Shopify Technical SEO Issues

There’s no point in having a beautifully designed Shopify store if it isn't visible to your target audience. 

Your online store's purpose is to attract visitors and convert them into customers or leads. If your website isn’t ranking on Google and other search engines, then there are some underlying Shopify technical SEO issues that need to be fixed.

Technical SEO aims to make your site as easy as possible for search engine crawlers to understand, crawl, and index your site properly. 

Unlike basic SEO, which is more content-focused, technical SEO focuses on optimizing your website’s architecture, code, and structure. In this post, we will discusses some of the most common Shopify technical SEO issues and why you should consider working with GoldenWeb as the ultimate Shopify SEO expert to fix them.

Page speed is a direct ranking factor for Google. A slow-loading website will not only frustrate your visitors but also lead to a higher bounce rate, negatively impacting your ranking in SERPs.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), HTML (HyperText Markup Language), and JavaScript are the three main coding languages used to develop a website.

These files can often be excessively long and contain a lot of unnecessary characters such as whitespace, comments, and more. Minifying these files will help reduce their size without affecting their functionality.

Images are often the largest files on a webpage and can significantly impact page speed if they aren’t properly optimized. We can help you optimize your images by reducing their file size without compromising on quality.

Browser caching allows a website to store static files on a visitor's computer so that they don't have to be downloaded each time the visitor loads a page. This can help reduce page load times, especially for returning visitors.

Server response time is the measure of time it takes for a web server to respond to a request from a browser. A slow server response time can be caused by a number of factors, such as poor hosting, excessive use of plugins, and more.

Delayed server responses are routinely shown to have a negative impact on user experience, being one of the most highly-ranked factors that cause people to leave a page early.

CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a network of servers that are used to deliver content to visitors based on their location. CDNs can help improve website speed by delivering content from a server that is closer to the visitor's location.

Google indexing is the process of Google discovering and adding your website's pages to its search results. When a page is indexed, it means that it can be found by anyone who does a search on Google.

One mistake that most Shopify owners make is indexing too many low-value/ thin content pages that aren’t relevant to their target keywords. 

This leads to what’s known as 'indexation bloat.' Indexation bloat is when too many low-quality pages are indexed in Google, which can result in those pages outranking your important pages.

This can be a big problem because it means that your most important pages aren’t being seen by your target audience.

At GoldenWeb, we fix this issue by conducting a comprehensive audit of your website's pages and identifying the ones that are causing indexation bloat. We then take the necessary steps to remove those pages from Google's search results.

Some of the steps we take to fix unoptimized Google indexing include:

• Removing low-quality pages from the sitemap: The first step is to remove any low-quality pages from your website's sitemap. This prevents Google from indexing those pages in the first place.
• Adding a no-index tag to low-quality pages: If there are some low-quality pages that you can't remove from your sitemap, then you can add a Shopify no-index tag to those pages. This tells Google not to index those pages.

An H1 tag is an HTML tag used to indicate the most important heading on a webpage. This tag is important for both usability and SEO.

One of the biggest problems we find when doing an SEO audit is Shopify stores with multiple H1 tags on each page. This is a big issue because it confuses Google spiders and makes it difficult for them to determine which heading is the most important.

Apart from having multiple H1 tags, another common issue we see is missing H1 tags. This is a big problem because it means that your pages aren’t properly structured and Google cannot understand what your page is about.

This can lead to your pages being ranked lower in the search results or even being completely excluded from the search results.

Remember, H1 tags are among the three most important on-page SEO factors. Google directly measures it to determine what a page is about. If you don't give Google the context it needs, it struggles to crawl and index your pages.

At GoldenWeb we can help you fix this issue by adding H1 tags to your pages where they are missing. We also make sure that your H1 tags are properly structured and optimized with your target keywords. This not only helps Google understand your pages better, but it also helps you rank higher in the search results.

Do-follow external links are when a website links to another website and passes on link equity. This is also known as link juice. If you have too many of these, it can actually hurt your website's ranking.

When you add too many irrelevant do-follow external links (such as linking to Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram), you are actually passing your domain power and authority to these sites. Therefore, instead of Google seeing your website as an authoritative site, they see these external sites as more relevant.

GoldenWeb can help fix this problem using an array of different techniques, including:

• Adding a "no-follow" tag to external links: This tells Google not to follow the link and, as a result, not to pass on link equity.
• Removing unnecessary external links: This reduces the number of do-follow links on your website.
• Linking to high-quality websites: We ensure any necessary do-follow links are from high-quality websites relevant to your industry.

PWA (Progressive Web App) is an advanced technology that allows you to create a website that acts and feels like a native app.

Some of the benefits of PWA are:

• Faster loading times: PWAs load faster than traditional websites because they are cached on the user's device.
• Offline mode: PWAs can work offline or in low-connectivity areas.
• Push notifications: PWAs can send push notifications to users, even when they are not actively using the app.
• Improved conversions: Due to their app-like feel, PWAs can improve conversions and lead to higher engagement rates.

If you aren’t using PWA on your Shopify website, you’re missing out on these benefits. It's one of the quick-win opportunities GoldenWeb can implement to help improve your website's performance.

By ensuring all static elements that repeat across your site, such as scripts, logos, menus stylesheets, and images, aren’t downloaded each time a new page is loaded, we make your pages load faster.

These Technical issues are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEO. We undertake a comprehensive SEO audit encompassing over 285 potential growth opportunities to give you an accurate picture of your website's SEO health.

We then put together a personalized plan to help you improve your website's ranking and visibility in the search results. We have helped thousands of Shopify owners triple their organic revenue within short timelines, and we want to help you too.

To help clients understand our process, we offer a free mini SEO audit that will analyze these 10 technical SEO issues and much more. But we don't want you to take our word for it. Book your free mini audit now to see how we can help grow your Shopify business.