Blog
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What you cannot change in Shopify URLs, and why it does not matter
TL;DR Shopify forces /products/ and /collections/ into your URLs and will not let you remove them. Clients are told constantly that this is holding them back. It is not. The cost is cosmetic and the cost of changing it would not be. This post exists to stop you spending money on it. Shopify forces /products/,…
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Collections are your category pages, and most of them are grids
TL;DR On a Shopify store the collection page has the best chance of ranking, and on most stores it is a grid of products with a heading above it and nothing else. That is the biggest structural miss I find. It is not a word count problem. Nobody ever decided the collection was a page.…
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Shopify filters and the crawl paths nobody chose
TL;DR Every filter you switch on in a Shopify collection is a URL generator, and customers can select more than one at a time. Nobody decides this. Most of those URLs never get indexed, which is the system working. The real costs are dilution and a Search Console report too noisy to read. Every filter…
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Every Shopify product has two URLs. That is usually fine.
TL;DR Every Shopify product sits at two URLs, and on a store with twenty collections one product can have twenty-one. This gets found in a crawl, panic follows, and somebody proposes a project. No project is needed. The canonical already handles it. Check yours survived the theme, then fix the internal links. Open any Shopify…
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Service area businesses: drawing an area you can actually rank in
TL;DR If you go to the customer, Google lets you hide your address and declare a service area instead. It is the right setting for those businesses, and people draw the area far too big. A service area is a claim about where you work, not a fact about where you are. If you go…
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The footer that linked to somebody else’s business
TL;DR On a med spa audit the footer address, the contact page address and the Instagram icon all belonged to a different company. Nobody had noticed, because nobody reads their own footer. That is not a NAP error. It is the site telling everyone who arrives that you are somebody else. On a med spa…
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Why you cannot rank across a whole city
TL;DR The request arrives in the same words every time: we want to be in the map pack for the whole city. You cannot, and the reason is not competitive or budgetary. Distance is one of Google’s three local factors and no amount of work moves your building. The realistic target is a zone. The…
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You rank on the website and not in the map pack. Those are two different competitions.
TL;DR A clinic ranks third in the blue links and does not appear in the map pack at all. Nothing is broken. Organic ranks your website, the pack ranks your Business Profile, and they are two competitions with two entry requirements. Check the primary category first. Thirty seconds, wrong surprisingly often. A clinic ranks third…
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Most of your product pages cannot rank
TL;DR Most product pages cannot rank, and saying so is more useful than another list of on-page recommendations. There are three thousand of them, they compete with Amazon and the manufacturer, and the effort available covers about twenty. The question worth answering is which twenty. Most product pages cannot rank, and telling a client that…
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Click depth is a symptom, not a rule
TL;DR Click depth within three is roughly right and badly explained. Three is not a rule. Depth is a symptom, and the number tells you how much of your site the internal linking has abandoned. Read the distribution rather than the maximum, and fix the structure rather than the number. Click depth is how many…