Shopify SEO Migration: Best Practices to Minimize Impact

Switching your existing store to Shopify? Use these Shopify SEO Migration best practices, you can save your hard-earned organic progress. 😄

Migrating your online store to a feature-rich platform like Shopify can be the best business decision you’ve ever made. From the ability to create visually appealing storefronts to access thousands of Shopify apps, there are plenty of reasons to migrate to Shopify.

However, platform migration is not always a smooth process, especially for those concerned with SEO.

But don’t worry, I’m here to help you with the Shopify SEO migration.

In this blog post, I will provide the best practices to follow when migrating to Shopify to protect your SEO. ✨

Table of Contents

• Why Migrate to Shopify?
• Shopify Migration: Why You Need to Follow SEO Best Practices?
• Shopify SEO Migration – Best Practices to Protect SEO
• Pre-Migration
  • Take a Backup of Your Old Store
  • Set Up Shopify Store
  • Go Global – Take Care of Hreflang Tags
  • Install Essential Shopify SEO Apps
  • Check Canonicals
  • Review Internal Links
  • Find The Best Timing for Migration
• Post-Migration
  • Set Up Google Search Console
  • Set Up Google Analytics 4
  • Submit Change Of Address Request In Google
  • Run Regular SEO Audits & Monitor 404s
  • Keep Your Old Store Active for At Least 2 Months
• Perform an SEO-friendly Shopify Migration

Why Migrate to Shopify?

Shopify is a leading eCommerce platform that is loved by millions of merchants around the world. The platform is easy-to-use and encompasses everything you need for your store’s success.

This renowned platform is being used by entrepreneurs in every industry — from fashion to books. It powers the online stores of top brands such as Red Bull, The Economist, and Hasbro.

Reasons? There are many! 🍀

Some of the top reasons to migrate to Shopify include ease of use, high scalability, beautiful storefronts, competitive pricing, high security, and more. It also comes with an extensive range of Shopify apps and themes that will never let you feel short of features. Now you should also know how to migrate to Shopify.

Shopify is a carbon-neutral eCommerce platform, which makes it a premier choice for entrepreneurs focused on doing sustainable business. 🌍

Shopify Migration: Why You Need to Follow SEO Best Practices?

Search engines like Google consider various factors to rank a website on the search engine ranking pages (SERPs). Here, the factors such as page experience, page speed, and website structure play a vital role. Remember SEO practices are one of the things from checklist before migrating to Shopify.

Search engine bots regularly crawl your website and keep their indexes updated with the latest changes. Change in these vital metrics during the website migration to Shopify can have a tumultuous effect on your website ranking.

In the worst case, bots may stop crawling and indexing your new website pages, and you may lose years of all your SEO efforts in no time.

According to Search Engine Journal, a poorly planned website migration can decrease organic traffic by 50% within a few weeks! ⚠

Regardless of the platform you migrate to, the fleeting impact of migration is unavoidable, but it can be minimized by following the right methods and strategies.

Shopify SEO Migration – Best Practices to Protect SEO

Migrating your store to Shopify is not a single-step procedure.

It is a strategic process that needs to be executed in different phases for a smooth transition — just like metamorphosis!

Therefore, I have divided the Shopify SEO migration strategies that you can follow before, and after the migration. ✨

• Pre-Migration
• Post-Migration

Pre-Migration

Ready to migrate your store to Shopify? 😃

Follow these SEO best practices before the actual migration, and during the staging phase, and save your online store from ranking drops. 📊

Take a Backup of Your Old Store

Backing up your old store is the first step of Shopify SEO migration.

Albeit the chances are very low, things may not happen as expected and you may lose your data during Shopify migration.

Can you afford that?

No one can. Therefore, it is essential to take a complete backup of your old store and keep it safe before proceeding with the Shopify Migration.

Use tools such as Screaming Frog to crawl your site pre-migration and export the report for future use.

This store backup may come in handy when in case you have messed up with the Shopify migration process.

It is also advisable to stock all the crucial SEO-related details of your old store before you migrate to Shopify, such as:

• Complete Website URLs
• Keyword Rankings
• Backlink Profile
• Sitemap (XML & HTML)
• 301 Redirects Data
• Analytics Data

Set Up Shopify Store

Migrate to Shopify and set up the store as it is an opportunity for you to have a fresh start.

Create and set up a new Shopify store, select your preferred plan, and you’re ready to go!

Below are a few things to consider during Shopify SEO migration.

• Install SEO-Friendly Theme: Use a Shopify theme that is fast-loading, responsive, and allows editing metadata. You can refer to our list of SEO-friendly Shopify themes.
• Use Clean Site Structure: Following a logical site structure is essential for SEO. The product & collection pages should be accessible from the homepage within three clicks.
• Product & Collection Pages: Import all the products to Shopify manually or using an app. Create new collections and categorize the products logically.
• Blog & Other Content: Migrate blog posts and other important pages to Shopify. Double-check the metadata and URLs not to avoid any SEO risk.
• Add Structured Data: It is time to add structured data or schema markup, which is insanely helpful in SEO for online stores. Also, add FAQ Schema to mark up frequently asked questions (FAQ) pages on a website
• Take Care of H1, H2, H3… Tags: After migrating your pages and products to Shopify, make sure they follow the ideal rule of one H1 tag per webpage, with other headers in a logical manner.

