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Shopify Store SEO Checklist: 12 Fixes in Order

7 minute read Updated 4 November 2026

Shopify already writes your sitemap, robots.txt and canonical tags, so most of a store's SEO work is in the admin. Let Google in first, then write a title and description for each page, keep product addresses short and stable, link products at their own address, and check the product markup your theme adds.

What Shopify already does for you

Start by knowing what you do not need to fix. Shopify’s help centre says every store gets a sitemap.xml and a robots.txt file made for it automatically. It also says canonical tags are added to pages for you, so the same product reached by two addresses is not shown twice. And it says structured data is built into Shopify themes. So this checklist is mostly about the parts only you can write: titles, descriptions, addresses and links. Work through it in order. A store Google cannot reach gains nothing from good titles.

Step 1: Take the store out of private mode

While your store sits behind a password, search engines cannot read it. Shopify says a sitemap reader such as Google cannot open your sitemap when the store is in private mode, and you have to switch private mode off before you can verify the store with Google. If your store is ready to sell, turn the password page off. If it is not ready yet, leave this step until launch day and do it first.

Step 2: Connect Google Search Console and submit your sitemap

Search Console is Google’s free tool for site owners. Shopify’s steps are: in Search Console, add a property using the URL prefix option and your address starting with https://. Choose the HTML tag method and copy the tag. In Shopify, open your theme’s actions menu, choose Edit code, open theme.liquid, and paste the tag on a blank line just below the opening <head> tag. Save, then click Verify in Search Console. Then go to Indexing → Sitemaps, type sitemap.xml and submit it. Google says submitting a sitemap is a hint, not a guarantee that every page will be crawled. You can check your sitemap first with our sitemap validator.

Step 3: Leave robots.txt as Shopify made it

Shopify’s default robots.txt keeps search engines out of the cart, checkout, account pages and filtered or sorted copies of collections, and lets them into products, collections, pages and blog posts. Shopify says this default works for most stores. You can change it by adding a robots.txt.liquid template, but Shopify warns that a mistake there can lose all of your search traffic, and its support team cannot help with edits. If you have edited it, test your important addresses with the robots.txt tester.

Step 4: Send every domain to one primary domain

If you own more than one domain, pick one for shoppers to see. Go to Settings → Domains. Shopify lets you choose the domain shoppers see and redirect the others to it, and its sitemap help says domains you do not use for international selling should redirect to your primary domain. Google treats a redirect as a strong signal of which address is the real one. Check that each old domain lands on the right place with the redirect checker.

Step 5: Write your home page title and description

Go to Online Store → Preferences. In the Social sharing image and SEO section, enter a title and a meta description for your store, then click Save. Google asks for titles that are descriptive and concise, and says the home page title is a reasonable place for a little more about the site. Google may use your meta description for the snippet under your result, but it does not always. Preview yours with the search snippet preview.

Step 6: Give each product its own search listing

Open a product. In the Search engine listing section, click the pencil icon. Fill in the Page title and Meta description fields. Shopify notes that a title over 70 characters or a description over 320 characters may be cut off in results. Google’s guidance is that every page should have its own title that describes that page. Titles that repeat the same words on every product, with only one detail changed, make it hard for people to tell results apart. Repeating a phrase several times does not help either; Google calls that keyword stuffing. Check a live product with the meta tag checker.

Step 7: Do the same for collections and pages

Collections have the same Search engine listing section when you create or edit one. For pages, go to Online Store → Pages, open the page, and click Edit website SEO under the search engine listing preview. Collections are often the pages people find when they search for a type of product rather than one item, so give each one a title and description of its own.

Step 8: Keep product addresses short and stable

The last part of a product’s address is its URL handle, in the same Search engine listing section. Google recommends readable words separated by hyphens rather than long codes. Set the handle once, early. Shopify advises against changing handles often, because it can keep the product out of search results. If you do change one, or delete a product, send the old address somewhere useful: go to Content → Menus, click View URL redirects, then Create URL redirect. Shopify only allows a redirect from an address that no longer loads a page. Google says a permanent redirect tells it the new address should be the one shown in results.

Step 9: Link products at /products/, not through collections

Some themes link a product from its collection page at an address like /collections/summer/products/blue-dress. The same product also lives at /products/blue-dress. Shopify’s canonical tag points search engines to one of them, so this is not a duplicate-content emergency. But each collection adds another address for the same product to crawl. Google’s crawling guidance says that when many of the addresses it knows on a site are duplicates, crawling them wastes Google’s crawling time on your site. Wherever you link to a product yourself, in menus, blog posts and buttons, use the plain /products/ address. Confirm what a page declares with the canonical checker.

Step 10: Do not link to ?variant= addresses

When a product has options such as size or colour, Shopify gives each combination an address ending in ?variant= and a number. These pages show almost the same content as the main product. If you link to them from menus, emails or other pages, search engines find many near-copies of one product. Link the main product address and let shoppers pick the option on the page. Google’s URL guidance also asks you to drop parameters that do not change the content.

Step 11: Check the product markup your theme adds

Structured data is hidden code that describes a product to search engines: its name, price and whether it is in stock. Google says product markup can make a page eligible for richer results that show price, availability and reviews. Shopify says this markup is built into its themes, but what counts is what your own theme actually outputs, so check a product page with the schema validator rather than assuming. Google’s rule is that markup must describe what shoppers can actually see on the page. A price in the markup that differs from the price on the page breaks that rule.

Step 12: Describe your product photos, and keep pages quick

Alt text is a short written description of an image. Click a product image, choose Edit alt text, write what the photo shows, and click Save alt text. Google says it uses alt text, along with the page’s content, to understand what an image shows, and asks you to avoid stuffing it with keywords. Then test your busiest product page with the page speed test. Google’s guidance is for the main content to appear within 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load.

Checking all twelve at once

Steps 9, 10 and 11 are hard to check by hand across a whole catalogue. When Lala SEO crawls a store and recognises it as Shopify, its audit runs three checks of its own: product pages without Product markup, internal links that reach products through a collection address, and variant addresses found while crawling. It also flags markup that claims text the page does not say. They sit among 136 checks in all, listed on the checks page. A free audit covers up to 300 pages, and the glossary explains any term in the report.

The bottom line

Shopify handles the sitemap, robots.txt and canonical tags, so leave those alone and spend your time on what only you can write. Start by taking the store out of private mode and submitting the sitemap in Search Console, then write titles and descriptions for your home page, products and collections. After that, tidy product links and check the product markup, which a free audit does for you.

This article is general guidance. Fixing what it describes makes a page easier for search engines to reach and read; it cannot promise a ranking. We are not affiliated with Google or endorsed by it, and cannot see inside how it ranks pages, so we make no ranking predictions. Lala SEO is independent and not affiliated with Shopify. Shopify is a trademark of its owner.