Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is the eCommerce site Shopify SEO friendly?
-
We ave a prospect client that wants to start doing SEO for his Shopify site, we are unsure if this will be SEO friendly. Will we have enough control to get great placement? Are we better off rebuilding the site for the client in an OpenCart?
-
Let's export Shopify to OpenCart. OpenCart is designed in a way that all of its pages can be indexed and identified in search engines. So by providing the identification information through Meta Title, Meta Description and Meta keywords, you are making it easier for search engines to get your store data. OpenCart allows the use of search engine optimized URLs for product, category, manufacturer and information pages. SEO keywords are defined per product, category, manufacturer and information page, stored in a database table (url_alias), looked up at each page request, and translated into an internal URL. Here is some SEO tips for optimize OpenCart site: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/11-seo-tips-boost-your-opencart-online-store-sourabh-nagori
-
Yes it is.
I am a Shopify Expert on the marketing panel. I have clients that ask me this question every other day at least. So much in fact that I ended up just creating a White Paper to refer clients to so that I don't have to repeat myself over and over again. If you are curious about what makes Shopify SEO friendly then you can check out the White Paper at http://www.denverseo.bz/is-shopify-good-for-seo.html.
I hope that this helps clear up this issue for anyone that might have questions about Shopify and SEO.
From what I have found you can really optimize any platform well, it just really depends upon who is in the driver's seat, their previous experience, and how talented they are when optimizing websites.
Cheers,
Martin
-
As ever with these things, I tend to think it depends on the client and budget. We can certainly do something better with WordPress but the costs are going to outstrip working with Shopify considerably. If the client has no technical staff and does not want to be responsible for the management of the store and just wants something that works and can be lightly SEO'd then, shopify is not terrible.
Sure, it's not great, but you have enough control to do the basics and if you want to get into the templating features it can be fairly powerful.
Also, unlike volusion and other similar packages, it includes a blog platform (very basic) that allows you to have a blog on the same domain instead of having to manage a separate blog.
Personally, I go WordPress + WooCommerce now if the budget supports it as you can really optimise that platform to perfection.
-
I've looked at Shopify and it does look like it is a good platform for most uses depending on the kind of market that your client is in however I would be careful. I'm sure that it's all shared hosting which could be a speed/performance problem and the lack of control of the backend would be my main issues. I would just hate to have an issue that I have no control over make the site less optimized.
I think if you're in a niche market that isn't too competitive you should be okay with it. I know they handle all the PCI compliance and stuff like that. I would however probably choose Wordpress over it any day just because of the features and controls.
-
Is the eCommerce site Shopify SEO friendly?
It depends on how you define "SEO friendly". Have they taken some steps to improve SEO? Yes. Would I ever build a business site on that platform? No.
The nice benefits are you can get your site up and going quickly and they offer excellent hosting.
Aside from the financial expense of needing to pay monthly for the service, there are far too many limitations from any hosted solution. There are tons of SEO optimizations which are desirable but cannot be made due to you having no control over the software nor the hosting environment. Sure you can change title tags and some other changes, but that is not close to enough.
I would recommend WordPress + the eCommerce plugin or Joomla + VirtueMart over Shopify. I mention these two specifically because they offer a nice balance between a cart and a site. If you only need a cart, there are several cart solutions available.
If you do go with Shopify, be sure to get your SEOmoz discount: http://www.seomoz.org/pro-perks
-
I think that you can do a virtual machine instance of OpenCart and see what the system returns by viewing page source. I haven't personally used Shopify but as a hosted solution, you'll have to test to see how that works out. Then do an audit of the code both spit out. Remember, the on-page optimization is only one part of your solution.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site Migration - Pagination
Hi, We are migrating our website and an issue we are facing is how to handle paginated content in our categories. Our new website will have the same structure but with different urls. Should we 301 redirect all the paginated content (if crawled by Google) to the url of the main category? To put this into an example: Old urls: www.example.com/technology/tvs (main category of TVs & also page 1) ** www.example.com/technology/tvs?v=0&page=2 ** ( page 2 of TVs) New urls: **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs **(main category of TVs & also page 1) **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs?page=2 **(page 2 of tvs) Should we redirect all of the old TV urls (also the paginated) to www.example.com/soundvision/tvs ? The is no rel next, prev tag in our site and no canonicals. Also there is a view all products page in each category, BUT it doesn't contain all the products(max. is 100 per page - yes the view all page is also paginated). The same view all products page (paginated) will exist in the new website also. I checked google search console, and Google has decided to treat as canonical page the first page www.example.com/technology/tvs . Also, all the organic traffic of our categories goes to these pages (main category page - 1st page). I would appreciate any thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HellasSITES0 -
Lightboxes and SEO
Do lightboxes (AKA popup boxes when you click "learn more" type CTAs) have any negative effect on SEO? We are looking at revamping our sites to have more of a tiled approach, and a lightbox with summary content popping out with additional CTAs, directing to pages with more information or free trial pages. Is there any downside to this approach from an organic perspective? is there anything specific to keep in mind when creating these if not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris81980 -
What do you add to your robots.txt on your ecommerce sites?
We're looking at expanding our robots.txt, we currently don't have the ability to noindex/nofollow. We're thinking about adding the following: Checkout Basket Then possibly: Price Theme Sortby other misc filters. What do you include?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Best way to implement canonical tags on an ecommerce site with many filter options?
What would be the best way to add canonical tags to an ecommerce site with many filter options, for example, http://teacherexpress.scholastic.com? Should I include a canonical tag for all filter options under a category even though the pages don't have the same content? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
How to perform Local SEO for sites like Angies List/Task Rabbit or Craigslist
I have a new SEO client that has a business model similar to Criagslist and Angies List or Task Rabbit, Where they offer local based services nationwide. My first thought was Local link building and citation building etc. But the issue is they are a purely online service company and they don't have a phyiscal address in every city/state they will be offering their services in. What is the best course of action for providing SEO services for this type of business model. I am pretty much at a stand still on how to rank them locally for the areas they provide services in. it's a business model that involves local businesses and customers looking for services from those local businesses.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VITALBGS0 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce sites
I just want to confirm something about duplicate content. On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content? Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page. If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products... Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode0 -
Is it possible to Spoof Analytics to give false Unique Visitor Data for Site A to Site B
Hi, We are working as a middle man between our client (website A) and another website (website B) where, website B is going to host a section around websites A products etc. The deal is that Website A (our client) will pay Website B based on the number of unique visitors they send them. As the middle man we are in charge of monitoring the number of Unique visitors sent though and are going to do this by monitoring Website A's analytics account and checking the number of Unique visitors sent. The deal is worth quite a lot of money, and as the middle man we are responsible for making sure that no funny business goes on (IE false visitors etc). So to make sure we have things covered - What I would like to know is 1/. Is it actually possible to fool analytics into reporting falsely high unique visitors from Webpage A to Site B (And if so how could they do it). 2/. What could we do to spot any potential abuse (IE is there an easy way to spot that these are spoofed visitors). Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
Can MadCap Flare WebHelp be made SEO Friendly?
A team member is porting over documentation from a .org wiki that will be placed on the company's root domain. The problem with MadCap is that it uses frames as well as javascript navigation. Has anyone encountered this problem before? I'm unfamiliar with the software and the project is pretty far into the pipeline at this point (I'm new at the company as well). Any advice on work-arounds or alternatives would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AnthonyYoung1