🔎 Focus: Technical SEO
🔴 Impact: High
🟠 Difficulty: Mid-High

Dear Tech SEO 👋

Today I want to share the most fundamental issues I find while working on Tech SEO on Shopify.

1 - Audit International/Location Folders: Bad implemented href lang (reference between locations/regions/languages) can kill rankings. Picture a US and UK based business, same language, far away locations - Google does not know which page to serve in what location.

2 - Clean Up Sitemaps: Remove outdated or "not found" sitemaps that waste crawl budget.

3 - Fix URL Parameters: Ensure dynamically generated URLs (like internal search box results) are properly canonicalized to prevent thousands of useless, duplicate pages. Where possible prevent those links to be even anywhere on the website.

4 - Noindex,Follow paginated landings: Based on experience I implement often a noindex, follow tag to ?page=2 and further. I allow the “follow“ to allow crawling of the links (product) within a given page.

🙋‍♂ Warning: this technique is not a common practice and requires a careful implementation and monitoring. Implement with care and with a Tech SEO specialist like my buddy Patryk Wawok.

4 - De-JavaScript Your Menus: Ensure top navigation and mega menus are visible in the source code, not just rendered via JavaScript, so crawlers can actually find your collection pages.

5 - Implement Contextual Navigation: Avoid showing the entire site menu on every page; silo the navigation so users (and bots) in a specific category only see related sub-categories.

6 - Optimize Breadcrumbs: Ensure breadcrumbs reflect the actual category tree (crucial for Shopify) and are clearly visible on mobile layouts.

7 - Dynamic "Related Products": Check if third-party recommendation apps are hiding crucial internal links from search engine bots. JS rendered sections work “ok“ but they need to be executed correctly.

8 - Debug JSON-LD Syntax: Check for simple coding errors (like missing double quotes) that can break the schema markup across tens of thousands of product pages.

9 - Align Schema with Ad Feeds: Ensure the structured data on your landing pages perfectly matches the data in your Google Shopping feeds to prevent ad blocks.

10 - Remove Duplicate Schema: Audit product pages to ensure you aren't outputting multiple, conflicting versions of product structured data.

11 - Audit Third-Party Plugins: Identify and remove heavy JavaScript apps (like customer service chatbots) that drastically slow down load times and cause Cumulative Layout Shifts (CLS).

12 - Optimize the Mobile Above-the-Fold View: Ensure breadcrumbs, core category descriptions, and products are visible immediately without excessive scrolling.

13 - Resize Product Cards: Adjust CSS to make product boxes slightly smaller, allowing more products to fit within a single mobile scroll. I tend to fit at least 2 per row on mobie (more than 2 would be overkill…)

14 - Speed Up Script Execution: JS rendered sections, something like recommended products are often rendered with a scroll or lazy-load feature. If they contain links I tend to render them first thing so without being the best rendering option they still are indexed properly by Google.

If you want to give it a deeper look, I leave this video session:

That’s it for today, practical and simple.

Reply “Shopify” and your domain I’ll show you the exact tech SEO fixes needed on your site.Technical SEO can achieve substantial organic traffic growth

Until next time 👋

Jairo

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