Maintain Link Equity for Shopify SEO

Migrating your ecommerce site? Here’s how to do it without nuking your SEO. I’ve seen enough site migrations to know one thing: Most brands mess up the platform switch By neglecting the SEO basics. So if you’re moving to Shopify (or away from it), here’s how to keep rankings, traffic, and revenue intact 👇 1/ NAIL YOUR REDIRECTS → #1 thing that tanks migrations. → Match every old URL to a new one - especially product and collection pages → WooCommerce uses /product-category/ → Shopify uses /collections/   ^ Completely different structure. You MUST redirect it. PS. Don’t forget to carry over your existing redirects from the old store. 2/ KEEP CONTENT THE SAME (OR BETTER) → Meta titles, H1s, descriptions, copy - keep intact where possible → Google hates change → If you do make edits, improve the content 3/ REBUILD PRODUCT PAGES WITH INTENT → If you’re a low-SKU store, make each product page do more work → Add FAQs → Longer descriptions → Use cases, trust builders, reviews 4/ FIX DUPLICATE PRODUCT URLS → Shopify often creates multiple URLs for the same product (e.g. /collections…/products/…) → Set canonicals to the clean /products/ version → Update all internal links to match → Otherwise you’ll split link equity and confuse crawlers 5/ WATCH TRIGGERS → Migrations break email flows more often than rankings → Double-check integrations like Klaviyo → Update logos, links, and event triggers → Test abandoned cart + post-purchase flows manually Migrations don’t ruin SEO. Sloppy execution does. But get the foundations right, And you’ll set yourself up to scale even faster on the new platform. Follow me – Freddie Chatt – for more ecommerce SEO secrets.

💡 Actionable Shopify SEO Tip #4 (Something you must change from the OOTB Shopify set-up) Make sure your collection product grid links to the clean canonical version of your product URLs. ❌ What you don’t want: example. com/collections/dresses/products/velvet-red-dress 💰 What you do want: example. com/products/velvet-red-dress Why it matters: Linking to the canonical URL ensures better SEO by avoiding duplicate content and consolidating link equity. 🔍 How to check and fix: Review your product grid to see if it's linking to the correct URL. If not, follow these steps: Go to Themes > Edit Code > Open your collections template Find this line: {{ product.url | within: collection }} Replace it with: {{ product.url }} ❗ Note: This will cause your PDP page breadcrumbs to be less descriptive. They will start showing as: Home / {product name} However, in our experience, this is still a much better approach for SEO. You can address the breadcrumbs separately with another dev implementation to counter this. Make sure you do this on a dev/non-live theme first to test that you don't break anything. Your product grid will now link directly to the canonical product URLs! 🚀 #ShopifySEO #eCommerceSEO #ShopifyTips

Most Shopify brands blow thousands on backlinks while ignoring the cheapest ranking factor. Internal links. The math is simple: 4-6 internal links roughly equals one backlink from a similar authority site. Let's say you're a DR40 site with 10K monthly traffic. Four internal links to your main collection page = one backlink from another DR40/10K site. Internal links cost you $0 and take a few minutes. That equivalent backlink? $200-400 minimum. Plus hours sourcing it. Plus dealing with a publisher who might be a pain in the ass. Use Screaming Frog to audit your internal links. Find your most important pages (new blogs, collection pages, product launches) and make sure they have links pointing to them. If a page is orphaned, Google won't find it. Neither will any LLM. Internal links help connect those dots. The more internal links pointing to a page, the more important Google perceives it to be. Greater importance = higher rankings. This tactic alone can close link gaps fast and get pages ranking on Google in weeks. Eventually you'll need higher authority backlinks for ultra-competitive keywords. But start here first.

60-Second SEO: This is the most common SEO issue on Shopify sites. By default, category pages link to duplicate versions of every single product in your store: If you have a Shopify store, you'll want to check to ensure that your site isn't linking to duplicate product pages. When you go on an individual collection and click to a product page, you might see a URL structured like this: URL: /collections/category_name/products/product_name However, when you check the canonical tag of that page, you'll see it point here: URL: /products/product_name This means that Shopify is actually creating two different versions of every single product page: URL: /collections/category_name/products/product_name URL: /products/product_name By default Shopify is setting up the internal linking structure around the non-canonical pages. This means, you're sending signals that Google should be indexing the duplicate version, not the canonical version. Fortunately you can change this by adjusting the product-grid-item.liquid file: FROM: <a href=”{{ product.url | within: current_collection }}” class=”product-grid-item”> TO: <a href=”{{ product.url }}” class=”product-grid-item”> This should result in your Shopify store linking to the correct versions of your content and eliminate the instances of internal links to duplicate pages.