Shopify is the best ecommerce platform we audit. It is also the most consistently misconfigured. Almost every Shopify store we look at has the same handful of fixable issues, and almost none of them require a developer to put right.
This is the same checklist we use internally for every Shopify audit we run. We have boiled it down into twelve checks you can complete in about thirty minutes, in priority order. The first six are the ones that move the needle. The last six are housekeeping.
What you needYour Shopify admin login, Google Search Console access, and a modern browser. That is it. No paid tools required.
The six checks that actually move rankings.
01 · Confirm one canonical domain.
Shopify gives you a .myshopify.com domain by default. If both versions are indexable, Google has to guess which one is real. Run site:yourdomain.com and site:yourbrand.myshopify.com in Google. If both return results, your real domain is not set as the only canonical. Fix it in Settings → Domains.
02 · Check your product schema.
Shopify themes vary wildly on this. Open any product page, view source, and search for "@type":"Product". You should see name, image, description, sku, offers, and ideally aggregateRating. If any are missing, you are leaving rich snippets on the table. The free Google Rich Results Test will confirm what Google actually parses.
03 · Audit collection page indexation.
Collections are often your highest converting organic landing pages. They are also where Shopify themes create the most duplicate content through filter URLs. In Search Console, go to Indexing → Pages. If you see hundreds of collection variants indexed, you have a faceted navigation problem.
04 · Check your title tags actually mention what you sell.
The default Shopify title is {product} | {store name}. That is almost never optimal. Your title should include the buying intent: brand, type, key spec, and ideally a UK or country modifier if you serve a specific market. Buy [Brand] [Product] in the UK · [Store] is a stronger pattern than the default.
05 · Look at your Core Web Vitals on category pages.
Open PageSpeed Insights and paste in your busiest collection URL. If LCP is above 2.5s on mobile, you have a real problem. The most common Shopify culprits are unoptimised hero images, third-party scripts loaded synchronously, and themes that ship every image at full resolution regardless of viewport.
06 · Confirm your sitemap actually contains your products.
Visit yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. You should see linked sitemap files for products, collections, pages, and blogs. Open the products sitemap and count. Does it match your live product count? If not, you have hidden products that Shopify is silently excluding from the sitemap, often because they are unpublished or assigned to no sales channels.
The six checks that are pure housekeeping.
07 · Set a meta description on your top 20 products.
Shopify will auto-generate one if you leave it blank. The auto-generated version is almost always worse than a thirty-word handwritten line. Start with the products that drive 80 percent of your revenue.
08 · Add alt text to product images.
Bulk edit through the Shopify admin or the CSV export. Alt text is an accessibility requirement, not just an SEO one. It is also a free ranking signal for Google Image search, which can be significant for visual product categories.
09 · Make sure your robots.txt is not blocking anything important.
Shopify generates this for you. As of 2021 you can override it with robots.txt.liquid. Check that nothing important is disallowed. The most common own-goal is blocking /collections/ after a botched migration.
10 · Submit your sitemap to Search Console.
If you have not already done this, do it now. Settings → Sitemaps → submit sitemap.xml. Google does find it on its own but submitting accelerates discovery and gives you an indexation diagnostic in the same screen.
11 · Set up Google Search Console alerts.
You want an email if any of your top-ranked pages drop out of the index. Settings → Users and permissions → Add user. Add yourself with full permission so notifications come through.
12 · Check your blog URLs are clean.
Shopify blog URLs default to /blogs/news/article-slug. The /blogs/news/ path is harmless but ugly. You cannot remove the path entirely without a custom solution, but you can at least rename "news" to something more meaningful for your store.
What to do with this list.
Work through them in order. Each one takes between 2 and 5 minutes. The whole audit fits in a focused half-hour block. The fixes themselves take longer, but at least you will know exactly what to do.
If you would rather not run the audit yourself, that is what we exist for. Our Shopify audit is the same framework, plus the items that need a tool to detect properly, plus a senior writeup explaining what to do first. Same checklist, no thirty minutes of your time, £79 flat.