Posted by Like any other software, Shopify issues occur from time to time and here we highlight 5 technical SEO issues and how to solve them.
Shopify is a cloud-based eCommerce platform allowing you to create and manage an online store. The platform has many features, including a blog, inventory management, and marketing tools. Shopify stores can be accessed from any device with internet access, which means that your customers don’t need to download any software or apps to visit your site or make purchases.
Technical SEO on Shopify is crucial; once you know the common issues and how to find them, you will be able to improve internal linking and ensure your website is accessible to search engines.
Shopify is a robust e-commerce platform that can help you build a thriving online store. But with any tool comes the potential for technical SEO issues. In this post, I’ll give you an overview of some of Shopify issues as well as ways to resolve such issues when you encounter them.
What is Shopify?
Shopify was founded by Tobias Lütke and Daniel Weinand in 2006. It was initially created as an e-commerce solution for small businesses with no coding knowledge or web design experience. They wanted to make it easier for people who had ideas but didn’t know how to turn them into reality online.
So they made a software system where you could build online stores without any technical skills or previous experience building websites from scratch. Shopify is an e-commerce platform that allows users to sell products online. It has been a popular choice for small businesses, with over 500,000 storefronts.
How it works
Shopify is a cloud-based e-commerce platform that allows you to create your e-commerce store. It’s an excellent platform for small and large businesses, with many of the same features as Magento or WooCommerce but with even more bonuses like easy payment integration and fulfillment options. The Shopify ecosystem comprises two main elements:
- Shopify’s core product, which includes the tools you need to create an online store; and
- An app store for third-party apps that can be installed on top of your store (think Facebook ads).
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What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is a subset of on-site SEO. It refers to making changes to your website that make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your content.
Shopify uses a custom version of Ruby on Rails, making it difficult for developers to spot and fix issues. This is one of the reasons why there are so many technical SEO issues with Shopify.
How to do a technical SEO audit on Shopify
The best way to do a technical SEO audit on Shopify is to use Google’s Search Console. The tool lets you see your site’s page speed, indexed pages, crawl errors or blocked resources, etc. However, it doesn’t provide in-depth information about how these issues affect search rankings or how they can be fixed.
For that, you need a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider, which will give you much more detailed information about the technical issues affecting your site and make fixing them easier.
Shopify Issues: Common Technical SEO Problems
Shopify is an excellent platform that offers many great features for business owners and merchants, but it also has some technical SEO issues that need to be addressed. Shopify is not a perfect platform and can sometimes have technical SEO issues. These can affect your website’s search engine optimization (SEO).
1. Sitemap Problems
Sitemaps are an essential part of both the user experience and technical SEO. They help search engines crawl your site and provide an easy way for users to navigate through your site’s pages.
There are two main types of sitemaps: HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps. The first is generated by Search Console, formerly Google Webmaster Tools, and the second can be created using tools like Screaming Frog or XML-sitemap-generator (for JavaScript).
2. User Interface Issues
User Interface (UI) issues are issues related to the usability of the Shopify website. They are important because they affect how users interact with your shop and how easy it is for them to accomplish their tasks.
Examples are:
- Preventing users from navigating away from a page before saving an order
- Make sure all links open in new windows
- Ensuring that drop-down menus show up over all other UI elements
3. Analytics Issues
Shopify analytics is not very good:
- Shopify analytics is not very accurate. It shows you your visitors and the number of views, but it doesn’t show you which pages they are looking at or how they interact with your site.
- Shopify analytics is not very helpful. It has a lot of errors and lacks information that would be useful to you as an eCommerce business owner, like tracking time on site or bounce rate.
- Shopify analytics is not very useful because it gives a lot of useless data that isn’t worth your time or attention, like “views” and “impressions.” These numbers don’t tell you anything about what people did when they came to your site.
4. Marketing Management issues
Marketing management issues on Shopify:
- Banner ad copy not working.
- Your AdWords campaigns are not converting as well as you would like.
5. Dictated Hierarchical Structure issues
Dictated hierarchical structure refers to how the content dictates your site’s URL structure inside of your site. On Shopify, for example, you can’t have a long URL with lots of extensions. This is because Shopify’s default product page template doesn’t allow for this kind of structure.
