How to Do a Shopify SEO Audit (and Fix Common Shopify SEO Problems)

A Shopify SEO audit is a check of everything that decides whether Google can find, understand and rank your store: which pages are indexed, how your titles and descriptions read, whether collection and filter pages are creating duplicates, how your redirects, speed, images and product data hold up, and whether your product and collection pages say enough to rank. Shopify handles a lot of the technical basics automatically, including the sitemap, robots.txt and canonical tags, so most audits come down to the problems store owners, themes and apps create on top of that. Below is the checklist we use, followed by the Shopify SEO problems we find most often and how to fix each one.

What Shopify handles for you and what you need to check

Shopify’s SEO overview lists the features every store gets: automatically generated canonical tags to prevent duplicate content, an automatic sitemap.xml and robots.txt, title tags generated by the theme, and SSL turned on by default. That removes a lot of setup work compared with site builders where you fill in these settings yourself, like the ones in our Weebly SEO settings guide, and it means an audit should focus on the parts you control.

The Shopify SEO audit checklist, step by step

1. Indexing and the sitemap

Verify the store in Google Search Console and submit the sitemap, which Shopify says is always at your domain followed by /sitemap.xml. Then open the Pages report and look for important products and collections that are not indexed, and use URL inspection on a few key pages to see how Google renders them. Shopify’s SEO FAQ notes that stores in private mode and stores still on a trial are not indexed, which explains many new stores that never appear. If the store has a blog, Shopify also creates a feed for it at the blog URL followed by .atom (Shopify Help), and Google accepts Atom feeds as a sitemap for your newest posts (Google Search Central), which we explain in our post on RSS feeds and SEO.

2. Titles, meta descriptions and headings

Export or crawl every product, collection and page and look for missing, duplicate or default titles. Shopify’s guide to adding keywords allows up to 70 characters for a title but recommends staying around 60, suggests about 160 characters for a description, and gives a useful example: “Body Butter – Natural & Cruelty Free” instead of only “Body Butter”. Each page should also have exactly one H1, and Shopify says a missing title or H1 usually comes from custom theme code or an app.

3. Duplicate URLs from collections, tags and filters

Shopify can show the same product at /products/name and at /collections/sale/products/name. Shopify’s developer documentation for the within filter, which creates those collection paths, warns that the two URLs carry the same content and asks developers to consider the SEO implications. The canonical tag points Google to the main product URL, but we still change theme links to use /products/ URLs so crawlers are not sent to duplicates. Tag pages such as /collections/shirts/blue are a second source. Shopify’s default robots.txt already blocks filtered collection pages (/collections/*+*) and sorted ones (/collections/*sort_by*), as its robots.txt guide explains, but single-tag pages are not covered by those rules, so check how many of them Google has indexed. We cover tags in more detail in do tags on Shopify help SEO.

4. Product and collection content

Thin or copied content is the most common reason a technically clean store does not rank. Shopify itself advises against copying the text manufacturers supply, because many other stores use the same words, and recommends that informational pages and blog posts have at least 500 words. Collection pages need a short, useful introduction too, since they are often the pages that should rank for category searches such as “linen summer dresses”.

5. Redirects and broken links

Every deleted product, renamed collection and changed URL handle should redirect to the closest live page. Shopify’s URL redirect rules only allow redirects from URLs that are actually broken, cap a store at 100,000 redirects (20,000,000 on Plus) and need separate redirects for each international market subfolder. A crawl that lists every 404 and every internal link to a redirected URL shows what to fix.

6. Speed and Core Web Vitals

Check the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console and test key templates in PageSpeed Insights. Google’s targets are a Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, an Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds and a Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. On Shopify the usual causes are apps that load scripts on every page, sometimes including code left in the theme by apps you have already uninstalled, oversized images and heavy sliders or videos above the fold, and when the theme itself is the problem, our comparison of fast, SEO-friendly Shopify themes is a good place to start.

7. Images, structured data and crawler access

Shopify cannot rename image files after upload, so its site structure guide says to rename files before uploading and add alt text to every product image. Test a few product pages in Google’s Rich Results Test to confirm the product structured data is present and shows the right price, which Google says makes pages eligible for richer product results. If your crawling tool keeps hitting rate limits, Shopify now lets you authorize your own crawlers with signatures created under Online Store, then Preferences.

Common Shopify SEO problems and how to fix them

These are the problems we see most often when a store owner asks why their Shopify site is not ranking.

Be careful with that last one. Shopify calls robots.txt.liquid edits an unsupported customization and warns that incorrect use can result in the loss of all traffic, so changes there belong with someone who knows both Liquid and SEO.

How often to run a Shopify SEO audit

We run a full audit when we start with a store and then repeat the technical checks after anything that changes the site’s structure, such as a new theme, a migration, a batch of new apps or a large catalog import, since those are the moments problems appear. Between those, a monthly look at Search Console’s indexing and performance reports catches most issues early. If you are weighing doing it yourself against hiring help, our post on what an SEO audit costs explains what changes the price.

Questions we get asked about Shopify SEO audits

Is Shopify bad for SEO?

No. Shopify handles sitemaps, canonical tags, robots.txt and SSL automatically, and its fixed URL structure is clean. Most ranking problems on Shopify come from thin content, duplicate links in themes, slow apps and missing redirects, all of which you can fix, and we weigh its strengths and limits in our post on whether Shopify is good for SEO.

How long does a Shopify SEO audit take?

It depends mostly on the size of the catalog. In our experience a small store can be audited in a few days, while a store with thousands of products and several markets takes longer, mostly because of the time spent reviewing content and redirects page by page.

Can I audit my Shopify store myself?

Yes. Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, the Rich Results Test and a crawler cover most of this checklist, and the steps above tell you what to look for. Where store owners usually need help is in fixing theme code, redirects and content at scale.

Does Shopify have a built-in SEO audit tool?

Shopify has no site-wide SEO audit report in its admin, so a store owner gets a search engine listing preview on each page, where the title, description and URL handle are edited, but no list of problems across the store. For that you connect Google Search Console, which is free and shows indexing, Core Web Vitals and search performance for every page Google knows about.

What tools do I need for a Shopify SEO audit?

A Shopify SEO audit can be done with four tools that have free versions, Google Search Console for indexing and search data, PageSpeed Insights for speed, the Rich Results Test for product structured data, and a crawler that lists every URL, title, redirect and broken link. Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider is a common crawler, free for up to 500 URLs per crawl and £199 a year beyond that (Screaming Frog).

Do I need an SEO app for my Shopify store?

Most Shopify stores can rank without an SEO app, because Shopify already creates the sitemap, robots.txt, canonical tags and editable titles, and every app you add can load scripts that slow your pages down. An app earns its place when it saves real time on a large catalog, for example by bulk-editing titles and alt text or by finding broken links you would otherwise check by hand.

How much does a Shopify SEO audit cost?

A Shopify SEO audit costs nothing if you run the free tools above yourself or use an automated scan like ours, while a manual audit from an agency or consultant is priced mainly on the size of the catalog, the number of markets and whether the fixes are included. Before comparing quotes, ask each provider for a sample report so you know what you are buying.

If you want a quick read on where your store stands, our free SEO audit checks your Shopify site for SEO, speed and AI search readiness in about a minute, and our Shopify SEO team can run the full audit and make the fixes with you.