One of the most important e-commerce platforms, Shopify, is at the heart of debates within the SEO community: Does shopify allow each page of my website to be well referenced in the search results? You can get the services of Shopify Web Design Agency in London
One of the most important e-commerce platforms , Shopify, is at the heart of the debates within the SEO community: Does shopify allow each page of my website to be well referenced in the search results ?
To answer these questions we have drawn up the advantages and disadvantages of the Shopify CMS .
A natural referencing strategy integrates a multitude of factors. From the choice of your target keywords to the optimization of meta-data, there are many elements to optimize to gain positions in the Google results pages. As long as the CMS gives you the possibility of optimizing these elements simply
So what are the strengths and limitations of Shopify? Discover the advice of our natural referral agency.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is the brainchild of a snowboard enthusiast. Tobias Lütke was looking for an online sales solution for his products. Dissatisfied with the existing e-commerce CMS which he considers too complex, he created Shopify in 2006, for a simplified handling, user friendly .
Shopify is therefore experiencing a meteoric rise with more than a million customers today. So why are so many critics speaking out now?
What are the benefits of Shopify for SEO?
Shopify hosting, updates and backups
Unlike Wix or WordPress (Woocommerce) which offer a fairly limited e-commerce solution, Shopify is relatively simple and complete , with a minimum of technical constraints to sell online. Shopify takes care of security updates and maintenance of their servers. The very reason for the existence of Shopify, to create a sales site, professional,as easily as possible.
From an SEO point of view, Shopify’s servers have relatively good press. They are fast. If you don’t tamper with the site’s source code, updates usually don’t involve compatibility or display issues.
Shopify allows On-site optimization of the main elements
Shopify offers, natively , the modification of certain important elements to improve the natural referencing of your store, such as:
- metadescription tag;
- title and Heading tags (content structure);
- Alt tags for pictures;
- URL writing (in part);
- 301 redirects.
Additionally, Shopify offers responsive and mobile friendly site themes . The CMS can therefore be responsive on a large majority of devices and browsers.
Shopify users can also count on a high loading speed , which is important for SEO .
The platform automatically generates a sitemap file (site plan) in XML format, which lists all the pages of the site. This helps search engines to properly read the site for indexing pages .
Finally, the links between the site and Google Analytics as well as the Google Search Console can be done simply to track traffic and conversions, especially those from organic traffic.
Limitations of Shopify in terms of SEO optimization?
Shopify is therefore a good CMS for e-commerce. However, it has some drawbacks.
Inaccessibility of robot.txt and sitemap files on Shopify
Although the sitemap and robot.txt files were created automatically, you will not be able to access them . They contain the instructions transmitted to the crawl robot which analyzes your website to index it. It is sometimes useful to transmit the information to Google, or to other search engines, not to index certain pages , which have no value for you (such as the T&Cs, the legal notices, and any page with a high rate of duplicate) and thus allocate more budget to your product pages and category pages.
Increasing the crawl budget of your site allows a better indexing of your pages and therefore the improvement of the natural referencing of your store . This de-indexation is not available on Shopify (you will have to go to Google’s Search Console).
For sites that sell products with many features and variations, access to the .htaccess file can be essential to avoid duplicates or spider traps . This is especially the case when you use a lot of filters, with faceted navigation techniques. You risk eating up your crawl budget
