Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of leading a masterclass at BrightonSEO, where I shared practical insights into optimising Shopify stores for e-commerce SEO. With Shopify’s rigid URL structures and some platform-specific quirks, SEO success often comes down to smart workarounds and meticulous attention to technical detail.

I had fun walking through some real-world examples, quick wins and some deeper strategies, backed up by case studies from real client projects.

If you missed the talk, here’s a summary of the key findings and a few extra tips you can apply to your Shopify store.

A core theme of the session was Shopify’s URL structure, which differs significantly from more traditional e-commerce platforms.

Rather than embedding category context into URLs, Shopify separates products and collections, meaning pages like “/products/nike-running-shoes” provide little semantic information for Google or users.

One of the most effective ways to improve this is by building custom breadcrumbs through metafields. This approach enhances internal linking, improves user experience, and gives clearer category signals to search engines, regardless of how visitors arrive at a product page.

Canonical URL handling is another important area of focus for Shopify. Although Shopify assigns canonical tags to product pages, Google does not always honour them. To strengthen control over indexing, it’s recommended to minimise the number of internal links to variant URLs, clean up sitemap entries, and use targeted robots.txt rules to disallow unnecessary crawling.

When we’ve done this for clients – refining product URL structures and optimising internal linking resulted in unwanted variant URLs, which previously accounted for 14% of product page views, were reduced to just 0.1%. IN this specific case, the client also witnesses:

• A 24% increase in organic revenue from product pages
• A 40% reduction in ‘crawled but not indexed’ pages.

The masterclass also covered how smaller e-commerce teams can manage Google Search Console. Regularly monitoring for crawl errors, duplicate content issues, soft 404s, and indexing patterns helps maintain a healthier site footprint in Google’s eyes.

I also ran through content quality issues and mainly how ‘thin content’ on collection or product pages can hold back overall site performance. To address this, I outlined a clear process: auditing pages systematically, then deciding whether to keep, improve, consolidate, noindex, or delete based on their SEO value. Simple techniques using site sitemaps, Screaming Frog, and even Shopify metafield automation can significantly streamline this process.

Additional advice included strengthening E.E.A.T signals through author profiles, detailed product filters, feature comparisons, and user-generated content (UGC).

Key Takeaways

• Enhance Shopify’s limited URL structure with custom breadcrumbs and cleaner internal linking.
• Guide Google’s indexing by reducing variant URLs, cleaning up sitemaps, and refining robots.txt files.
• Audit and manage content quality to address thin pages, zero-result searches, and keyword cannibalisation.
• Invest in E.E.A.T-focused features like author profiles, interactive content, and detailed filters.
• Use a VPN set the the US (even when that isn’t your target area) for deeper SEO hints.
• Small technical improvements, smarter site structures, and a focus on helpful content can together drive significant growth in organic traffic and revenue for Shopify stores.