Matt Diggity 👑
Tips from the Agency
My agency, The Search Initiative (https://thesearchinitiative.com), just had some nice results focusing on some very basic, technical SEO for an ecom client.
Here's what we did:
Internal Linking Structure
1. One issue across the site was that on the product pages, there were links to a search of the product brand, as opposed to a category page. We changed the Shopify code so this linked towards the brand collection page, to provide better relevancy between products and collections.
2. The product pages were set up so that each product had multiple URLs depending on the category it appeared in. For example you would have this:
/product/product-name-1
and also have this:
/collection/collection-name-1/product/product-name-1
/collection/collection-name-2/product/product-name-1
/collection/collection -name-3/product/product-name-1
Therefore to simplify it, whenever you find a product in a collection, we changed the code so it served the /product/product-name-1 link directly.
Headings
The site was creating multiple versions of the same headings across all pages, which we managed to locate and remove. These were hidden to the naked eye but picked up by crawlers, therefore we got rid of these to make sure content was unique and not repeated.
Redirects
The products that appeared in the /collections/all section of the site were all redirecting to the /products/product-name pages (all 607 of them), which is clearly inefficient, so we removed the redirect and again changed the code to directly serve the appropriate link in the 'all' collection.
Hope that helps! Happy ranking.
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Paul
The URL change is a good one I'm working with a 17 location client and they have 4 clicks to the main ranking page from the home and just by changing the menu, it can be 2 clicks. This URL example is exactly what I need to do on my SEO sites as well as my affiliate sites. Thx Matt.

Matt Diggity 👑 ✍️ » Paul
Anytime.

Oxlee
This is so relevant right now! Ecom product pages and product category pages are currently a massive focus at our agency. Most clients that come in have the above issues or similar or worse! Lol! I would love some clarity on this Matt. We are obviously handling all on a case by case basis BUT I’d love a way to simplify the process and have a solid checklist for my team. I am working on this… BUT holy shit! The amount of Ecom sites failing because of these issues is crazy. Any and all shared resources focusing specifically on this are highly appreciated.

Matt Diggity 👑 ✍️ » Oxlee
New issues are popping up all the time regarding ecommerce. Make a checklist of things to watch out for, but don't let that checklist EVER be final.
I swear, every client has new problems we've never seen before.
Oxlee » Matt Diggity
I’m 100% with you my man! for clients that come in with “aged sick websites” it is a moving target and each case is unique and requires some creativity when curating the best solution for the specific “patient” and their multi factorial issues… focus is obviously fixing issues while ensuring the most positive impact after all things considered. With regards to the “checklist” I was speaking more to the notion of: 1) Fix the “broken” sh** that comes in, AND more pertinent to my comment 2) BUILD ALL NEW ECOM SITES following a NINJA checklist to avoid sh** like this down the road AND once that turd is polished💩✨make that structure and layout available as a blue print and supply an affordable solution at scale to everyone jumping into ecommerce right now as there are so many people diving head first into empty pools in the Ecom space, paying good money for sh** that was broken before it even went to market! I can fix broken sh** all day long… but wouldn’t it be a better world if sites were built right straight out the gate?

Tom
Whenever I change the Shopify code to one url for each product it removes the breadcrumbs. Any idea how to retain these while removing the collection page product urls? Matt Diggity.

Matt Diggity 👑 ✍️
TBH, that's beyond me. Rad?
Rad
It's really encouraging to see that we're not the only ones fighting with this!!
We figured out 2 workarounds:
1. We don't use Shopify's breadcrumbs and instead use our own code where we display:
– homepage
– first collection this product is in
– product
Yes, flat like this – better than nothing.
This one is currently being tested, so I'm not sure if we have any ready to use, universal code we could share.
2. We use the standard, unified product URLs on collection pages (/product/product-name) with additional attribute (e.g. data-breadlink) which we change in JS.
So when a user or Google visits, they see the unified URLs, while when the user clicks, they go to the breadcrumb link with collection in the URL.
This isn't ideal because I assume Google might still occasionally visit the wrong (and canonicalized) URLs, but I would assume it does it less so and it "sees" the unified URLs across the site.
This is the best I could figure out to find a compromise between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and User Experience (UX).
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Joshua
Why not go with /product-name/? Most people are talking about having everything off the root and using virtual siloing. Is this just a fad? Is it dumb?

Matt Diggity 👑 ✍️ » Joshua
We see better results with a hard silo when it comes to ecom and lead gen.
For affiliate, we mostly go flat though.
Joshua
Thanks for the heads up on that. Is that because the affiliate content tends to be skyscraper landing pages and so don't need the supporting content clusters?
Matt Diggity 👑 ✍️
We definitely dont do skyscraper much at all.
The reason we go flat on affiliate is that there typically isn't much search volume on affiliate "category pages".
That said, we have a few sites where we do it anyways.
IT DEPENDS!!11one1!!

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