The Shopify SEO checklist: what to fix first, what to fix next, and what to skip

A store with 3,000 products. Every product title pulled straight from the product name. Every meta description blank, or auto-filled with the first sentence of the product description. Not one page had been touched for SEO — not because the owner didn’t care, but because nobody had ever told them where to start.

That’s the real problem with Shopify SEO checklists. There’s no shortage of them. Search the term and you’ll find lists with 15 items, 30 items, 50 items — all formatted the same way, all with equal visual weight, all giving you the same implicit message: everything matters equally. That’s not true, and treating it like it is guarantees you’ll either do nothing (paralysed by the length of the list) or waste time on low-impact fixes while the high-impact ones sit untouched.

This checklist works differently. Three tiers: what to fix in the next hour, what to fix this weekend, and what to fix once the basics are solid. Plus one item the standard advice tells you to fix that you should leave alone.

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Why most Shopify stores have SEO problems they don’t know about

The store looked fine from the outside. Products were live, pages were loading, Google could crawl everything. No obvious errors. But “crawlable” and “optimised” are not the same thing.

Two problems show up on almost every Shopify store, and both are invisible to the merchant until someone points them out.

The first: many common Shopify themes use your logo as the H1 — the single most important heading on the page. The logo is an image, not text, and usually has no alt text and a filename like logo.png. As far as Google is concerned, your store has no H1. The most important on-page relevance signal is a blank.

The second: merchants write product copy the way an owner thinks about their product — the story behind it, what makes it special, the features they’re proud of. That’s not what a customer types into Google. A customer types “women’s waterproof hiking boots size 8.” If your copy doesn’t match that language, you won’t match that search.

Both are fixable. And neither requires a developer.

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The Shopify SEO checklist, ranked by impact

Tier 1 — Fix these first (under an hour, highest ROI)

1. Meta titles

Your meta title is what appears as the clickable headline in Google results. It’s the single highest-impact on-page SEO signal, and it’s wrong on almost every store.

The default Shopify format — “Product Name | Store Name” — is a directory entry, not a search result. It tells Google what the product is called. It doesn’t tell Google what problem it solves or what a customer actually types.

The fix is to write for the searcher, not for yourself as the store owner. “Women’s Waterproof Hiking Boots — Lightweight, Size 5–12 | TrailCo” ranks. “Summit Boot | TrailCo” doesn’t.

Stores with large catalogues can enrich every meta title at once — adding keyword context, a location, or a category descriptor around the product name — without editing pages one by one. The 3,000-product store mentioned above did exactly that using Plug In SEO — every product went from a bare default to a title with keyword context, in one session.

For deeper guidance on individual product pages, see the complete product page SEO guide for Shopify.

2. Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions don’t directly affect your Google ranking, but they control click-through rate — how many people actually click your result when it shows up.

A blank meta description means Google generates one for you, usually pulling a random sentence from the page. You lose control of the message, and the result is often generic or out of context.

Aim for 150–160 characters. Include what the product is, one specific detail, and a reason to click. “Free UK shipping” or “in stock now” works. “Discover our beautiful range” doesn’t.

3. Schema markup (structured data)

Schema is the structured data that tells Google and AI engines exactly what your pages contain — the product name, price, availability, ratings. Without it, Google has to guess.

It also determines whether your content gets cited by AI search tools. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity to recommend a product category, the pages it pulls from have clean, structured data. Stores without schema are harder to cite.

The FAQPage schema type specifically captures People Also Ask boxes in Google results — additional visibility on top of your organic ranking.

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Tier 2 — Fix next (a few hours)

4. Fix your H1

Open your Shopify store. Right-click the page → Inspect. Look for the <h1> tag. On many common Shopify themes, it wraps the logo — an image element, usually with no alt text and a filename like logo.png.

