Technology evolves at a fast pace, and this has been a popular article that we point people to. So we wanted to do two things: keep it up to date, and flesh it out with more useful hints and tips alongside the original three key points.
Shopify makes launching an ecommerce store easy. That same simplicity means important search engine optimisation (SEO) details often get skipped, because Shopify quietly fills them in for you and the results are rarely good.
The good news is you don't need to be an SEO specialist to fix them. Every product, collection and page in Shopify has editable SEO fields, and a few small changes can make a noticeable difference to how your store appears in Google. This post covers the fields we most often find neglected when store owners manage their own sites, plus a few less obvious tips, including one where I think Shopify's own advice is wrong.
Where Shopify hides its SEO settings
Scroll to the bottom of any product, collection or page you're editing and you'll find a section called 'Search engine listing'. Click 'Edit' and you can set the page title, meta description and URL handle.
Shopify auto-fills these from your product title and description. That's convenient, but it's rarely what you'd choose if you thought about it for ten seconds. And what goes in these fields is what Google is most likely to show on its results pages, so it's worth those ten seconds.
1. Page titles and meta descriptions
Google calls the clickable headline in its search results the 'title link', and your page title field is the strongest signal for what it shows there. The meta description is the short piece of text shown underneath.
Worth knowing: Google treats both as strong suggestions, not commands. If your title looks vague, stuffed with keywords or doesn't match the page, Google will likely rewrite it. The better your title describes the actual page, the more likely Google is to use it as written. The same goes for descriptions, which Google rewrites even more freely. Don't let that put you off; a well written title and description still win far more often than an auto-generated one.
What good looks like:
- Titles: descriptive and concise. Google doesn't enforce a character limit; it truncates by pixel width to fit the device. As a practical guide, aim for roughly 50 to 60 characters with the important words first. 'Organic Cotton Hoodie in Forest Green' beats 'Hoodie'.
- Descriptions: around 100 to 155 characters giving someone a reason to click. Descriptions aren't a ranking factor, but they're your free ad copy on the results page. This is a great opportunity to encourage people to click through to your site and improve your click through rate (CTR).
- No repetition, no boilerplate. Every page should have a unique title and description. If fifty products share the same description, Google has fifty reasons to ignore them.
One small aside for the detail-minded: Google can now also use your og:title (the title social platforms read) as a source for title links. So if your social sharing tags say something different from your page title, keep them consistent.
2. Collections
Collections are where many stores leave the most value on the table, because collection pages target the searches people actually make. Nobody searches for your product's exact name until they know you exist. They search for 'women's running shoes' or 'raw dog food'. That's a collection page's job.
Two things to do:
Set a unique title and meta description for every collection. Describe what's inside in natural language, thinking about what a customer would type into Google, not just 'Collection of t-shirts'.
Write real copy on the collection page itself. A paragraph or two of genuinely useful text on the page, not just in the meta fields. This is what tells Google (and increasingly, AI search tools) what the page is about, and it's what separates a proper landing page from a bare grid of products. Keep it human. If it reads like it was written for a robot, it'll perform like it too.
And don't simply copy your meta description into the collection's intro paragraph. The intro is a chance to expand on it. Google and other search engines read all of these signals together; they pull in the same direction.
3. Products
Adding products to Shopify is quick, and it's tempting to skip straight to publishing. This is where stores lose ground at scale.
Unique titles and descriptions. If every product in a range shares a near identical description with one word swapped, Google sees a wall of duplicate content and doesn't know which page to prioritise. Even small changes, like including colour or material in the title, give each page its own identity.
Get the URL handle right at creation. Shopify offers to create a redirect if you change a handle later, which works, but the better habit is a clean, readable handle from day one and then leaving it alone. Handles don't need keywords stuffed in; they need to make sense. If your product title includes extra wording (promo text, for example), check the handle is a sensible length and only carries the main words.
