Migrating to Shopify: 3 Things That Could Impact Your SEO
So you’re considering switching to Shopify or Shopify Plus. Great decision! Shopify is one of the top ecommerce platforms for a reason: it’s visually appealing, easy to use, excellent for mobile users, boasts wonderful customization abilities and offers reliable infrastructure.
That said, you may have read a few horror stories about ecommerce sites experiencing huge drops in organic traffic after migrating to Shopify. Or worse—maybe you have already replatformed, and now you’re dealing with an ecommerce SEO disaster of your own. Yikes!
Losing Traffic After Switching to Shopify? Here’s Why
Watching your website slide off the first page of Google, your traffic nosedive and your sales tank is a terrible feeling. Whether you are trying to prevent this from happening or are looking for immediate assistance, we have some important advice to share: don’t panic!
The fact is, some ecommerce websites do lose sales after migrating to Shopify—but that doesn’t mean it is a bad idea to replatform. It’s actually quite common to see a drop in traffic after any ecommerce site migration.
Why? Website migrations are among the most difficult technical processes to navigate, even with proper planning. Search engines crawl your site regularly in order to index each page. When your site URLs change between crawls, it has the potential to disrupt your rankings.
Broken links, duplicate content, and other crawling and indexing issues can all cause your organic traffic and sales to plummet. Many replatforming strategies do not properly account for all of these potential SEO problems, which can lead to devastating results. Changing your ecommerce site design during the migration can also affect your site’s SEO as well as impact your conversion rate.
The good news? With a bit of advance planning, it is entirely possible to prevent (or clean up) this type of post-migration SEO mess. Keep reading to learn about three common SEO issues online retailers face when migrating to Shopify, plus helpful tips for protecting your traffic.
1. Different Folder URL Structure
One of the first things you may notice when switching to Shopify is that categories now live under a folder titled “/collections” and products live under a folder titled “/products.” Additionally, blog pages are housed under “/blogs/news” while the folder “/pages” applies to all other non-content pages (HTML sitemap, shipping, privacy policy, account, etc).
Shopify’s folder URL structure is likely different from your old site, which means a lot of your URLs will be changing during the migration process. As you might have guessed, this creates the potential for things to go wrong.
When replatforming your ecommerce site, it is critically important to 301 redirect your old URLs to the new ones. If you don’t, your new site won’t benefit from all of that hard-earned organic traffic you spent years building up on your old website. This could result in dropping off the first page of Google for one of your primary keywords, along with seeing a significant drop in traffic, sales and revenue.
2. Robots.txt
An ecommerce robots.txt file is created to tell Google and other search engine robots how to crawl your site, generally by indicating specific URLs that should be ignored.
On your old site, you may have had a custom robots.txt file that effectively hid certain pages from the search engines—for example, advanced faceted navigation (used by shoppers to filter through products on your site). This is useful because it helps more essential pages rank higher in the search engine results.
With Shopify, you cannot edit your robots.txt files. This is not really an issue, as Shopify’s URL structure prevents most of the crawling and indexing problems that a robots.txt file would be used to fix in the first place. Additionally, many online retailers prefer the simplicity of having their robots.txt files handled automatically by Shopify.
However, some webmasters are caught off guard by the fact that they can no longer modify their robots.txt files. This is something you should be aware of and plan for when migrating to Shopify Plus or Shopify.
3. XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is an important SEO tool that can help Google quickly locate and crawl your essential webpages; think of it as a roadmap for search engines that directs them towards those harder-to-find pages that may not have any internal links pointing to them.
When you have duplicate, noindex, or other unusual URLs in your XML sitemap, it can confuse the search engines as to which URLs are important to crawl. Ultimately, this can negatively affect your website’s overall SEO health
Like the robots.txt, your XML sitemap isn’t able to be edited by default in Shopify. Luckily, there is a low-cost plugin that will give you full control over your Shopify XML sitemap, called Sitemap & NoIndex Manager.
This feature offers an affordable and easy-to-use solution, but it’s important to know about ahead of time—especially if you are in the process of calculating your total monthly costs on the Shopify platform.
Protect Your Traffic with Ecommerce SEO Migration Services
In addition to these three key elements that can affect your ecommerce site’s SEO, there are many other factors to consider when switching to Shopify, as our Shopify experts covered in this article. If you are losing traffic and sales after migrating to Shopify, your best course of action is a comprehensive site audit to uncover any technical or content SEO issues that could be impacting your rankings.
Before, during, or after an ecommerce site migration, it is important to partner with qualified ecommerce SEO experts who understand the ins and outs of your new ecommerce platform. Whether you are currently in the planning stage or have already switched to Shopify, the organic search experts at Whitecap SEO can help your organization diagnose and fix any issues.
Did your organic traffic and sales drop after replatforming to Shopify? Our team of SEO experts can help get you back on track. The sooner you involve us in the project, the better your results will be. Contact us today for more information.
Planning to migrate to Shopify soon? For more tips and advice, read our roundup of 37 Shopify experts who share their best advice for ecommerce shops looking to migrate platforms to Shopify.