Shopify Technical SEO Audit: The 32 Checks I Run Before Anything Else

Most Shopify SEO advice you read online is content advice in a technical-SEO costume. This is the actual technical pass — the 32 checks I run before I'll write a single piece of content for a client.

Shopify is a particular SEO beast. It does some things very well (clean URLs, automatic XML sitemaps, native canonicals) and some things terribly (faceted nav indexing, pagination handling, duplicate content from collection sorts, search-engine-unfriendly variant URLs). A real technical audit accounts for both.

I run this checklist on every new Shopify engagement before I'll commit to a content or CRO plan. It usually takes 6–8 hours and surfaces 12–20 issues on the average store. Here it is, with the tools and target values.

Part 1: Crawl & indexing (checks 1–9)

1. robots.txt audit. Confirm /admin, /cart, /checkouts/, /collections/all are noindexed correctly. Shopify auto-generates these but I've seen apps clobber them.
2. XML sitemap reachability. /sitemap.xml should return 200, should be under 50MB, should be submitted to Search Console.
3. Search Console coverage report. "Excluded" pages count vs total. If excluded > 30%, you have a structural problem.
4. Indexed pages count via site: operator. Compare to product count. If indexed > products × 3, you have duplicate URL bloat from variants or filters.
5. Canonical tag audit. Every PDP should canonical to itself, not to the default variant. /collections/all/products/x and /products/x should both canonical to /products/x.
6. Pagination handling. ?page=2, ?page=3 should not self-canonical. Use rel="next"/"prev" or noindex paginated pages.
7. Faceted nav handling. /collections/x?filter.v.option.size=L type URLs should be noindexed. This is the single biggest Shopify SEO leak.
8. Internal search pages. /search?q=… should be noindexed. Often these end up indexed by accident.
9. 404 audit. Run a Screaming Frog crawl. Internal links pointing to 404s lose ranking signal and waste crawl budget.

Part 2: On-page SEO (checks 10–17)

1. Title tag uniqueness. Every page should have a unique title under 60 characters. Most Shopify themes default to "Product Name — Store Name" which is fine until you have 200 PDPs all trailing "— Brand Co."
2. Meta description coverage. Every page that gets organic traffic should have a custom meta description. Shopify defaults to the first 160 characters of body — that almost never makes sense.
3. H1 uniqueness. One H1 per page, matches the primary keyword for that page.
4. H2/H3 outline. No H4 without an H3, no H3 without an H2. Most themes break this.
5. Image alt text coverage. Every content image should have descriptive alt text. Run a crawl and report missing alts.
6. Internal linking depth. No important page should be more than 3 clicks from the homepage. Most Shopify stores have orphan collections and underlinked PDPs.
7. Anchor text diversity. Audit anchor text patterns. "Click here" and "learn more" tell Google nothing.
8. URL structure audit. /collections/category/products/product is the right pattern. Slug should match H1.

Part 3: Structured data (checks 18–23)

1. Product schema. Every PDP needs Product schema with offers, price, availability, brand, ratings. Most themes ship a broken version.
2. Organization schema. Homepage needs Organization with logo, name, sameAs (social profiles).
3. BreadcrumbList schema. Every page deeper than homepage needs breadcrumb schema.
4. WebSite schema with SearchAction. Enables the sitelinks search box in SERPs.
5. FAQ schema (where applicable). If your product has FAQs on the PDP, mark them up.
6. Validate everything in Google's Rich Results Test. If it doesn't pass there, Google won't render rich results.

Part 4: Performance (checks 24–28)

1. Core Web Vitals — field data via Search Console. LCP < 2.5s, CLS < 0.1, INP < 200ms.
2. Mobile usability errors. Search Console → Mobile Usability. Should be zero.
3. HTTPS everywhere. No mixed content warnings.
4. Image optimization audit. No PDP image over 200KB. Use Shopify's image_url filter with explicit widths.
5. Render-blocking resources. No render-blocking JS or CSS above the fold.

Part 5: International & advanced (checks 29–32)

1. hreflang tags (if multi-region). Every region-specific URL should have hreflang to all other regions including x-default.
2. Markets configuration audit. Shopify Markets should have correct domain or subfolder per region.
3. Currency switching SEO. /en-us/, /en-gb/, /en-au/ folders should be properly hreflang'd, not just JS-switched.
4. Server-side rendering check. Disable JavaScript in DevTools. Verify content still renders. Shopify themes that depend on JS for critical content lose ranking.

The tools I actually use

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider — full site crawl, every audit starts here
• Google Search Console — for real index data and Core Web Vitals field data
• Ahrefs / Semrush — backlink and competitor analysis
• Google Rich Results Test — structured data validation
• PageSpeed Insights + WebPageTest — performance
• Sitebulb — secondary crawler when Screaming Frog misses something

What the audit deliverable looks like

When I run this for a client, the deliverable is a 12–20 page document organized by impact: 'do today,' 'do this month,' 'roadmap.' Every issue has the specific URL or page, the recommended fix, and an effort estimate. The fixes themselves are typically a 2–4 week engineering sprint after the audit lands.

An audit without an implementation plan is just a list. The point of running these 32 checks is to know where to spend the next sprint, not to feel busy.

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If you'd rather not do this yourself

This is the work I do for clients. If you want it done properly, the relevant offer is Technical SEO Audit.

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