Managing a Shopify website requires many daily tasks, from managing client databases, marketing to basically optimize your site to get your product high ranked on Google. If not, most of the site owners have confronted with many Shopify SEO issues.
We all know that optimizing your Shopify site demands a high degree of your meticulousness, although Shopify offers a highly optimized platform with multiple SEO apps on their app store.
By working with multiple clients, we collected 8 Shopify on-page SEO problems that most of them confront. Let’s jump into some of the issues that we helped our clients deal with.
Table of Contents
Shopify Issue #1: Duplicate meta description
What is a meta description?
A <meta description> tag is a short snippet under article title in search engine that helps search engines understand what the page is about.
What is a duplicate meta description on Shopify?
Duplicate meta descriptions are one of the issues with Shopify. It appears when the same text appears across multiple pages on a website. For instance, when you create a large e-commerce website and have hundreds of products in bulk, your website might address the issue of duplicate meta description.
How does it affect your rankings?
Duplicate meta description won’t make your website penalized by Google but unfortunately, you can’t expect that your key product ranked higher than another with the same meta description.
How to fix duplicate meta description?
I guess the first solution to think about is to change it manually. Go to your Shopify dashboard then to Online Store and to Blog post to change meta description if your URLs is a blog. Otherwise, go to Products and you need to change every product’s meta description manually.
But this solution only works when you have few products. Imagine if your store has over 1000 products and you have duplicate meta descriptions for 1 collection. For instance, under Collection “Shoes”, you would have thousands of types of shoes ranked for keyword “shoes”. Hence, we call it “Pagination”. To address this issue, you can either leave it like that in Shopify dashboard and hope that Google will understand that they are all relative pages (BUT IT’S FAR TOO RISKY). Or to set canonical to core collection page by changing the code in theme.liquid on Shopify dashboard.
Shopify Issue #2: Duplicate title tags
What is a title tag?
The title tag is an HTML code tag to give a web page a title. This title can be found in the browser title bar, as well as in the search engine results pages (SERP).
What are duplicate title tags?
As the same as duplicate meta descriptions, duplicate title tag is one of Shopify’s issues that multiple pages are duplicated with their web page title. Google would consider multiple pages with duplicate title tags as containing duplicate content. We will discuss this issue below.
How does it affect your ranking?
Firstly, from the search engine’s aspect, multiple pages are ranking for the same title tags. That would definitely make Google confused which page to rank higher. In some circumstances, less important pages will be ranked higher on Google. Secondly, from searcher’ intent’s aspect, the title tag is one way to make the searcher click on the URLs. Multiple pages therefore make them confused on which URLs to click on.
How to fix duplicate title tags?
The fastest way is to view your page source and check your title issues. Then go to theme.liquid and add this canonical line of code: **<link rel=”canonical” href=”{{ canonical_url }}” />**
Shopify Issue #3: Duplicate content
What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content are issues with Shopify that multiple content within or across domains are appreciably similar.
How does it affect your rankings?
As the same as duplicate meta description and duplicate title tags, by having duplicate content on your website, you will lose your capability to choose which page you want to rank for.
How to fix duplicate content?
When you have thousands of product under one collection, the risk of having duplicate content is obvious. The simple solution you can do is to access to your theme files on Shopify dashboard. And change <a href=”{{ product.url | within: current_collection }}” class=”product-grid-item”> To this: <a href=”{{ product.url }}” class=”product-grid-item”>. By this way, all the product pages will be directed to one URL path that will be ranked by Google.
Shopify Issue #4: Issues with Lack of H1 Headings
What is a H1 Heading?
The H1 tag is an HTML heading that’s most commonly used to mark up a web page title.
How does it affect your ranking?
Firstly, H1 tags help search engines understand the page. Secondly, H1 tags improve user experience and thirdly, it also improves accessibility.
How to fix missing H1 tags?
If your H1 tag redirects to your logo, you can go to header.liquid and change <h1 class> to <dev class> and <h1> to <dev>. Then go to product-template.liquid and change <h2> to <h1>.
Shopify Issue #5: Issues with too long title text
What is a title tag?
The title text is an HTML code tag that allows you to give a web page a title. The title tag of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a page’s content.
How long should it be for a title text?
An ideal title text should last around under 60 characters, so that when it appears on SERPs, your reader will be able to guess what your page is about.
How to fix a too long title text?
If you want to edit your title tag on a blog post, just go to Blog post on Shopify partner and then to overview your Search Engling Listing Preview before submitting.
If you happen to have more than 1000 products, it will be endless work. I suggest you export your products into a CSV file, update title tags there and reimport later.
Shopify Issue #6: Issues of Missing Alt Tag
What is an Alt tag? An Alt tag is an HTML attribute to apply to image tags to provide a description about your product for search engines.
How does it affect your rankings? Well-written alt text is important to your website’s accessibility, and its search engine optimisation. Therefore, an ideal alt text should be:
- Good Alt Text is Fairly Long and Descriptive (But Not Too Long) – Less than 125 characters are good.
- Your Alt Text should be unique.
- Try to avoid keyword stuffing
- Don’t include the word like “image of…” or “picture of…”
How to fix Missing Alt Tag?
Go to Product on Shopify dashboard and click on Add Alt text.
Shopify Issue #7: Issues of Non-descriptive anchor text
What is an anchor text?
Anchor text is those words that hyperlinks display when linking to another domain or URLs or location on the web.
How does it affect your rankings?
While anchor text is one of many Google ranking factors, it also tells your readers where they can find more information and what this hyperlink is about.
How to fix non descriptive anchor text?
You can fix this error simply by changing the words to be more descriptive. Also remember to run another Lighthouse audit to confirm your fix.
Shopify Issue #8: Internal Linking issues
What is an internal link?
An internal link is a hyperlink that allows navigation from one page in a website to another.
What are the most common internal linking and how to fix it?
- Orphaned pages
- Orphaned pages are pages that have no relation to other pages in your domains. Or in other words, it has no values. So there is no reason for Google to crawl and index it.
- The fastest way to fix it is to noindex the pages. If the pages bring values to your business, try to add some valuable internal links.
- Pages with only one incoming internal links
- To fix this issue is very fast. Placing more relevant and valuable internal links to the URLs so that users and search engine will have the ability to find it.
These 8 updated on-page issues with Shopify above are pretty common when you are working with large e-commerce websites. Do mind to check it once a week to make sure your website is crawlable and SEO-friendly.
Besides, on-page issues, I suggest you read our article about “What are the most common technical Shopify SEO issues?” to have a wider understanding about Shopify SEO.
