The Ultimate Shopify SEO Guide

First post here on IN, so go easy on me :)

If you'd ask 100 SEOs what they think about Shopify, I'm confident over 90% will say it's shit.

This 90% wants full control over the platform (which isn't possible since it's a managed platform) and don't have up-to-date knowledge of the latest abilities of the platform.

I was done hearing about how bad the platform was, so I decided to set up a test environment and set out to configure it like I would configure WooCommerce or Magento.

I went through all the usual suspects, like defining titles, meta descriptions, headings, redirects, managing navigation, XML sitemaps, optimizing images, implementing structured data and so on.

And guess what I found?

You can do 95% of the things you can do on any platform that you can fully control and I didn't find any big showstoppers.

Sure, the platform has its quirks but doesn't every platform? And besides, Shopify's quirks won't prevent you from ranking. Truth be told, there are two issues I found that aren't easy to solve:

Implementing advanced faceted navigation (reason: you may need to adjust the robots.txt, which you can't out of the box but there are work-arounds and Shopify's SEO lead is also gathering input to build his case internally to make it manageable)
Internationalization: but Shopify is making a lot of progress on this front, for instance by rolling out international domains and an extension to this which followed shortly after.

For those wanting to push their Shopify store to its limits, I documented my entire journey in this guide. It includes code examples, expert best practices and recommended apps.

I'm sure a lot of you are on the Shopify platform, so I'm curious: is there anything you're struggling with on the SEO side of things on Shopify that I may be able to help with / give you pointers on?

Not an AMA, but happy to answer any questions you have!

TL;DR: wrote an in-depth guide on Shopify SEO. Happy to answer any questions you have about improving your rankings!