A word on Shopify Magic. Shopify's built-in AI will happily generate titles and descriptions for you. Convenient, but the output is generic, and generic at scale is exactly the kind of content Google crawls and quietly ignores. Use it as a starting point if you must, then make it yours.
Some reassurance on duplicate URLs. You may notice your products are reachable at two addresses, one via the collection (/collections/summer/products/hoodie) and one direct (/products/hoodie). Shopify handles this for you with a canonical tag pointing at the direct URL, so don't panic about it. The duplicate content you control, and should fix, is repeated titles and descriptions.
Beyond the basics
A few less obvious tips that come up in our client work.
The link title box (where I think Shopify unintentionally misleads a little)
When you insert a link in Shopify's editor, there's an optional 'Link title' field, and Shopify's own help docs tell you filling it in helps SEO and accessibility. If you're linking to pages properly, using descriptive text as the 'anchor' text, leave the link title blank.
Google gets its signal from the anchor text, the actual words you've made clickable. The title attribute adds little or nothing. And for accessibility it can actively hurt: if the title just repeats the link text, some screen readers announce it twice, which is a worse experience, not a better one.
The rule is simpler than Shopify makes it. Make the clickable words themselves descriptive ('read our Shopify SEO guide', not 'click here') and leave the box blank. If your anchor text isn't descriptive, fix the anchor text.
Image alt text
Arguably the fourth overlooked field. Every product image has an alt text field, and it does double duty: it helps your images appear in Google image search, and it's what screen readers announce to visually impaired customers.
Describe what's actually in the image, concisely, with the product name where natural. 'Brown leather bifold wallet, open to show card slots' beats 'wallet'. Don't start with 'image of' (screen readers already announce it's an image), and leave alt text empty for purely decorative images.
Recent Shopify enhancements have made this easy to do within Shopify itself. Click the image and the mini-editor that opens has a box where you can add alt text. It also creates a suggested alt text, which is rather clever, as AI views and understands the image. As with all AI, it's a good starting point, so have a read and check it's true and sensible before clicking the tick to apply it.
Metafields, for when you outgrow the basics
Shopify's built-in fields cover most stores well. When you want to go further, things like FAQ schema on key pages or richer product structured data, metafields plus some small theme template changes unlock it. That's beyond a ten-minute tidy-up and usually needs a developer (or a patient afternoon learning some basic Liquid coding), so I'll save the details for a future post. For now, just know the ceiling is higher than the admin makes it look.
Quick win: the ten-minute check
Log into Shopify, open one of your best-selling products and scroll to the Search engine listing section. Click 'Edit' and make sure the title and description are unique, specific and written for a human. Then do the same for your two or three most important collections.
Focus on a few pages at a time rather than trying to fix everything at once. Monitor the impact in Shopify Analytics, Google Analytics (GA4) and Google Search Console. And remember SEO is a long game; changes take weeks or even months, not days, to show.
Frequently asked questions
Does Shopify do SEO automatically?
Partly. Shopify handles a lot of the technical groundwork (sitemaps, canonical tags, mobile-friendly themes) but the fields that matter most, your titles, descriptions and page copy, are auto-filled rather than optimised. That part is on you.
How long until changes show in Google?
Typically a few weeks for Google to recrawl and reflect changes, longer for rankings to move. Resist the urge to judge a change after three days.
Should I fill in the link title box when adding links?
Usually not. Make the clickable text itself descriptive and leave the box blank. See above for why.
This is a lot of effort. Is it really worth it?
We believe so, yes. And as the search landscape shifts towards AI (think AI Overviews in a Google search, and searching directly in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and so on), good SEO helps your presence in AI searches, too.
Need help with Shopify SEO?
At Webcetera we help businesses get more from their Shopify stores, whether that's tightening up SEO settings, speeding things up or building from scratch. We're a Shopify Select Partner and this is our bread and butter. Get in touch or see what we do with Shopify.
