straight to /products/name from collection grids, so all internal links point to one address.
Image alt text
Describe what's in the image: "Black linen shirt, front view" instead of the file name. It helps image search and people using screen readers.
Structured data
Product structured data lets Google show price, stock and rating in search results. Most current themes output it, but review and bundle apps sometimes add a second copy. Run a product URL through Google's Rich Results Test after installing a reviews app.
Internal links
Link to your most important collections from the home page, the menu and blog posts. A collection that isn't linked from anywhere is hard for Google to find, even if it's in the sitemap.
To check all of this on your own store in one go, our Shopify store audit covers titles, headings, canonical tags, structured data and indexing.
