Is your Shopify page quietly failing SEO basics?

Shopify renders every product at /products/handle AND at /collections/collection-name/products/handle when a visitor clicks through a collection. Same content, two URLs. Shopify ships a canonical tag pointing at the /products/ version to handle it — but themes that override the canonical, or apps that inject their own, break this. That is the first thing I check on every Shopify audit.

At minimum: name, image, description, and an offers block with price and availability. Brand helps too. Without price + availability, Google has no data to show price snippets in results. Most Shopify themes output partial Product schema — present but missing fields — which is why this tool checks completeness, not just presence.

When a shopper picks a size or color, Shopify appends ?variant=123456 to the URL. If your canonical tag echoes that variant URL, every variant becomes a separate page in Google's eyes — splitting your ranking signals across near-identical URLs. The canonical should always point at the clean, variant-free /products/handle URL.

Because the default theme template builds every title as "Product Name – Store Name" from the same Liquid variable. With 50 products that is fine. With 500, you get hundreds of titles that differ by two words, none of which mention the things buyers actually search — material, size, use case. Rewriting title templates per collection is one of the highest-value fixes I do.

The standard theme.liquid includes a canonical_url tag that points collection-nested product pages back to /products/handle, and strips variant parameters. So out of the box it is mostly correct. Problems come from edited themes, page-builder apps, and headless setups where that line got removed or overridden. This tool reads what your page actually outputs — not what Shopify is supposed to do.

Yes, twice over. Google Images is a real discovery channel for products — alt text is how your product photos rank there. And alt text is an accessibility requirement. Shopify lets you set alt text per image in the product media editor; most stores leave it blank. I aim for 90%+ coverage with descriptive alts, not keyword stuffing.

I target 70-165 characters. Shorter and you waste the snippet space; longer and Google truncates it mid-sentence. For products, lead with what it is + the differentiator + a reason to click. Google rewrites descriptions it does not like, but a well-written one still wins more clicks than a truncated template string.

They control how your product looks when shared on WhatsApp, Instagram DMs, Facebook, Pinterest and most chat apps — the image, title and description in the preview card. For ecommerce, a missing og:image means shared product links show as bare text. That is lost free traffic from every customer who shares your product with a friend.

Partly. Apps can fill missing alt text and meta fields in bulk, and some patch schema. But apps cannot write titles that match buyer search intent, and the worst canonical problems live in the theme code where apps do not reach. My honest take: use an app for bulk hygiene, fix the theme-level issues by hand once, write the titles yourself.

Mandeep Singh, Sprout Sage Solutions. I run SEO for Shopify stores and service businesses. Every check in this tool is something I look at manually in client audits — this just runs the same checklist in your browser. Your pasted code never leaves your device.