Shopify does a reasonable amount right out of the box, which is exactly why the problems that remain are so consistent from store to store. They are not random. They are the by-product of decisions the platform makes for you, and once you know where they sit you can work through them in an afternoon or two rather than paying someone to rediscover them every year.
This is written for Australian stores, so the last section deals with the things that only matter once you are selling here. Everything before it applies to any Shopify store.
The URL structure you inherit
Every product on a Shopify store is reachable at more than one address. There is the clean product URL, and there is the same product nested inside whichever collection the visitor arrived through. Shopify canonicalises the nested version back to the clean one by default, which handles the duplication, but two things still go wrong often enough to check.
The first is internal linking. If your theme links to products through their collection paths, every internal link on the site points at a URL that is not the canonical one. It still works, it is just weaker than it needs to be, and it makes any crawl of the site harder to read. The second is that apps and custom templates sometimes overwrite the canonical tag. Pull a crawl and confirm that every product resolves to one canonical address and that the address matches the page it sits on.
While you are in there, look at what else is indexable. Tag pages, filtered collection views and internal search results can generate a very large number of thin URLs. Shopify blocks some of these in its default robots file, but themes and filter apps routinely create new ones that nothing is blocking.
Collection pages carry the money
Category terms are where the buying intent sits, and on most stores the collection page is a heading, a sort dropdown and a grid. There is nothing on it for a search engine to understand beyond the product titles.
Give the important collections real copy. Not a paragraph of filler above the grid that pushes products below the fold, but a properly written block below the products covering what is in the range, how to choose between the options, what fits what, and the questions people ask before they buy. Unique title and meta description on each, a single heading that names the category the way customers say it, and internal links to the sub-collections that sit beneath it.
Be honest about which collections matter. A store with ninety collections does not need ninety pieces of copy. It needs the eight that carry the demand treated properly and the rest left tidy.
Product pages and the variant problem
Manufacturer descriptions pasted across a category produce a set of pages that differ only by a model number. If forty products share the same three paragraphs, none of them has anything to offer that the other thirty nine do not. Rewriting all of them is rarely realistic, so rewrite the ones people actually search for by name and leave the long tail alone.
Variants are the other half of this. Colour and size variants should not be generating separate indexable URLs with near identical content. Check how your theme handles variant selection in the address bar and whether those parameter versions are being crawled.
The unglamorous items belong on this list too. Alt text on product imagery, which Shopify will happily leave empty across an entire catalogue. Explicit width and height on images so the layout does not shift while they load. Image files at a sensible size rather than whatever came out of the photographer export.
Speed, and where Shopify actually loses it
The platform itself is fast. Stores are slow because of what gets added to them. Every app that injects a script, every review widget, every chat bubble and pop-up builder adds work that has to happen before the page settles, and on a mid-range phone on mobile data that is where the score goes.
Audit the app list against what the store genuinely uses. Uninstalled apps frequently leave their code behind in the theme, so check the theme files rather than trusting the app list. Then look at the hero image on the templates that matter, because on most stores the largest element on screen is a banner that is far bigger than it needs to be and is not given loading priority.
Test on mobile. A desktop score tells you very little about what your customers are experiencing.
Structured data that ships broken
Most themes output product markup, and a surprising number of them output it incorrectly. The usual faults are a price that does not match the displayed price, availability that never updates, currency missing, or review markup left in the theme with nothing behind it.
Run the important templates through a validator: one product, one collection, the home page and an article. Review markup only goes on the page if the reviews are real and visible on that page. Nothing on this list is worth a manual action.
Internal linking, which Shopify will not do for you
Out of the box, a product is linked from its collection and from nowhere else. That leaves the catalogue flat and leaves your written content stranded.
Link from blog articles into the collections they discuss, using the phrase a customer would search rather than click here. Link related products to each other where the relationship is real. Link sub-collections up to their parent and back down again. If a page is more than three clicks from the home page, ask whether it needs to be.
This is the step most stores skip, and it is the one that makes everything else work harder. A team running this as a programme rather than a one-off, whether that is in-house or an ecommerce SEO agency, will usually start here for exactly that reason. If you are weighing up who should do it, the questions worth asking are set out in our guide to choosing an ecommerce SEO specialist in Australia.
The Australian layer
Confirm the store presents prices in Australian dollars to Australian visitors by default, and that the markup agrees with what is on screen. If Shopify Markets is running multiple currencies or regions, check how those alternate versions are being linked and whether the right one is the canonical for this audience.
Shipping information does more work than most people expect. Delivery timeframes, whether you ship to remote areas, thresholds for free shipping and what happens with returns are all things people check before they buy, and putting them in plain text on the page rather than behind a modal gives the page something to answer with.
Use Australian spelling in product copy, because a lot of supplier-provided text arrives in American English and reads as imported. If there is a warehouse, showroom or click and collect point, that is worth a proper location page and a Google Business Profile, which is a separate piece of work to everything above.
What to recheck after every theme or app change
Theme updates and app installs are the most common way a store quietly breaks. After either, check that the canonical tags survived, that the product markup still validates, that nothing new is being injected into the head, and that the mobile speed on your key templates has not moved. Ten minutes each time saves the six month mystery about where the traffic went.
