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Passieon

Shopify SEO for Canadian stores

Shopify is Canadian, and Canadian retail uses it heavily, which means a very large number of Canadian stores share the same platform faults: one product at several collection URLs, canonical tags the theme has broken, and filters generating pages nobody asked for.

The Canadian specific is language. A store selling into Quebec is either serving French properly, with its own URLs and its own hreflang, or it is competing with one hand tied. Translating the theme strings and leaving the product content in English is the common half-measure and it ranks for neither audience.

Cross-border is the other one. A Canadian store visible to US searchers needs to be clear about currency, duty and where it ships from, because ambiguity there is abandoned carts rather than lost rankings.

How the work is done

The URL structure you cannot change

Shopify will not let you drop /collections/ or /products/ from paths. Fighting that with redirects creates chains and breaks canonicals. The answer is to work inside it and spend the effort where it is not fixed: handles, collection names and the internal links pointing at them.

Duplicate product URLs across collections

The same product appears under every collection it belongs to, each at its own URL. Shopify canonicals these by default and themes routinely break it. This is the single most common Shopify fault and it is invisible until somebody checks.

Collection pages, where the searches actually are

The equivalent of a category page and the highest-value template in the store. Most themes give it a title and a grid. It needs copy that answers how to choose, placed so the products still lead.

Theme and app weight

Every app injects script whether the page uses it or not, and stores accumulate them. An audit of what is loading on a product page usually finds several apps nobody remembers installing, including SEO apps that made the store slower than they made it rank.

Tags, filters and the crawl budget

Shopify tag filtering generates URLs at a rate that surprises everybody. Decided per filter, the same as faceted navigation anywhere: indexed where searched, crawlable but not indexed where not, blocked where noise.

Blog content that links into collections

Shopify blogs are usually either abandoned or full of posts linking nowhere. Written properly they answer the buying question and pass their authority into the collection that sells the answer.

What is different about search in Canada

The CN Tower above the Toronto skyline seen across Lake Ontario, its observation pod clear against the glass towers around it

Seasonality decides the calendar

Pages for a seasonal service need to be written and indexed months before the season. Publishing a snow removal page in November is publishing it late.

Province first, city second

A page per province that a business genuinely serves, with city pages underneath only where there is real service, reads as true to both a buyer and to Google. A footer listing every city in Canada does not.

French is a separate job

Quebec search is a different campaign with different pages, written by somebody who writes French natively. We do the English side and say so plainly rather than machine-translating.

Searches in Canada run on google.ca, which returns a different result set to google.com. Work is checked against the one your customers actually use.

What you get

  • A canonical audit across every product reachable from more than one collection
  • Collection page copy and structure on the collections that carry the revenue
  • Handles, titles and descriptions across the templates, not page by page
  • An app and theme weight audit, with what to remove and what it costs you to keep
  • A tag and filter indexing decision, written down and implemented
  • Product and breadcrumb structured data checked against what the theme renders
  • Monthly reporting against orders from your own Shopify analytics and Search Console

Also on this site

Results from real clients

Every number below is from the client’s own Google Search Console, for the period shown. Impressions are how often the site appeared; clicks are people who arrived. What each visit is worth is your sales process, not ours, so these are the visits we can prove rather than a conversion figure we cannot.

See all eight client results

  • 52,993clicks
    Up and Running Physical Therapy
    Physical therapy · 1 Mar 2023 to 14 Mar 2024
    Impressions
    2,238,155
    CTR
    2.4%
    Avg. position
    13.49

    +139,355% clicks against the previous period of the same length.

  • 12,285clicks
    Backcountry Physical Therapy
    Physical therapy · 6 Jul 2023 to 31 May 2024
    Impressions
    601,822
    CTR
    2.0%
    Avg. position
    19.3

    +2,059% clicks against the previous period of the same length.

  • 7,630clicks
    Your Place Physical Therapy
    Physical therapy · 1 Sep 2023 to 31 May 2024
    Impressions
    284,589
    CTR
    2.7%
    Avg. position
    15.66

    +1,184% clicks against the previous period of the same length.

  • 6,816clicks
    Peak Endurance
    Performance and physical therapy · 1 Sep 2023 to 31 May 2024
    Impressions
    482,378
    CTR
    1.4%
    Avg. position
    16.16

    +1,174% clicks against the previous period of the same length.

How the engagement works

There is no package to pick from. What the site needs is decided on a call and written down before any work starts, because a business with one location and a clean site needs a different month to an agency reselling to twelve clients.

  1. 01

    A call, before anything is quoted

    Thirty minutes on what you sell, where you sell it, and what the site looks like today. No scope is written before that conversation, because the right work depends on all three.

  2. 02

    A written scope and quote

    What will be done, in what order, and what it costs, in writing. Nothing starts until you have agreed to it.

  3. 03

    Month to month from there

    The work runs monthly and the scope changes as the site does. Cancel with 30 days’ notice.

True of every engagement

  • Search Console and Analytics set up in your name, so the data is yours
  • No lock-in: month to month, cancel with 30 days’ notice
  • One person you can email, in your working hours
  • Every change listed in the monthly report

Book a call with us

Questions about shopify seo in Canada

Can you do SEO on Shopify?

Yes, and the platform is not the limitation most people assume. It has three real constraints: a forced URL structure, duplicate product paths across collections, and theme weight. Everything else on a Shopify store is as changeable as on any site.

Why does my product appear at several URLs?

Because it belongs to several collections, and Shopify builds a URL for each. It sets a canonical by default and themes frequently break it, which is why this is the first thing worth checking and the most common fault we find.

Will an SEO app fix this?

Rarely, and often it makes the speed worse. Apps can automate titles and structured data; they cannot rewrite a collection page, decide your filter indexing, or remove the four other apps slowing the store down.

Should we move off Shopify to rank better?

Almost never. A migration is the single riskiest thing you can do to a store’s traffic, and the problems people migrate to escape are usually fixable in place. If a migration is genuinely right we will say so, and there is a separate page about doing it without losing the traffic.

Do you touch the theme code?

Where it is needed and with your sign-off, on a duplicate theme rather than the live one, so nothing changes on the storefront until you have seen it.

Can you cover more than one province?

Yes, and it is usually the right structure: a page for each province you genuinely serve, with city pages only where you actually send someone. Pages for places you cannot serve cost more than they earn.

Do you do French-language SEO?

No. English only. A French campaign needs a native writer and pretending otherwise would produce pages that read as translated, which is worse than not having them.

What does the first month look like?

A technical fix list worked through, the Google Business Profile brought up to date, and the pages that already get impressions rewritten before any new ones are added.

Book a call with us

A 30-minute call in your working hours. Tell us what you sell and where, and we will tell you what we would do first and what it involves. Prefer email? Send your website through the form and the Passieon Team will reply within two working days.

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