The duplicate URL problem nobody mentions
Shopify serves the same product at more than one address: once at /products/name and again at /collections/whatever/products/name. Left alone, that splits signals across near-identical pages and dilutes the authority of the page you actually want ranking.
The canonical tag in most themes handles this correctly, but plenty of custom and heavily edited themes break it. Checking that every product canonicalises to its /products/ URL takes ten minutes and is the highest-value ten minutes in Shopify SEO.
Collection pages are the money pages
People search for categories far more than they search for individual products. 'Cream chargers', 'linen shirts', 'cold brew coffee' — those are collection queries, and the collection page is what should rank for them.
Shopify gives collections a title, a handle and a thin description box, and most stores leave the description empty. That is a blank page competing against retailers who wrote something. Give each priority collection real copy, sensible internal links to its best products, and a heading structure that says what the page is.
We wrote about this in more depth in our piece on ecommerce category pages, and the point stands on every platform: the category page is where commercial intent lands.
Faceted navigation will eat your crawl budget
Filters generate URLs. Colour, size, price, brand, sorted ascending, sorted descending — every combination is a crawlable address, and a large catalogue can produce tens of thousands of them from a few dozen real pages.
Decide which filtered views deserve to be indexed, because a few genuinely do: 'black leather boots' is a real query with real demand. Everything else should be blocked or canonicalised. Left unmanaged, Google spends its time on your sort-by-price-descending pages instead of the pages that sell.
Speed, apps and the theme
Most slow Shopify stores are slow because of apps. Every review widget, popup, upsell bar and analytics snippet adds render-blocking work, and stores accumulate them for years without removing any.
Audit the app list against what the business actually uses. Uninstalling an app does not always remove its code from the theme, so check the theme files too. Then look at image sizes and the hero, which is usually the largest contentful paint on any ecommerce homepage.
The content most stores never write
Product descriptions copied from the manufacturer put you in a duplicate content race against every other stockist, and the one with more authority wins. Write your own, even briefly.
Then answer the questions people actually ask before buying: sizing, compatibility, delivery, what to buy alongside it. That content ranks for long-tail queries, reduces returns and gives internal links somewhere useful to point. It is unglamorous, and it compounds.