How to Find and Fix SEO Issues on Your Shopify Store

Most Shopify stores do not have one big SEO problem. They have a dozen small ones that build up over time: products deleted without a redirect, supplier descriptions pasted in bulk, and apps installed for a campaign and never removed. Together they hold back rankings.

This guide covers the issues that come up again and again on Shopify, how to spot each one, and what to change in the admin to fix it.

Start with a crawl and Google Search Console

Before changing anything, run a desktop or cloud crawler against your store's domain and let it follow every link. Export the URLs with their status codes, title tags, meta descriptions, canonical tags and word counts. This single export surfaces most of the problems below.

Then open Google Search Console. The Pages report under Indexing shows which URLs Google has indexed and which it has excluded, with the reason. The Performance report shows which pages bring clicks, so you know which products and collections deserve attention first. The Core Web Vitals report tells you whether real visitors are seeing slow pages.

Duplicate product URLs from collections

Shopify creates two paths to every product in a collection. The clean URL is /products/product-handle. The collection-scoped URL is /collections/collection-handle/products/product-handle. Themes usually link to the second form from collection grids, so a crawler finds each product under several addresses.

Shopify handles this with a canonical tag on the collection-scoped page pointing to the clean URL. Check your theme has not broken it: view the source of a product reached through a collection and confirm the canonical points to the short URL. Customised themes and apps that rewrite the head section can remove it. A second fix is to edit the product card snippet so collection grids link straight to the /products/ URL, so internal links are not split across duplicates.

Thin or copied product descriptions

If your descriptions came from a supplier's catalogue, the same text is live on many other stores and Google has little reason to rank your copy above theirs. Sort your crawl export by word count to find very short product pages, then search a sentence from a few of them in quotation marks to see how widely it is shared.

Rewrite the products that already earn impressions first. A useful description answers what a buyer would ask in a shop: what it is made of, how it fits, what it works with and how to care for it. Keep the supplier's specification table below as supporting detail. For large catalogues, work in batches by collection, or read our guide to hiring a Shopify virtual assistant to hand the work over.

Missing and duplicate title tags and meta descriptions

Shopify fills the title tag from the product or collection name and the meta description from the start of the description unless you override them. That is why so many stores have titles that are just the product name. Filter your crawl export for duplicate titles, missing descriptions and titles that are far too long or short.

To fix a page, open it in admin and scroll to the search engine listing section, where you can edit both directly. Put the main product or category term first, add a detail such as material or size, and keep it short enough to display in full. Write the description as a plain sentence about what the page offers. Do collection pages and top products by hand, then use a bulk editor app for the rest.

Image alt text and file size

Alt text helps Google understand what a product image shows, and file size affects how fast the page loads. In your crawl export, look for images without alt text and images above a few hundred kilobytes. You can edit alt text from the product's media section, and bulk editor apps can fill it in from the product title.

Write alt text as a plain description with the product name and the attribute shown, such as colour or angle, without stuffing keywords. For file size, resize images to the largest dimension your theme displays and compress them before upload. Shopify's CDN converts formats automatically, but it cannot rescue a badly prepared original.

Page speed and app bloat

Every app you install can add scripts to every page, whether or not the page uses that app. Over time a store collects review widgets, pop-ups, chat bubbles and countdown timers that all load before the product image. Open the Apps section in admin and uninstall what you no longer use, then check the theme code for leftover script tags.

Run a few key pages through PageSpeed Insights and note the largest scripts and images it flags. For a fuller walkthrough, read our post on what to do when your Shopify store is loading slowly.

Broken links after deleting products

When you delete a product or collection, its URL starts returning a 404, and every backlink, old ad and internal link pointing there is wasted. Search Console's Pages report lists these under the not found reason, and your crawler shows 404s reached from internal links.

Shopify has a built-in redirect tool. In admin, under Online Store, open Navigation and then URL redirects. Add the old path and send it to the closest replacement product or the parent collection, not the home page. For many at once, import a CSV. For seasonal items, set them to draft rather than deleting them, so the URL stays alive.

Blog and collection page content

Collection pages are often your best pages for category terms, yet many have no text at all. Add a short introduction describing what is in the collection, who it suits and how to choose. Some themes can place a longer description below the product grid.

Your blog should support these collections rather than chase general topics. Buying guides, product comparisons and care instructions link naturally to collections and products. Make sure every post links to at least one collection and that collections link back to relevant posts. This is the part most stores skip, and it costs nothing.

Structured data added by your theme

Most themes output product structured data automatically, including name, price, availability and image. Some apps add their own copy, leaving two conflicting Product entries on one page. Test a product page with Google's Rich Results Test and look for duplicate or incomplete items, especially review markup for ratings that do not appear on the page.

If you see duplicates, decide which source should own the markup, usually the theme, and disable the other. If fields such as brand or SKU are missing, a developer can extend the theme's JSON-LD snippet. Never add structured data for content the visitor cannot see.

A monthly checking routine

SEO on Shopify is maintenance, not a one-off project. Set a fixed day each month and repeat a short routine: recrawl the store and compare against last month's export for new 404s, duplicate titles and lost canonicals; review the Search Console Pages report for new exclusions and the Performance report for pages that have dropped; check the app list for anything added; and review new products for descriptions, alt text and meta data.

Keep a simple log of what changed and when, so you can connect a drop or a lift to an action. Stores with many hundreds of products often find this routine is where a specialist earns their keep, which is what our ecommerce SEO service covers.

Need a hand with your Shopify store?

If the routine above is more than your team has time for, Ecomm11's ecommerce virtual assistants and ads team can take this work over, from catalogue clean-up to monthly SEO checks. Request a free account audit and we will show you where your store stands.