In short
- Shopify handles several technical fundamentals by default: automatic canonicals, a robots.txt that blocks filtered and sorted collections, and a sitemap.
- What remains your job: the title tags, meta descriptions and copy of your collections, often left at their default values.
- Collections are Shopify's category pages: they are the ones that capture purchase queries.
- On a catalog of hundreds of collections, manual entry in the admin becomes the bottleneck.
Shopify is the most widespread e-commerce platform among brands that are just getting started, and it has an earned reputation for simplicity. On the SEO side, it takes care of part of the technical work for you. The rest, in particular the tags and copy of your collections, is up to you.
What Shopify handles for you
- Canonicals: Shopify automatically adds canonical tags to avoid duplicates, for example when a product is accessible through several collections.
- robots.txt: the default file notably blocks crawling of filtered and sorted collections, which duplicate the main collection. It can be edited through the
robots.txt.liquidtemplate, but Shopify recommends doing so only with real expertise and keeping its Liquid objects, since the default rules are updated regularly. - The sitemap, generated automatically.
- International: with Shopify Markets, the hreflang annotations for the different languages and regions can be managed by the platform.
What remains your job
Collection tags
This is the main piece of work. For each collection, Shopify lets you edit the page title, the meta description and the URL handle, in the search engine listing preview section of the admin. With no input, it uses the collection's title and description, which often produces title tags that are too short ("Fitted sheets") and truncated meta descriptions.
Apply the method from our title tag guide and our meta description guide to every collection that needs to rank.
Collection copy
The collection description is usually displayed at the top of the page, depending on your theme. Short at the top, fuller below the products if your theme allows: see what works for a category's SEO text.
Filters and dedicated collections
Shopify filters generate URLs that the default robots.txt keeps out. To rank for a combination with real demand ("linen fitted sheets"), the simplest solution on Shopify is often to create a dedicated collection, with its own URL, tags and copy, rather than relying on a filter URL. See our guide to facets.
Structure and internal linking
Menus, parent and child collections, links between collections: Shopify does not impose a hierarchy, it is up to you to build it. See our guide to internal linking.
The bottleneck: entering tags at scale
Editing the tags of one collection takes a few minutes. For 400 collections, that means several days of entry, not counting the writing. Bulk import apps help, but they do not write anything.
unblind connects to your Shopify store, analyzes each collection and each product, writes the title tags, meta descriptions and copy around each page's main query, then publishes them directly to your store. Before each push, you see a preview of the changes, and you can back up the existing values to restore the previous state if needed. A Matrixify export is also available if you prefer to import yourself.
Frequently asked questions
How do you edit the title tag and meta description of a Shopify collection?
In the Shopify admin, open the collection, then the search engine listing preview section at the bottom of the page: there you can edit the page title, the meta description and the URL handle. If you enter nothing, Shopify uses the collection's title and description.
Is Shopify good for SEO?
Shopify provides a sound technical foundation (canonicals, robots.txt, sitemap, HTTPS). The results then depend on what you do with it: collection structure, specific tags and copy, internal linking and content.