Shopify SEO: collections, product titles, tags and the apps worth installing

Most of a store's organic sales are decided before a single product description is written. The collection pages are where people searching for a kind of thing land, and the way a store's collections are set up in its first month limits what it can rank for in its third year. Shopify makes the setup easy, which is exactly why so many stores get it wrong.

This is the short version of what we check on a Shopify store, in the order it pays. None of it needs a developer.

Collections first, because that is where the money searches land

Somebody who types "linen curtains" into Google is not looking for one product. They want to see what you have, so Google shows them collection pages, and a store with no collection for that search cannot be in the results at all.

For example, if you sell curtains and the navigation opens a menu of fabrics instead of a page for linen, build the page. Without it, you cannot target the search, and a menu is not a page. The test for every collection is whether there is a search behind it: "curtains" and "linen curtains" and "blackout curtains" are three searches, so they are three collections.

Then write on the page. A grid of products with a heading above it gives Google almost nothing to read. Two or three paragraphs above the grid, and a few more below it, about what the range is, who it suits and how to choose, are the difference between a collection that ranks and one that sits on page four. Write them for a buyer who is deciding; the searches follow.

Do not get hung up on making hundreds. A collection with four products and no text is thin, and Google treats a store full of thin collections as a store with a problem. Merge the small ones into the collection people search for.

Product titles are written for the buyer, and the search title can differ

The product title on Shopify does two jobs. It is the heading a shopper reads, and unless you change it, it is also the title Google shows in the results. Those are different readers, and Shopify gives you a separate field for the second one under the product's search engine listing.

Put the thing people call it first. "Linen curtain, natural, 228cm drop" is found by somebody searching for linen curtains; "Aurelia" is found by nobody. Brand names and collection names belong at the end, if anywhere. Variants (size, colour) do not need their own product unless people search for the variant by name, which for most stores they do not.

Use the search engine listing field when the shop title has to be short or stylised. That is the place for the plain description of what the product is, and it is worth doing on the products that already get impressions in Search Console first, because those are the ones a better title will turn into clicks and sales soonest.

Tags: useful in the admin, a problem in the index

Tags help you find products in the admin and build automated collections. They also create pages. Every tag on a collection produces a filtered URL, and a store with thirty tags across ten collections can have three hundred filtered pages, each showing the same products in a different order with no text of its own.

Google crawls those. In the simplest of terms, the more of them there are, the less attention the pages that make money get. Check Search Console for URLs with a tag in the path; if they are being indexed and nobody searches for them, stop linking to them from the theme and let the canonical do its work. A tag page earns a place in the index only when there is a search for exactly that thing, and then it should be a real collection with text instead.

What Shopify does for you, and what it will not

Shopify handles more of the technical side than any other platform a small store is likely to use. The sitemap is generated. Product URLs reached through a collection carry a canonical to the plain product URL. When you change a handle it offers to create the redirect, and you should always say yes. The robots file can be edited if you need to.

Just as important is what it will not do. The URL structure is fixed: every collection lives under one path and every product under another, and no app changes that. Speed depends almost entirely on the theme and on the apps you install, and Shopify will not warn you as it gets slower. And nothing on the platform writes the collection text or fixes a title. Those are yours.

Apps worth installing, and the rule for every app

There is no shortage of SEO apps in the store, and most of them do one of four things: compress images, manage redirects in bulk, add structured data the theme lacks, or collect reviews and publish them with the markup Google reads. Any of those can be worth having when the theme does not already do it.

The rule is that every app adds code to every page. Measure the speed of a product page on a phone before installing anything, then again after. An app that saves you an hour a month and slows every page by a second costs you sales every day. And when you remove an app, check the theme code for what it left behind, because many leave their scripts in place.

How to tell whether it is working

Rankings are a step on the way, and the step is not the destination. Two numbers tell you whether the work paid. In Search Console, the clicks on collection URLs, by URL, month on month. In Shopify's own reports, the sales attributed to search, which is the figure the collections and the titles exist to move. When the second one rises, the work is working; when the first rises and the second does not, the collections are attracting the wrong searches, and the text is the place to look.

If you would rather it was done for you

Everything above is work a store owner can do in a fortnight of evenings, and the collection text is worth doing whoever you hire afterwards. When you want it done for you, with the store's own numbers as the measure, this is what our Shopify SEO service covers, and the wider ecommerce SEO service for stores on other platforms. The SEO audit checklist is the longer list, for any site.