Go Global – Take Care of Hreflang Tags

Are you selling globally? If not, then it’s time to re-think about it. Shopify allows you to create multi-lingual stores for different regions under one account. The number one thing to consider while setting up multiple stores on Shopify is the hreflang tags.

Hreflang tags help search engines understand different variants of the pages for different locations and languages.

The general syntax of the hreflang tag is:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="langauge-location" href="target_url">It informs the search engine about the alternate version of the webpage in a different language for a specific location.

You can install the Multi‑Store Hreflang Tags Shopify app to do that.

Here’s an example of perfect implementation of hreflang tags in Shopify by Tentree:

This is an essential step in your Shopify platform migration to ensure a green score in international SEO.

Install Essential Shopify SEO Apps

Shopify comes with plenty of out-of-the-box features for search engine optimization.

But, you may still need to add some of the essential Shopify SEO apps while onboarding on this eCommerce platform.

Some of the recommended apps for your Shopify store are provided below:

• Yoast SEO for Shopify
• Automizely Page Builder
• SEO JSON‑LD Boost by Verge
• Fire AMP
• SEO Images King
• Schema Plus for SEO
• Tiny IMG SEO Image Optimizer

Use these apps to optimize your store and make it ready for search engine bots to hop on.

Check Canonicals

One of the biggest SEO issues with the Shopify platform is the duplicate product URLs through collection pages.

For example:

Products in Shopify can be accessed through multiple URLs:

• https://example.com/products/product_name (Direct Link)
• https://example.com/collections/collection_name/products/product_name (Link Present on the Collection Page)

Setting up canonicals lets you specify the pages that you want Google to consider for rankings among the duplicates.

During the Shopify SEO migration, check whether the pages containing collection in their URLs are canonicalized to the original product URL or not by inspecting the head section. The tag will look like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="target_url">

You can also use browser extensions such as MozBar to easily check the canonicals.

Similarly, the platform also auto-generates tag pages for the collections, which need to be canonicalized to the parent collection.

Open theme.liquid file, find:

<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" />

and place it with:

{% if template contains 'collection' %}
<link rel="canonical" href="{{ shop.url }}{{ collection.url }}" />
{% else %}
<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" />
{% endif %}

Review Internal Links

You also need to review the internal links in your website content as the URL structure changes.

Although the 301 redirects set up in the previous would save you, it is a better practice to replace the old links with fresh ones in the website content.

Find The Best Timing for Migration

Website downtime can be detrimental to your business, especially if you have regular customers visiting your site and placing orders. Therefore, website downtime during the Shopify migration can directly impact your sales and revenue.

Generally, no downtime platform migration is just a thing for fiction. However, its effects can be minimized by choosing the right time for migration. Choose the timeslot for Shopify migration when you are expecting the least traffic on your website.

Finally, connect your Shopify store to your old domain by changing the name server for the domain. But change domain name without losing SEO progress of your store.

Post-Migration

Follow these best SEO practices after connecting the domain to your Shopify store:

Set Up Google Search Console

Add the HTML verification file or the meta tags to your new Shopify store to re-verify the ownership.

The next step is to inform Google about the new URLs through sitemap and 301 redirections. By default, Shopify auto-generates an XML sitemap. Go to your search console account and submit a fresh sitemap of your Shopify store. Shopify has an insanely different site URL structure, and it is likely that you need to redirect the old URLs to new ones to avoid 404 errors.

Use the Screaming Frog report that we exported earlier, and import the website index in a sheet. And map the new URLs manually (one: one), and set up redirects in your store.

Double-check the 301 redirects using tools such as Screaming Frog.

Also, create new annotations in Google Search Console to track changes in your website performance after migration.

Similarly, you can also submit your new sitemap to Bing for crawling and indexing.

Note: If you are changing your domain, you may also need to submit a change of address request in Google Search Console.

Related Read: How to Add Google Search Console to Shopify?

Set Up Google Analytics 4

Now, its time to set up Google Analytics 4 in Shopify and track data.

You can follow this step-by-step guide for that: How to Set up Google Analytics 4 in Shopify.

Run Regular SEO Audits & Monitor 404s

Now, it’s time to perform an SEO audit and check if everything is in place. Run technical SEO checks and on-page audits to find and fix SEO issues in your newly set up Shopify store.

Also, keep monitoring the 404s in your Google Analytics 4 account regularly. To be on the safe side, it is also advisable to keep your old store active for at least 2 months from the date of migration to Shopify.

That’s a wrap-up! I hope these SEO best practices when migrating to Shopify are helpful! 🙌

Perform an SEO-friendly Shopify Migration

There is always a chance of messing up with SEO while re-platforming to Shopify.

No business owner can afford to lose their hard-earned SEO success overnight while migrating to Shopify. We are here to help you make a smooth transition to Shopify with assured maximum protection of your rankings. Our SEO experts and professional Shopify developers will migrate your store to Shopify with minimum downtime.