Shopify SEO checklist: the 8 fixes that actually move rankings

Shopify gives you a decent base: an automatic sitemap, canonical tags, clean URLs. What it can't do is write your titles, fix the links you broke when you renamed a product, or describe your images. That is where most stores lose rankings.

These are the eight fixes we do first on any store, in order of payoff.

1. Titles and meta descriptions

Every product, collection and page has a "Search engine listing" section at the bottom of its edit screen. Most stores leave it blank, so Shopify uses the product name, which is rarely what people search for.

Title: about 50 to 60 characters, the search phrase first, brand last. "Organic Cotton Baby Sleeping Bag, 2.5 Tog | Brand" beats "The Dreamer". Description: about 150 characters that make someone want to click, not a keyword list.

2. One H1 per page, and headings that mean something

Some themes wrap the logo in an H1, so every page has two. View the page source and search for <h1. Inside descriptions, use H2 and H3 for real sections (Sizing, Materials, Care), not for making text bigger.

3. Broken links and missing redirects

Changed a product handle or deleted an old collection? Every link to the old URL now 404s. In Online Store, go to Navigation, then URL Redirects, and point old URLs to the closest live page. Shopify offers to create a redirect when you change a handle; make sure that box is ticked.

4. Image alt text

Describe what is in the photo, in plain words: "Navy linen shirt, front view, on a model". It helps image search and people using screen readers. Skip "image1.jpg" and keyword stuffing.

5. Sitemap and robots

Your sitemap lives at yourstore.com/sitemap.xml. Submit it in Google Search Console, then check the Pages report for anything marked "Excluded" that shouldn't be. Password-protected stores and pages hidden from search won't index; that's often the whole problem on a new store.

6. Speed basics

Remove apps you don't use (their code often stays). Compress hero images. Avoid autoplay video on the homepage. You don't need a perfect PageSpeed score. You need the page to show something quickly on a phone.

7. Internal links

Link collections to their best products, products to related products and guides, and blog posts to the products they discuss. Google finds and ranks pages partly by how your own site links to them. A product with no links pointing at it is hard for Google to take seriously.

8. Structured data

Product structured data (price, availability, reviews) lets Google show richer results. Most modern Shopify themes include it. Test a product URL in Google's Rich Results Test. If it's missing or has errors, that's a theme fix worth making. Blog posts can carry Article and FAQ markup too.

What to skip for now

Keyword density, meta keywords (Google ignores them), and buying backlinks. None of these will help a store whose titles are still blank.

After the fixes: content

The eight fixes make your existing pages rankable. To reach people earlier, while they're still researching, you need pages that answer their questions. That's what a blog is for. It works best when each post targets a low-competition keyword (difficulty under about 20 on most tools) and new posts go out on a steady schedule rather than in bursts.

Questions people ask

Does Shopify have good SEO out of the box?

It handles the plumbing. Titles, descriptions, headings, alt text and internal links are still yours to do.

How long does SEO take to work?

Fixes to existing pages can show within weeks once Google recrawls. New content usually takes two to six months.

Do I need an SEO app?

Not for these eight. Some apps add weight to every page, so install carefully.