Shopify technical SEO audit: what to check

Most Shopify stores have three or four technical problems quietly costing them traffic, and they're the same three or four. This is the audit I run, in the order that finds things fastest.

1. Indexation: how many pages does Google have?

Search Console → Pages. Compare indexed pages against your real count of products, collections, pages and articles.

• Far more indexed than you have? Something is generating URLs — filtered collection parameters, tag pages, or a badly configured app. See duplicate content.
• Far fewer? Pages aren't being discovered or are being excluded. Check the exclusion reasons; they're specific.

Two minutes, and it's the check that most often reveals something structural.

2. Canonicals

View source on:

• A product reached from a collection — canonical should be /products/handle, not the collection-scoped URL.
• A filtered collection URL — canonical should be the unfiltered collection.
• Page 2 of a collection — should canonicalise to itself, not page 1.

The first is a theme bug when it's wrong, and it's worth checking on any theme you inherit.

3. Redirects

Crawl your site and check for:

• 404s with inbound links or historic traffic. These are redirects you're missing.
• Redirect chains — anything taking two hops.
• Redirects to 404s, which is worse than either alternative.

If the store has been replatformed or restructured, this is where the damage usually is — redirect mapping and URL redirects.

4. Titles and meta descriptions

Crawl and sort. You're looking for:

• Missing or duplicate titles across products and collections.
• Titles over about 60 characters, truncated in results.
• Missing meta descriptions, where Shopify's default is being used.
• Collections with no description on the page at all — collection page SEO.

Sort by traffic and fix the top hundred rather than all of them.

5. Duplicate product descriptions

Take five product descriptions and search an exact phrase from each in quotes. If fifty other retailers have the same text, that's your biggest single opportunity and it's an editorial one — product page SEO.

6. Structured data

Run a product, a collection, an article and the homepage through Google's Rich Results Test. Look for:

• Missing or stale price and availability.
• Two conflicting Product blocks — one from the theme, one from an app. Common once an SEO app is installed.
• Review markup for reviews not on the page.

Details in structured data.

7. Speed, with field data

Lab tools are for iterating; field data is what Google ranks on. Check Core Web Vitals in Search Console for your key templates, on mobile.

If LCP is poor, it's nearly always the hero or first product image — wrong size, or lazy-loaded when it shouldn't be. The speed audit and the theme checklist.

8. Internal linking

Crawl and look at:

• Orphan pages — products or collections nothing links to. On a large catalogue there are always some.
• Click depth. Anything more than three clicks from the homepage is under-served.
• Anchor text. "Shop now" everywhere tells search engines nothing; "Outdoor dining chairs" does.

9. Hreflang, if multi-market

Verify it exists, is reciprocal, and uses correct codes. Missing or broken hreflang means your language versions compete with each other, and it's the most common failure on multi-market stores — localisation.

10. The small ones

• Sitemap submitted and returning 200.

• robots.txt — Shopify's default is fine. If someone has edited it, check what they blocked.
• Sitemap submitted and returning 200.
• HTTPS on apex and www, with one redirecting to the other.
• A styled 404 that links somewhere useful.
• No password page left on.

What to do with the findings

Sort by traffic at risk, not by how technical they look. In my experience the ranked order is almost always:

1. Missing redirects after a relaunch.
2. Duplicate manufacturer descriptions.
3. Collection pages with no content.
4. Filtered URLs eating crawl budget.
5. LCP on mobile.

Fix those five and most stores have done the technical SEO that matters.

A technical audit takes an afternoon and usually finds one thing that has been costing traffic for a year. The tools are free; the missing part is somebody looking.