Shopify ranks fine when it's set up properly. The problem is almost never the platform itself, it's app bloat, thin collection pages, and duplicate content from tags nobody's looked at in two years.
Get my free audit See how it works| Typical agency | Me | |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly rate | £150+ | £60 |
| Shopify-specific experience | Often generalist | Deep, hands-on across many stores |
| Who does the work | Often a junior, account passed around | Always me, senior level |
A handful of things matter more than the rest.
Uninstalling an app rarely removes all its code. Orphaned scripts and metafields keep loading long after the app is gone, and that's usually the real reason a "lightweight" theme still loads slowly.
Shopify's collection tagging can quietly generate dozens of near-identical URLs. Left unmanaged, this splits ranking signal across pages competing with each other instead of with competitors.
A collection page with just a grid of products and no genuine content underneath it is a missed opportunity, and often outranked by competitors who bothered to write something real.
Four steps. No obligation until step four.
15 minutes on your store, your goals, and whether this is genuinely worth pursuing.
A full technical and content audit benchmarked against your closest competitors.
I explain exactly what I found and what I'd tackle first, in plain English.
3-month minimum, then month to month.
A full audit of your Shopify store's technical setup, collection structure, and product pages, benchmarked against your closest competitors.
Technical fixes, collection and product page work, content, and reporting you can actually understand.
Shopify ranks perfectly well when it's set up properly. The platform's own limitations, like the fixed /products/ and /collections/ URL structure, rarely matter as much as basic execution: thin product descriptions, slow themes weighed down by apps, and duplicate content from tag-based collections.
Uninstalling an app rarely removes all of its code. Many apps leave behind script tags, unused liquid snippets, or orphaned metafields that keep loading in the background. A proper technical audit checks the actual rendered page weight and script execution, not just the apps list in your admin.
No. Standard Shopify plans support everything genuinely required for strong SEO: custom meta titles and descriptions, a full sitemap, redirect management, and an editable robots.txt.liquid file. Shopify Plus mainly adds URL structure flexibility, which matters less than most people assume.
Usually a mix of canonical tags pointing to the primary collection URL, noindexing genuinely low-value tag combinations, and consolidating near-duplicate collections where the search demand doesn't justify separate pages.