What belongs on a Shopify SEO checklist?

What are the ten checks, at a glance?

Which SEO basics should every Shopify store have?

The checks above find where sales go missing. These are the on-page basics every Shopify store should also have in place, and where to set each one, according to Shopify's and Google's own help pages.

These basics matter, but they are rarely the whole story. On the store in the case study, the biggest changes came from the checks that go past on-page SEO: getting the best products onto Google and getting email to reach people. Sales from Google went from $285 to $8,668, and sales from email from $982 to $12,508, comparing the slowest 30 days before the work with the best 30 days after.

What belongs on the checklist for each type of page?

The table above covers settings every page shares. Each type of page also has a job of its own. These are the checks for each one, with where to make the change in Shopify.

Home page

• A title and meta description written for the store as a whole. Set them in Online Store, then Preferences, in the Social sharing image and SEO section.
• The first lines say plainly what you sell and who it is for, using the words buyers search.
• Links to your main collections, so shoppers and crawlers reach them in one click.
• A social sharing image, set in the same Preferences section, so links to the store look right when shared.

Collection pages

• One collection for each way buyers actually search: by use, by size, by material or by occasion.
• A description of its own. Shopify's guidance is at least 250 words of descriptive text on every page.
• A title and meta description in the Search engine listing section that name what the collection holds.
• Alt text on the collection's featured image: open the collection, then Update, then Edit image.
• A link from the menu or the home page. A collection nobody links to is hard for Google to find.
• Filtered and sorted versions left alone. Google is supposed to treat them as copies of the main collection.

Product pages

• A product title with the words buyers use. Shopify turns the title into the page's main heading.
• Your own description, not the manufacturer's. Shopify warns that copied text may already be on other websites.
• The details buyers ask about, written out in the description: size, material, weight, fit, care and shipping time. Detail that only lives inside a size or color menu is easy to miss.
• Alt text on every image that says what the image shows.
• Price and availability that match what Google shows in the free listings.
• Published to the Google & YouTube channel, so the product can appear in Google's free listings.

Blog posts and pages

• One question answered per post, in the words buyers use to ask it.
• Enough to answer it well. Shopify's guidance is at least 500 words for informational pages and blog posts.
• Links from the post to the products or collections it is about.
• A title and meta description, set for a page in Online Store, then Pages, under Edit website SEO.

What goes on a technical SEO checklist for Shopify?

Shopify handles more of the technical side than most platforms, so the technical list for a Shopify store is short. These are the items worth checking once, and then again after any big change.

• The store is public. Google cannot read the sitemap of a store in private mode.
• One main domain. If you own more than one domain and are not using them for different countries, Shopify says to redirect them all to your primary domain.
• The default robots.txt file is left alone unless there is a specific reason to change it. Shopify calls its default file optimal for SEO, and warns that a wrong edit can cost a store all of its search traffic.
• Broken links are redirected. In Shopify, a redirect only works from an address that shows a Page not found error, and a store can have up to 100,000 redirects.
• The Page indexing report in Google Search Console is checked each month, so a product or collection that drops out of Google is caught early.
• The sitemap is submitted once in Google Search Console. Shopify keeps it up to date on its own after that.

How do you find the keywords your buyers use?

You do not need a paid tool to start. The best keyword list for a store that already sells is sitting in two free reports and in Google itself.

1. In Shopify, open Analytics, then Reports, then Searches by search query. These are the words shoppers type into your own store's search box.
2. In Google Search Console, open Performance, then Search results, and sort the Queries tab by Impressions. These are the searches Google already shows your store for.
3. Type your main product words into Google and note the suggestions that appear as you type, and the questions under People also ask.
4. Give each phrase one page: a collection for broad searches, a product page for a specific product, a blog post for a question.
5. Use the phrase in the four places Shopify names for keywords: the page title, the meta description, the image alt text and the words on the page.
6. Check again in a few weeks. Google says some changes show up in a few hours and others can take several months.

What if you sell in specific cities?

Stores that deliver to certain cities, or let customers pick up, have a second way to be found: local searches, including the ones that end in “near me.”

• A Google Business Profile can put the store on Google Maps and in local results. It is for businesses with a storefront or a service area. Google says a rented mailing address with nobody working there is not eligible.
• City pages only where there is something real to say: delivery days, pickup points, or what customers in that city order. Google's spam policies name pages aimed at different cities that all funnel visitors to one page as doorway abuse.
• Local searches tracked by city. Rankings in one city can differ from rankings in the next, so check from the cities you actually serve.

On the store in the case study, six city pages went live in August 2026. On September 11, 2026, 170 of 246 “near me” searches checked in its target metro showed the store on page one of Google.

Do you need an SEO app for Shopify?

Not to start. Shopify builds in the basics: the sitemap, the robots.txt file, and fields for titles, descriptions, URL handles and alt text. An app earns its place when there is a lot of repetitive work, such as writing alt text for hundreds of images. Shopify itself suggests a third-party app when a store needs a large number of redirects.

No app can publish your products to Google's free listings for you, get an email sequence sending to the whole list, or tell you which channel really paid. Those are the checks higher on this page.

What about links from other sites?

Links from other websites still help Google decide what to trust. Buying them is another matter: Google's spam policies list buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam. This checklist, and the work behind it, does not include link building. The links worth having come from being worth mentioning, by suppliers, local press and customers who link on their own.

What should you do with what you find?

If a check turns something up, that is where your traffic is leaking sales. Start with the one nearest the top, because the early checks are the ones where the answer is certain and the fix is known. This is the first stage of The Traffic to Sales Method.

Would you rather have it done for you?

The checks on this page are the do-it-yourself version. When I run the Lost Sales Check, I log in to your accounts and read Shopify, Klaviyo, Google Search Console, GA4 and Google Merchant Center together. Then I fix what I find, starting with the biggest dollar amounts. That is the Shopify store audit.