Expect BestShopify SEO sits in an unusual place. The platform does several things very well without being asked, and then imposes constraints you simply cannot remove. Knowing which category a problem falls into saves a great deal of wasted effort.
What Shopify gets right for you
Speed and security are handled. The hosting is fast, the infrastructure is reliable, SSL is standard and the platform is patched without you thinking about it. That is a meaningful head start over a neglected self-hosted store.
Sitemaps generate automatically. Canonical tags are set in most themes. Mobile rendering is generally sound out of the box. Structured data for products is usually present.
For a lot of store owners that means the technical basics are already covered, and the work belongs elsewhere.
The Shopify SEO constraints you cannot fix
The URL prefixes are fixed. Every product sits under /products/, every category under /collections/, every static page under /pages/. You cannot flatten that, and no app changes it. Accept it and move on, because it matters far less than people claim.
The bigger structural quirk is that a product reachable through several collections generates several URLs. Most themes canonicalise this correctly, but it is worth confirming yours does, and worth keeping your internal links pointing consistently at one version.
Blog URLs are similarly nested and similarly unchangeable.
Where the actual work is
Collection pages. These are the commercial pages and most stores leave them almost empty. A collection page with a genuine introduction explaining the range, the choices and who each option suits will outrank a bare grid of products every time. Most competitors have not bothered.
Product descriptions. If you sell products other shops also sell, the manufacturer description is on a hundred sites and ranks for none of them. Rewriting descriptions for your best sellers is slow, dull and one of the highest-return things available to a Shopify store.
Image handling. Descriptive file names, real alt text and sensible compression. Shopify serves images well, but it cannot write alt text for you and product photography is usually the heaviest thing on the page.
Internal linking. Related products, collections linking to each other, and blog content linking to the collections it supports. Shopify does almost none of this automatically.
The app problem
The most common cause of a slow Shopify store is apps. Each one adds scripts to every page, several of them load regardless of whether the page uses them, and stores accumulate apps the way drawers accumulate cables.
Audit them periodically. For each, ask whether it is earning its subscription and its weight. A store carrying eight apps where three would do is paying twice: once in fees and once in conversion, because speed and sales move together.
Content that suits a shop
Buying guides work better than news for retail. Somebody searching for how to choose between two things you sell is much closer to purchase than somebody reading an industry update.
Write those, link them to the relevant collections, and keep them updated as the range changes. That combination, a strong collection page supported by a guide that feeds it, is the pattern that tends to work.
What to do first
Check your canonicals are behaving, then write proper introductions for your top five collections, then rewrite descriptions for your best sellers, then audit the apps. In that order.
That sequence will do more than any app promising to optimise your store, and most of it is a few afternoons of unglamorous work rather than a project.
One thing worth checking before any of it: whether your store is accidentally hiding pages from search. Shopify generates collection and tag URLs generously, and themes sometimes noindex more than intended, or leave a password page live on a section nobody realised was gated. Confirm what is actually indexed before assuming the problem is content.
Our Shopify development work covers the technical side, and our ecommerce web design page explains how we approach stores generally.