The Shopify SEO checklist that is actually worth working through

Search “shopify seo checklist” and you get lists of 17, 25 and 50 items. They are mostly accurate. They are also mostly useless, because a checklist without an order is a to-do list where the item that doubles your revenue sits at number 34, below “add your store to Google Business Profile”, and you never get that far.

The problem is not that the advice is wrong. It is that the lists are written to be complete rather than to be worked through. Completeness is easy: name every knob the platform exposes. Ordering is hard, because it means having an opinion about which knobs matter, and that demotes some of the fifty items to “do not bother”.

This is the ordered version, from running Supplements Wise, an independent UK supplements store. Three tiers, worked top to bottom, plus a section listing the items we stopped doing and have not missed.

What should be at the top of a Shopify SEO checklist?

The four things that touch pages where money changes hands. If you do only this tier, you will have captured most of the available return.

1. Unique copy on your top twenty products. Manufacturer descriptions are the commonest store SEO failure we see, and the most expensive. If you sell a product forty other stores also sell, and you all pasted the same supplier paragraph, Google has no reason to pick you. Rewrite the top twenty by revenue in your own words, answering the questions customers actually ask before buying. Not all four hundred products. Twenty. The long tail can keep the supplier copy until the top of your catalogue is done.

2. Collection pages that target a real query and contain real text. Collection pages are the strongest commercial pages a Shopify store has, and most stores ship them as a bare grid with a one-line heading. Each important collection should target a query people search, “waterproof hiking jackets” rather than “Our Range”, and carry 150 to 300 words that genuinely help someone choose. This is the page type that earns most per hour spent on it, and it is routinely left empty.

3. Check you are not competing with yourself. Before you publish anything new, find the queries where two of your own pages are splitting the impressions. On a blog that costs you a position. On a store it costs you the collection page that had the add-to-cart buttons, which is why we wrote a separate guide to cannibalisation on Shopify. Do this before writing, not after, because the cheapest cannibalisation to fix is the kind that has not happened yet.

4. Confirm Google is actually indexing your money pages. Open Search Console, Pages report, and look at what is excluded. Stores routinely discover that a chunk of their catalogue sits under “Crawled, currently not indexed” while they have been busy optimising title tags. An unindexed page cannot rank no matter how good its meta description is. Fifteen minutes, and it occasionally changes everything.

Which Shopify SEO checklist items are actually theatre?

Roughly a third of the standard list. Naming them is the useful part of this article, because every hour spent on these is an hour not spent on tier one.

URL structure. Shopify puts /collections/ and /products/ in your paths and you cannot remove them. Every checklist mentions this and some suggest workarounds. Ignore it. No store has ever failed to rank because of the word “collections” in a URL. The same goes for the /blogs/news/ prefix on articles.

Variant URL duplicate content. Shopify canonicalises variant URLs to the parent product by default. This was a real issue years ago and is now handled by the platform. Checklists keep the item because checklists are copied from other checklists.

Chasing a green score in an SEO app. SEO apps score pages against a generic rubric that has no knowledge of what your competitors rank for. A 100 out of 100 on a page nobody searches for is a perfect score in a game nobody is playing. Our comparison of the Shopify SEO apps goes into which of them do genuinely useful work.

Keyword density. There is no target. Write about the thing, mention the thing, move on.

Resubmitting your sitemap. Shopify generates and updates it automatically. Submit it once. Google does not crawl faster because you pressed the button again.

Word count targets. Length is an output of covering the topic, not an input. A precise 900-word answer beats a padded 2,500-word one, and the padding is visible.

Domain authority. It is a third-party estimate, not a Google metric, and it moves too slowly to guide any weekly decision. Watch your own positions on your own queries instead.

Publishing frequency for its own sake. Three posts a week from a list of guessed keywords will underperform one post a week from your own search data. Volume without a brief is just cost.

What does the compounding half of the checklist look like?

Tier two is the work that does nothing in week one and most of everything by month six. It is a loop rather than a list, which is why it does not fit the checklist format well and gets reduced to “blog regularly” on most of the fifty-item lists.

5. Work a striking distance report weekly. Queries where you already rank at positions 5 to 20 with real impressions are the cheapest rankings available to you, because Google has already decided you are relevant. We keep a full walkthrough of the Search Console workflow, including the filters and the prioritisation. This report is the brief for everything downstream, and it is free.

6. Write articles for the informational queries where a product page is ranking. When Google ranks your product page at position 14 for a how-to query, it is telling you in your own data that it wants an article from you and has nothing better to offer. These are the highest-probability briefs a store has, and no generic keyword tool will ever surface them because they are specific to your store.