Google reads your H1 as the primary relevance signal for the page. If it’s an image, you have no H1 signal. Fix this in your theme settings: make sure the H1 on collection and product pages is the page title (text), not the logo image. Then rename your logo file to something descriptive (e.g., trailco-outdoor-gear-logo.png) and add matching alt text.

Most merchants have never looked at this. Most have the same problem.

5. Image alt text

Google can’t see images. It reads the alt text attribute to understand what the image shows. Every product image with empty alt text — or the default IMG_4521.jpg — is invisible to image search.

For product images: describe what’s in the photo. “Women’s waterproof hiking boot in olive green, side view” is useful. “Product image 3” is not.

This compounds at scale. A store with 500 products and 4 images each has 2,000 opportunities to signal relevance. Most have 2,000 blanks. Plug In SEO scans your entire store and flags every missing or weak alt text — so you know exactly what to fix and where.

6. Broken links

Every time you discontinue a product, hide a collection, or change a URL, the old link becomes a dead end — a 404 error. One or two doesn’t matter. Fifty does.

Broken links waste Google’s crawl budget (time the crawler spends on your store). They also send customers to an error page mid-purchase, which kills conversion.

Find them with an SEO audit tool. For each one, set up a 301 redirect to the nearest live equivalent — the parent collection, or the closest replacement product. Don’t leave 404s sitting. They compound over time, especially for stores with high product churn.

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Tier 3 — When the basics are solid

7. Collection page copy

Collection pages are your highest-ranking opportunity. When someone searches “women’s summer dresses” or “men’s waterproof jackets,” they’re looking for a collection, not a single product. Google ranks collection pages for those queries.

Most Shopify stores have zero text on collection pages — just a grid of products. Add 100–150 words of keyword-relevant copy above or below the grid. It doesn’t need to be long. It needs to tell Google what the page is about in plain, searchable language.

8. Internal links

Every blog post that covers a topic related to a collection should link to that collection. Every collection should link to related collections. Internal links pass relevance signals between pages and help Google discover your full catalogue.

Shopify’s default structure creates isolated pages. Internal links connect them. This is especially important for new products and pages that haven’t earned external links yet. See how to build Shopify SEO that compounds over time for the full internal linking approach.

9. Google Search Console

Set it up if you haven’t. Verify your domain, submit your sitemap (Shopify generates it automatically at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml), and check the Coverage report once a month.

GSC tells you which pages Google has indexed, which it hasn’t, and which have errors. You can’t fix crawling and indexing problems you don’t know about. It’s free and it’s the closest thing to a direct line to what Google sees on your store. Once you’re set up, keyword research is the next lever — finding the terms your customers actually search for, not just what you assume they’d type.

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What to skip (for most stores)

URLs with “copy” in them

Shopify sometimes appends -copy or -1 to URLs when products are duplicated in the admin. The standard advice is to fix these — change the URL to something clean.

Don’t. Not unless your store is brand new with zero traffic.

Changing a URL breaks the old link for any external site that’s linked to it, any Google result that has it indexed, and any bookmark a customer has saved. You need a 301 redirect to prevent a 404. If the page has any traffic or backlinks, the redirect means you’re hoping Google passes the ranking signal through — which it usually does, but not always, and not immediately.

The risk is greater than the cosmetic improvement. Leave -copy URLs alone unless the SEO cost of the messy URL is provably higher than the cost of the redirect.

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The 3,000-product store at the start of this post had never touched their SEO. In one session using Plug In SEO, they enriched the meta titles across every product in their catalogue and added schema markup to every product page. No developer. No manual editing. One afternoon.

Plug In SEO covers the full Tier 1 and Tier 2 checklist:

• Meta title and description editor — add keyword context around your product names across your full catalogue at once
• Schema markup — Product, FAQPage, Organization, and BreadcrumbList added automatically
• Broken link scanner — finds 404s with suggested redirect destinations
• Image alt text audit — flags every missing or weak alt text so you know what to fix

Want an expert to run through the checklist for your specific store? Quick Start Service → One call, everything fixed, no retainer.