Shopify Reveals 13 Must-Have SEO Optimizations (Straight from Their Experts)

We asked Fabian Muessig, Head of Solutions Engineering EMEA at Shopify, and his team about their recommended SEO best practices. The result: 13 concrete, Made in Shopify tips to boost your SEO: sitemap, speed, filters, international SEO, product variations, redirects… In short, everything you really need to know to boost your store’s ranking in search results.

Key points:

• Shopify handles a lot of things natively, but for advanced needs (custom sitemaps, dynamic tags, complex redirects), specialized apps are essential.
• Technical SEO is all about the theme: clear structure, loading speed, Schema.org markup, canonical tags, etc. The choice of theme has a direct impact on your SEO.
• International SEO is well-framed thanks to Shopify Markets, with multi-language and multi-region management via subdirectories, automatic hreflang and translation tools.

🗺️ Sitemap.xml: The native one is very good, the app is essential for customization

Shopify automatically generates an XML sitemap for all stores, including links to products, collections, pages, and blogs. This sitemap is dynamically updated whenever content is added or deleted and can be submitted to search engines like Google and Bing for indexing.

However, Shopify doesn’t allow you to customize it or create custom ones. For advanced SEO needs, such as excluding specific URLs or creating custom sitemaps, apps like 🛍️ Custom XML Sitemap Builder Pro or 🛍️ MAPIFY Sitemap Generator are recommended.

🤖 Robots.txt: Edit your instructions in robots.txt.liquid

To edit the robots.txt file in Shopify, go to your admin and navigate to  Online Store > Themes. Click  Edit Code to access the code editor. Create a robots.txt.liquid template in the Templates folder to customize the directives.

You can add or edit rules for specific bots or URLs. Save your changes to apply them. Be sure to test your changes to avoid any negative impact on your SEO.

🌳 Collections: create a tree structure with your mesh

Shopify doesn’t allow you to create native sub-collections, but it is possible to simulate a hierarchical structure: using nested menus and effective internal linking.

Organize your collections into thematic silos to group related products under a single main category, while adding internal links to and between relevant sub-collections and products. Use JSON-LD markup to enrich pages with structured data, which helps search engines understand the site hierarchy.

Using this strategy, you keep collection URLs at the root, but your internal linking, coupled with the breadcrumbs, creates a tree structure for search engines. Create (and maintain) a tree file via Whimsical or Xmind to track your “fake tree” as you add collections. This will make it easier to identify internal parent/daughter/sister links to make. Laura

🧩Variants: deduplicate your products by customizing your variants

In Shopify, customization of product variant content is limited by default but can be extended with tools and apps. Natively, you can configure up to 3 options per product (such as size, color, material) and a maximum of 100 variants (this limit will be extended to 2048 soon).

Each variant can have its own price, SKU, stock, and image. However, Shopify doesn’t allow you to add variant-specific descriptions or extend these limits without third-party solutions.

To take it a step further, apps like 🛍️ Variant Description OMG allow you to add unique descriptions to each variant, while meta fields can be used to enrich product sheets with personalized information.

Use the characteristics of your variations to create unique h1 titles and title tags. This will help you avoid duplicating content without unique descriptions. Also, consider the ALT attributes of your images: these should also be customized based on the characteristics of your variations. Laura

🏷️Title tag: dynamic filling and deduplication

Natively, Shopify allows you to customize titles via the Search Engine Optimization section in each product sheet.

For products, there’s no need to overdo it: use your deduplicated h1 title thanks to variant-by-variant customization and use it to fill in your title tag. You can revisit this later to refine the titles of your top products. Laura

For advanced options, apps like 🛍️ SEO Manager or 🛍️ Smart SEO allow you to create dynamic templates for Title and Meta-description tags, integrating keywords or variables like price or collection.

📚 Schema.org: Native microdata at Shopify?

Most modern Shopify themes already include standard Schema.org markup for products, including information like pricing, availability, and reviews.

For more specific microdata, you can edit your theme’s liquid files or use dedicated apps available on the Shopify App Store. This implementation significantly improves your products’ visibility in search results, allowing the display of rich snippets that potentially increase click-through rates.

🖼️ Images: Shopify’s strong point

Shopify includes several native features to optimize images and improve SEO. Images are natively compressed and served via a CDN (Content Delivery Network), ensuring fast loading times for users worldwide. Shopify also supports modern formats like WebP and makes images responsive, adapting to different screens.

However, alt text tags and filenames must be added manually to maximize SEO. To take things a step further, apps like 🛍️ TinyIMG automate compression, adding optimized alt tags, and generating sitemaps for images, boosting search engine visibility.

⚡Speed: Theme + Image Optimization

For a high-performance Shopify store, choose a speed-optimized theme with lightweight, responsive code. Choose official Shopify themes or those specifically designed for performance.

