Shopify SEO
agency.

URLs you can’t change, and links you can

Shopify fixes its URL prefixes: products live at /products/, collections at /collections/, content pages at /pages/ and articles under /blogs/. You can edit the handle after the prefix but not the prefix itself, so there is no point chasing a “clean” structure; there are better uses of your budget. The issue that matters is collection-aware product links. Many themes link products as /collections/mens-shoes/products/trail-runner, which renders a second URL for every collection a product belongs to. Shopify adds a canonical pointing at /products/trail-runner, but the internal links still point everywhere else, so crawl time and link signals get split. The fix is a small Liquid change so product cards link straight to the canonical URL, and we test it on a duplicate theme before it goes live.

Shopify now lets you edit robots.txt through a robots.txt.liquid template. We use that carefully, mainly to keep crawlers out of sort parameters and filter combinations that will never deserve to rank, while leaving useful filtered views, such as a high-demand color or material, crawlable as proper landing pages. Variant URLs with a ?variant= parameter canonicalize to the parent product, which is usually what you want, unless a variant is searched for in its own right and deserves its own product.

Collections deserve more attention than they usually get. On most Shopify stores the collection pages, not the products, rank for the valuable category terms, yet they are often a title and a grid. We add a short introduction above the products, deeper buying guidance and FAQs below them, links to related sub-collections and a sensible heading structure. Smart collections built on product tags and conditions let you create targeted landing pages for searches like a material, use case or price band without touching the catalog itself, which is often a better answer than opening tag filter URLs to Google.

Speed is mostly an app problem

Shopify’s hosting and CDN are fast. Slow Shopify stores are almost always slowed down by what has been added on top: review widgets, upsell popups, chat, tracking pixels and theme sections that load on every page whether used or not. Uninstalling an app does not always remove the snippets it injected into your theme. We map every script to the app that loaded it, remove the dead ones, defer what can wait, and replace heavy apps with native theme features where Shopify now offers them. Candidly, most apps installed “for SEO” are slowing stores down more than they help.

International stores and AI shopping

Shopify Markets can run international versions on subfolders or separate domains and adds hreflang automatically, but only for the content you actually translate and localize. We check that each market has translated handles and meta data, correct currency in structured data, and no redirect logic that hides pages from crawlers. Shopify has also been building ways for AI assistants to discover and sell catalog products directly. Those surfaces depend on the same product data your store already publishes, so accurate titles, attributes, inventory and reviews do double duty for search and for AI shopping answers.