Shopify does a few SEO jobs well out of the box and makes several others harder than they need to be. This is the order we work through on a growing store, which is roughly the order of return rather than the order of effort.

1. Fix the duplicate collection URLs first

Shopify serves the same product at more than one address. A product sitting in a collection is reachable at /products/item and at /collections/name/products/item. Left alone, that splits signals across two URLs for every product in every collection.

Most modern themes set the canonical correctly. Check yours by opening a product through a collection link and reading the canonical tag in the source. It should point at /products/item with no collection path. If it does not, that is a theme edit and it is worth doing before anything else.

2. Give collection pages something to rank with

A Shopify collection page is often a heading and a grid. There is nothing on it for a search engine to understand beyond the product titles.

Collections are usually your highest value pages, because they match how people search. Someone searching for running shoes is not looking for one shoe. Add a short introduction above the grid that says what is in the collection and who it suits, and a longer section below the grid for the detail. Two hundred useful words beats two thousand padded ones.

3. Rewrite the product titles that were written by a supplier

Supplier feeds produce titles like SKU-4471 Black Cotton Crew Neck. People search for black cotton t shirt. If the two do not meet, the page will not rank for the thing it sells.

Work through the products that already get impressions but few clicks. Search Console will show you which. Those are pages Google is already willing to show and people are choosing not to click.

4. Tidy the faceted navigation

Filters generate URLs. Colour, size and price combinations multiply quickly, and a crawler can spend its budget on thousands of near identical pages instead of the ones that matter.

Decide which filtered views deserve to be indexed. A colour or a brand often does, because people search that way. A price band almost never does. Everything else gets a noindex or a canonical back to the parent collection.

5. Speed, but only the parts that matter

Shopify hosting is fast. Themes and apps are what slow a store down. Every app you have ever trialled may still be injecting script into every page.

Audit the app list, remove what is not in use, and check whether the remaining ones load on every page or only where they are needed. That is usually a bigger win than compressing another image.

6. Then, and only then, write

Once the technical foundation holds, content compounds. Buying guides, comparisons and sizing explainers capture people weeks before they know which product they want, and those are the pages AI answer engines quote when someone asks which one to buy.

Doing this in the other order is the common mistake. Publishing onto a store with split canonicals and a crawl budget being eaten by filter URLs is paying for content that cannot perform.