Shopify SEO Audit: What to Check

Table of Contents

A Shopify SEO audit done with a generic crawler tool mostly tells you what Shopify already handles correctly: valid sitemaps, clean hosting, correct canonical tags on paper. What it misses is the platform-specific stuff, the gap between what Shopify sets up by default and what actually happens once a theme, a few apps, and a growing catalogue get involved. Here’s what a proper audit actually checks, and what it tends to find.

Start with the canonical URL bug almost every store has #

Shopify generates two working URLs for every product, the canonical /products/product-name and a collection-aware version, /collections/collection-name/products/product-name. Shopify’s own canonical tag correctly points to the first. The problem is that theme templates still default to generating internal links using the second, on collection pages, related-product blocks, and search results, contradicting the page’s own canonical tag.

Practical tool

What's the audit likely to find on your store?

The fix: check your theme’s product-link templates (usually snippets/product-card.liquid or similar) and point them at the canonical /products/ path directly, then confirm your sitemap only lists canonical URLs. See the full Shopify SEO guide for the complete breakdown of this bug.

App bloat #

Every SEO, reviews, or upsell app adds its own JavaScript to every page load, and Shopify stores accumulate them fast, often outliving whatever they were installed to fix in the first place. An audit checks each installed app against what it’s actually earning in return for its page-speed cost, since speed is both a ranking factor and a conversion factor at once.

Thin or duplicated collection pages #

Shopify collections default to a bare product grid unless you deliberately add content. An audit checks whether your highest-traffic collections have anything genuine to rank with, a real paragraph written for the category, not filler stuffed in to hit a word count.

Migration history #

If the store moved to Shopify from another platform, this is usually the single highest-stakes thing to check. Every URL structure typically changes in a migration, and without a complete old-URL-to-new-URL 301 redirect map, years of accumulated rankings and backlinks can vanish. An audit checks this before anything else if a migration happened within the last couple of years.

What a proper audit rolls all of this into #

Each of the above is a separate finding on its own. What actually makes an audit useful is ranking them against each other, by what’s actually costing you traffic and revenue, not by how many items fit on a checklist. That’s what a Shopify SEO consultant engagement starts with, before any content or on-page work begins.

If you’d rather have this run properly against your actual store, see Shopify SEO consulting or get in touch.