why technical seo is the foundation
Content and backlinks are wasted if Google can't properly crawl and index your pages. Technical SEO issues account for 30–50% of ranking problems that "good content" can't fix.
canonical tags on every page
<link rel="canonical" href="https://yourstore.com/products/my-product" />Without canonicals, Shopify creates duplicate URLs for the same product (collection-scoped URLs vs direct product URLs). Google penalises duplicate content. Add canonical tags to all product and collection templates.
structured data (schema.org)
Product schema enables rich results in Google search — star ratings, price, availability. These dramatically increase click-through rate from search results. Implement at minimum: Product, Offer, and AggregateRating schemas.
sitemap accuracy
Your sitemap should only list indexable pages. Exclude pagination pages, filtered collection URLs, and search result pages. Submit the sitemap in Google Search Console and check for coverage errors weekly after launch.
core web vitals targets
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): under 2.5s
- FID/INP (Interaction to Next Paint): under 200ms
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): under 0.1
Run PageSpeed Insights on your product pages monthly. The biggest wins are usually image lazy loading, font preloading, and removing unused JavaScript.