7. Refresh before you write new. An existing page that ranks at position 9 will usually reach page one faster from an update than a new page will from scratch, and it keeps its age and its links. Our own pattern has been consistent: refreshed pages moved within one to three weeks, while new articles took four to eight to settle.

8. Run the internal linking pass on every publish. Link to the new article from the two or three most relevant existing pages, and always from the product or collection page that was previously ranking for the query. Link out from the article to the products it should sell. Then, quarterly, list the pages with no internal links pointing in and fix them. On most stores that list is longer than the owner expects.

9. Watch what you published for six weeks. Climbing means leave it alone. Flat after four to six weeks means the content missed the intent and needs a second pass. A previously winning page slipping means investigate the same day. Without this step you never learn which of your habits work, so you keep performing all of them.

What about the technical items every other checklist leads with?

They belong in tier three, done once, then forgotten. Shopify’s technical defaults are genuinely fine, which is the part the agency checklists have a commercial reason to underplay.

10. Image file sizes. Compress before upload. A 4MB hero image is a real problem and a solved one.

11. Alt text that describes the image. Write what is in the picture, for the person using a screen reader. That is the whole item. Alt text stuffed with keywords helps nobody and reads as what it is.

12. Broken internal links. Stores accumulate these silently as products retire. Sweep quarterly.

13. Product schema. Most decent themes emit it. Check it once in Google’s Rich Results Test, fix it if broken, then leave it.

14. Title tags and meta descriptions on money pages. Write them to earn the click rather than to contain the keyword. Worth doing, worth roughly twenty minutes per important page, and worth nothing at all if the page underneath is duplicate supplier copy.

This tier is the entire content of some published Shopify SEO checklists, which is the inversion this article exists to correct.

How long does the whole checklist actually take?

Tier one is a week of concentrated work for a store with a few hundred products. Twenty product rewrites is the bulk of it, the collection page text is an afternoon, and the cannibalisation and indexing checks are an hour each.

Tier three is a day, once.

Tier two never finishes, which is the point. Two to four focused hours a week plus writing time is the sustainable version. The failure mode is not doing it badly, it is doing it for three weeks and stopping, because the value is cumulative and the graph tends to bend somewhere around week seven. We wrote up the full weekly loop as the working system behind a store that ranks, and the case study shows what it did to our own numbers over six months.

Where does software fit into this?

Honestly: nowhere in tier one, and nowhere in the judgement calls. Rewriting your twenty best products is your job, and deciding which collection to build out next quarter needs someone who knows the business.

What software takes off you is the repetitive half of tier two. Pulling the striking distance report every week, checking every proposed article against your existing pages before it gets written, and finding the orphans is exactly the data work that should not be done by a person with a spreadsheet at 11pm. That is what we built QueryClimb to do, split across Search Insights for the signal, the Content Calendar for the monthly plan, the Blog Writer for supervised drafting and Wise Links for the linking pass. The pricing is on its own page, and the free audit runs the signal and classification steps on your own store so you can see your list before paying for anything.

The checklist above works with nothing but Search Console, a text editor and the discipline to keep going. It is the same checklist either way. The tool buys back the hours.

Frequently asked questions

What is the first thing to do for SEO on a new Shopify store?

Write unique descriptions for the products you most want to sell, and give your main collection pages a query to target and a few hundred words of real text. Everything else on any checklist is downstream of having pages that deserve to rank. On a brand new store, also confirm the password page is off and Search Console is verified.

Is Shopify good for SEO?

Yes, with one caveat. The technical foundations are sound out of the box: canonical tags, automatic sitemaps, editable titles and metas, fast hosting. The caveat is that Shopify makes it very easy to publish hundreds of near-identical product pages, so the platform’s failure mode is duplicate content at scale rather than technical breakage.

How many SEO items should I actually work on at once?

One tier at a time, top down. The reason fifty-item checklists fail is that they invite you to sample from the middle, and the middle is where the low-impact items live. Finish tier one before you touch anything else, even though tier three is more satisfying because you can complete it in an afternoon.

Do I need an SEO app for my Shopify store?

Not for anything in tier one. Apps are useful for bulk editing metadata, monitoring broken links and finding technical regressions, which is real but modest value. No app writes your product descriptions or decides which collection deserves the effort this quarter.

How long before a Shopify SEO checklist shows results?

Tier one work on pages that already get impressions can move within a few weeks. New articles typically take four to eight weeks to settle, longer on a young domain. The compounding effect of tier two, where clusters and internal links lift each other, runs on a two-to-four-quarter timescale. Judge nothing in the first fortnight.