Is Shopify bad for SEO?

Shopify’s help centre lists the search features every store has without any setup.

• A sitemap.xml file listing products, collections, pages and blog posts, generated automatically.
• A robots.txt file, which can be edited.
• Canonical tags, added automatically so that a product reached by more than one address is counted once.
• Title tags produced by the theme, which the owner can rewrite for each page.

Shopify decides the first part of every address. Products sit under /products/, collections under /collections/, pages under /pages/ and blog posts under /blogs/. The owner chooses the rest. For most stores this costs nothing in search. It matters when a store moves to Shopify from a site with different addresses, because every old address then needs a redirect.

The store also runs on Shopify’s servers, and the checkout is Shopify’s own.

Stores are rarely held back by the platform. Four things do the damage.

• Product descriptions copied from the manufacturer, identical on every store that sells the product.
• Collection pages with a grid of products and no words.
• Apps that add scripts to every page. Our guide to why a Shopify store is slow covers them.
• No content beyond the catalogue, so the store appears only for product names and not for the questions buyers ask first.

Three checks show where a store stands.

1. Type site: and the store’s domain into Google, to confirm the pages are indexed. If they are not, see Shopify store not showing on Google.
2. Run a product page and a competitor’s product page through PageSpeed Insights, on mobile.
3. Search for one of your products by its ordinary name, open the store that outranks you, and compare the two pages line by line.

If the store is indexed, fast and its pages say more than the competition’s, the platform is doing its job. A store that passes none of these has work to do that no platform would do for it.