Shopify Product Tags SEO

Misuse of Shopify Product Tags for SEO is one of the most common issues we see when we start working with a new Shopify client for SEO.

In this article, we’ll discuss what Shopify product tags are, how to use them, and how to avoid making common mistakes that will prevent your Shopify store from climbing up in theva rankings.

Shopify Product Tags as wel as the Shopify product schemas are added to products in the back-end of Shopify for better organization of inventory, productsand Shopify seo for variants.

In addition, product tags can also be used to add sorting & filtering functionality to a Shopify store, so the customer can find their desired product easier.

Unlike popular belief, Shopify tags don’t help SEO. In fact, Shopify Product Tags often work against your SEO efforts, as they create tons of thin content pages, which thus waste your crawl budget.

But let’s take a step back for a second, how does all of this happen?

For every tag you add to a product, Shopify will auto-generate a new page under each collection that contains the product you added the tag to.

This means that if you added a tag to a product that’s inside of 8 collections, Shopify will auto-generate 8 new pages under each collection URL.

Apply lots of tags to lots of products, and you’ll end up with hundreds of low-quality pages indexed inside Google:

As we mentioned above, every tag you add to a product results in a brand-new page created under every collection containing that product.

There are 3 main issues that arise from this:

1. No On-Page SEO Control
   
   Since these tagged pages are auto-generated, we don’t have any control over the content, meta title, or H1 heading tags. This makes it impossible to optimize these pages, and dramatically reduces your chances of ranking well.
2. Unoptimized Crawl Budget
   
   It’s also important to keep in mind that Google will never crawl all of your pages at once, but only a small part of your site.
   
   With that in mind, it’s important that we only index well-optimized pages (consider cheching our Shopify jome page SEO guide) that have the ability to rank high in Google, otherwise we’ll be wasting Google’s crawl budget.
   
   Since tagged pages can’t even be optimized for SEO, they’re not the best when it comes to optimizing your crawl budget.
3. Duplicate Content
   
   On top of everything we mentioned, tagged pages usually compete with your own pages or some of the Shopify collection pages, which have much higher chances of ranking, since they can be more optimized for SEO.
   
   The last thing you want as an SEO is to have your own product pages competing for the same keyword.

There is no single best number of product tags for SEO in Shopify. You should add and use as many product tags as you need for your internal organization and better UX, but as discussed before product tags don’t really have an impact on SEO…

And if they do have an impact on SEO, it’s usually negative.

It can be challenging to optimize your website for Google searches and to increase Shopify conversion rate. Fortunately, GoldenWeb can support you with technical SEO. Our Shopify SEO experts can help you in optimizing your website for better results on Google searches.

Our comprehensive SEO audit service thoroughly examines your store to find any technical SEO problems that might be preventing you from ranking higher on Google. We then give you a thorough report of our findings along with doable fixes for the problems we found.

Click here to request a free mini SEO audit where we’ll go over 10 potential quick-wins that you can implement on your Shopify store to boost your organic traffic.