The importance of having a dictated hierarchical structure can be explained by looking at how Google and other search engines crawl and read sites. Search engines follow links from one page to another when crawling websites.
So if one piece of content leads back to another work with no relation between them, like using “product name” as an anchor text on multiple pages. Then it’s possible that those pages could be treated as separate entities and seen as spam by Googlebot or other bots crawling your website.
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Solutions to Common Technical SEO issues on Shopify
If you’re experiencing technical SEO issues on Shopify, there are plenty of ways to get back on track. This section will discuss some common problems and how to fix them. The easiest way to resolve these issues is with a tool called Screaming Frog. It’s an easy-to-use crawler that can analyze any website or web app for technical SEO problems like duplicate content, pages without titles, missing h1 tags, and more.
Below are some of the common technical SEO issues and tips on how to fix them:
1. How to fix sitemap problems on Shopify
First, you should make sure that the sitemap is valid. If it has errors or is disorganized, Google might be unable to crawl it properly and index all your pages.
Next, check whether or not the sitemap is being indexed. You can do this by searching for your domain on Google and looking at the number next to “Indexed Pages” in webmaster tools (WMT).
You can also use a free online tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider to check that WMT has indexed each page on your site. WMT indexes the more pages, the higher chance the Google bot will crawl them.
Finally, make sure that the Google bot is actually crawling your pages by checking them within WMT under “Crawl,” “Crawl Stats,” and “All Pages Crawled.” And then sort them from newest to oldest so you can see which ones have been crawled most recently. New additions here indicate that new content has recently been added and should be indexed soon.
2. Solutions to User Interface Issues on Shopify
If you’re running a Shopify store and are looking to optimize your website for Google, the following solutions will help:
- Use Google Search Console. This tool is free and tells you if there are any errors in the code of your site. If any problems are found, they can be fixed before they cause issues with search engine rankings or user experience.
- Use Google Analytics for tracking eCommerce behavior on your site to determine what content users like to see most often: product descriptions vs. blog posts vs. videos.
This will help guide future content development efforts so that visitors get what they want from each visit without being overwhelmed by an overload of information not related directly to making sales through purchases made now through the platform itself instead of linking offsite.
3. How to fix marketing management issues on Shopify
When it comes to solving marketing management issues on Shopify, there are a couple of ways to achieve this. Thankfully, the solution process is simple and you can do it in no time:
- Set up your website to be mobile-friendly.
- Make sure the website is easy to navigate.
- Make sure it’s easy for customers to find what they’re looking for, whether by category or brand name.
- Make it easy for them to browse and search through products, too, and remember that not everyone likes clicking links. They might want a simple text list of all the items you offer instead of browsing categories or filtering through images in a drop-down menu (though this can still be done).
4. AAP Technology
The solution for most of the technical SEO issues on Shopify is a tool called AAP technology, which stands for Advanced Analytics Platform. This cloud-based tool can be accessed from anywhere in the world and allows you to make changes on your website without having to do anything complicated or hire a developer.
When using this platform, you can fix issues such as duplicate content, incorrect canonical tags, and broken links that drive away search traffic. You’ll also see how much traffic your site gets from each social media channel so that you can focus on reaching these customers through ads or email marketing campaigns.
AAP technology is a way to get your Shopify store to the top of Google, increase your revenue, increase your customer base and increase profits. The more traffic you get from Google, the more revenue you will make.
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Importance of fixing Technical SEO Shopify Issues
Why is fixing technical SEO issues on Shopify important? Google ranks websites higher when they’re technically sound. If you have technical SEO issues, Google will penalize your site for it. This can cause a drop in rankings and traffic, which means less money coming into your store.
Not only does fixing technical SEO issues help optimize the search engine results page (SERP), but it also helps with user experience and usability. The better the user experience, the more likely people will buy from you instead of someone else’s store with more minor technical issues or problems with their website design on Shopify.
Conclusion
There are so many benefits to using Shopify for your eCommerce website. But it is crucial to remember that you may face several technical SEO issues if you choose this platform. Several of these typical technical issues have been explained in this article.
You can avoid these problems by doing regular audits and ensuring your site is set up correctly. If they do come up, though, don’t panic; follow the steps outlined above, match the issues and follow the steps on how to get the problem fixed.
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