Best Theme Practices:

1. Use Shopify’s native lazy loading feature and limit the number of images per page.
2. For code, minimize the use of custom JavaScript, avoid unnecessary applications that make the site cluttered, and use Shopify’s theme analysis tool to identify problematic scripts.
3. Regularly test your speed with PageSpeed ​​Insights to identify and fix bottlenecks.

Regarding the images themselves:

1. Always use WebP or AVIF format,
2. Compress them before importing with tools like TinyPNG,
3. Respect the recommended dimensions without oversizing them.

🚫 Filters: Block facet URLs!

To avoid indexing filter URLs in a store, Shopify recommends 4 best practices:

1. Implement the noindex, follow meta robots tag on filter pages via the theme.liquid or collection.liquid file.
2. Use rel=”nofollow” attributes on filter links to avoid PageRank dispersion.
3. Configure your robots.txt file to specifically block URL paths from the filter settings.
4. Include canonical tags pointing to the main collection page to indicate the canonical version to search engines.

SEO apps available on the Shopify App Store, like 🛍️ SEO Manager or 🛍️ Smart SEO, also offer simplified configuration options to manage these indexing issues.

🎨 Shopify Themes: Which Theme Should You Choose for an SEO-Friendly Store?

To optimize the SEO of a Shopify store, several themes are recommended for their speed and SEO-friendly features. For a free theme, Dawn is an excellent option thanks to its minimalist design, easy customization without coding, and native SEO optimization.

Otherwise, the Billionaire Theme is designed specifically for SEO with features like lazy loading and optimized pages for products and collections. The Palo Alto theme is also ideal thanks to its advanced customization and optimization for navigation and images.

Finally, themes like Be Yours or Impulse offer a seamless user experience while integrating advanced SEO tools.

🛠️ Shopify App Store: the top 5 SEO applications

Do you have a Top 5 SEO app to address these issues when they are not addressed natively?

1. 🛍️ Smart SEO: This app excels at automatically generating metadata and implementing advanced structured data. It allows for a full implementation of Schema.org markup far beyond Shopify’s native features, significantly improving your rich snippets in search results.
2. 🛍️ SEO Manager: Particularly powerful for managing bulk 301 redirects, it also offers a complete SEO audit of your store with personalized recommendations. Its 404 error monitoring and backlink analysis features fill significant gaps in Shopify.
3. 🛍️ Yoast SEO: Recently released on Shopify after its success on WordPress, Yoast provides real-time content analysis and highly accurate optimization suggestions. Its traffic light system effectively guides the optimization of each page and product.
4. 🛍️ Booster SEO Image Optimizer: Ideal for automating the optimization of meta tags, alt texts and 404 redirects. It simplifies SEO for beginners while increasing page loading speed.
5. 🛍️ Tapita SEO & Speed ​​Optimizer: Provides SEO audits, meta tag templates, Schema integration, and expert advice to improve rankings and conversions.

🌍 International SEO: geographic and linguistic targeting

Shopify offers three options for managing its international presence: domain (example.fr), subdomain (fr.example.com), or directory (example.com/fr/). This is easily done through Shopify Markets, which allows you to create country- or region-specific experiences, adapting languages, currencies, and tax settings.

Next, it is essential to translate all the content of the site: product descriptions, pages, but also page titles, meta descriptions, alt tags and headers (H1, H2, etc.). Shopify offers the app 🛍️ Translate & Adapt, but there are also more advanced solutions like 🛍️ Weglot or 🛍️ Langify.

Hreflang tags are another fundamental element. They tell Google which language or geographic version of a page to display, depending on where the user is coming from. If you use Shopify Markets with subfolders, these tags are automatically generated. Otherwise, you’ll need to integrate them manually or via an app.

🔁 301 Redirects: Native Features and 3 Apps to Go Further

Shopify natively allows you to create simple redirects through the admin interface ( Navigation > URL Redirects ). This native feature allows you to manage basic redirects for individual pages, such as when editing product or collection URLs. However, Shopify has limitations such as the inability to create mass redirects, use regular expressions, or manage complex conditional redirects.

For more advanced needs, the 🛍️ SEO Manager app is recommended, offering bulk CSV redirect imports, dynamic redirect rules, and 404 error monitoring tools. Other apps like 🛍️ SC Easy Redirects or 🛍️ SEOAnt ‑ 404 Link Redirect are also appreciated for their additional features, depending on the complexity of the redirection needs and the size of the catalog.

Our opinion? Pretty clean… but watch out for the costs!

We’ve all struggled to optimize the SEO of our first Shopify store. That’s normal: the platform has its own specificities, which must be understood and integrated. The only point of attention we could raise: be mindful of the overall SEO budget, as this can be quite high with paid apps. Explore native features as much as possible and take them into account when making technical choices during a redesign.

Thanks to the Moon Moon agency for putting me in touch with the Shopify teams.