The SEO Impact of a Migration to Shopify: Navigating Risks & Protecting Rankings

Having migrated more than 60 stores to Shopify over the past decade, Swanky has a wealth of experience navigating the intricacies of ecommerce replatforming.

When talking with retailers who are considering a migration to Shopify, a common theme in our discussions is SEO. Specifically, they want to fully understand the impact that moving ecommerce platforms can have on well-earned rankings.

This article will explore this topic in more detail, answering the following questions:

1. What are the risks to SEO when migrating your ecommerce store?
2. How can you mitigate the potential SEO risks of a migration?
3. How do I protect my international SEO ranking during a migration?
4. Why can migrating to Shopify have a positive impact on SEO?
5. How does Swanky approach ecommerce migrations?

Throughout, we will focus on how Shopify’s powerful native SEO functionality is designed to mitigate the impact of a website migration and support retailers moving to the platform.

1. What are the risks to SEO when migrating your ecommerce store?

Migrating your ecommerce store to a new platform can unlock a host of benefits for your business, including improving the customer experience, reducing total cost of ownership, and future-proofing your online store for scalability.

However, if not managed carefully, the replatforming process can also pose significant SEO risks.

There are various factors you’ll need to take into consideration when preparing for a migration. For example, are you planning to keep the same domain or switch to a new one? Is your metadata optimised? How will you handle any redirects? Without properly addressing these key areas, you could leave yourself open to loss of revenue, reputation and brand visibility.

Some of the specific SEO risks during a store migration include:

• Loss of organic keyword rankings: If your URLs change, proper redirects are not implemented, and your metadata is poorly optimised or left empty, search engines may fail to associate the new URLs with the old ones, resulting in your rankings dropping.

• Loss of backlinks: If high-quality backlinks are pointing to URLs that are not properly redirected, the value of these links will be lost.

• Broken internal links: Internal links pointing to old, non-existent pages can lead to a poor user experience and crawl errors.

• Keyword cannibalisation: Poor content restructuring and an inadequate keyword targeting strategy can lead to multiple pages targeting the same keywords, thereby confusing search engines and diluting rankings.

• Indexing delays: Changes in site structure or URLs may take time to be reindexed, leading to temporary traffic loss.

• Redirect issues: Poorly executed 301 redirects (or lack thereof) can confuse both users and search engines, causing a drop in organic traffic.

• Data and tracking issues: Failure to properly configure analytics tools can lead to lost tracking data, making it difficult to monitor performance post-migration.

These risks can result in a loss in organic traffic to your site. For shoppers who do find your site, they may become confused by broken links and missing content, causing a poor customer experience.

The good news is, there is plenty you can do to help avoid these risks to SEO during your migration. Although an initial, temporary drop in rankings is very common whilst Google reindexes your new store, with the right migration management, you should see your SEO scores rapidly recover. And, for brands migrating to Shopify, we often see a significant boost in SEO ranking over the months following a migration (as we’ll cover in section 4). 

2. How can you mitigate the potential SEO risks of a migration?

Page template content mapping

Thorough planning is key to a successful ecommerce migration. As part of this process, it’s important to map out all of your content, URLs and templates to ensure that everything is redirected to relevant pages.

Decide whether you’ll be bringing across all of your pages and content to Shopify, or creating new content. If there are pages that will be retired, you’ll need to carefully consider which pages you redirect these to. The redirect should point to similar content, since Google will penalise the redirect if it views it as having no relevance (for example, just linking back to your homepage).

Mapping out your content will also help to avoid the risk of any duplicated content (duplication can lead to keyword cannibalisation and erode your SERP positioning). 

Careful handling of redirects

Redirects are one of the most essential elements to a migration. You’ll want to invest time into these to ensure all of your old URLs properly redirect to their new counterparts. Improper handling of redirects can lead to broken links and lost traffic, so this is an area that requires additional care.

Map all your redirects out in advance, check them and analyse them for relevance.

When it comes to redirect creation, Shopify enables retailers to easily set up 301 redirects from old URLs to new ones.

Test all redirects before and after the migration using tools that can detect errors. 

Understand indexable vs non-indexable URLs

Take note of your indexable and non-indexable URLs and make sure these are properly carried across. Indexable URLs are essential for maintaining your site’s authority on Google. These are the pages that search engines can crawl, read and rank, whilst non-indexible pages are those you don’t wish to be crawled.

Before migration, tidy up your pages and remove any unnecessary non-indexable URLs, unless absolutely required for business reasons.

Mapping your pages correctly will help you avoid making any of your indexable pages non-indexable, or vice-versa.

Set up the robots.txt file & sitemap

We’d advise completing a full technical SEO audit on your current site ahead of your migration, to avoid transferring any legacy technical issues with your sitemap.

A well-structured robots.txt file is crucial when transitioning to your new website. Migration can be an opportunity to improve upon your previous file, but as a minimum you will want to match it.

Shopify automatically creates your website’s sitemap.xml and robots.txt files. Resubmitting your sitemap to Google on the day of your website launch will act as a ‘signal’ for Google to re-crawl and index your site, ensuring the changes are recognised faster. 

Optimise your schema markup

Schema markup provides search engines with structured data about your site, helping them better understand the content.

For brands migrating to Shopify, the platform’s themes provide built-in schema markup, with support such as:

• Automatic structured data for products: Shopify themes typically include JSON-LD structured data for products, helping search engines display rich snippets (additional details about your products such as price, availability, and reviews). In SERPs, a product page with a rich result will attract more clicks than a product page without.

• Organisation and breadcrumb markup: Many themes include schema markup for store details (name, logo, etc.) and breadcrumbs to improve navigation in search results.

• Custom enhancements: If your old website had custom schema markups, you’ll need to ensure that these are carried over to your new platform. Shopify users can add or modify structured data using apps or by editing theme code to include additional markup for FAQs, blog posts, or other rich snippets.

This built-in functionality helps improve SEO visibility and enhances how products appear in Google search results. 

Prioritise data-led keyword targeting

One of the most impactful approaches for post-migration organic growth is to employ a keyword-led strategy for on-site and backend content population. This is to ensure that key pages are optimised for Google, achieve high SERPs rankings, and therefore drive organic traffic and revenue.

We would recommend employing a keyword strategy to assist with the creation of:

• URL slugs
• Meta descriptions
• Page titles
• Heading tags
• Collection page copy
• Product descriptions

Creating a keyword mapping document (which identifies primary and secondary keywords for every valuable, indexable page on site) will help facilitate the above, whilst leveraging data to inform decisions.

For an ecommerce website, keyword mapping forms the lynchpin of your SEO and content strategy. This mapping document can be created using a keyword research tool, where each keyword is evaluated according to its monthly search volume, competitive difficulty and search intent, in conjunction with your brand’s USPs, competitive positioning and product inventory.

 Example of keyword mapping to maximise rankings post-launch.

Pre- & post-migration audits

A pre-migration SEO audit will give you clarity around site health and domain authority. It can also provide site speed, keyword ranking and metadata insights. As well as ensuring you don’t migrate legacy technical issues with your sitemap, understanding your site’s SEO profile will help mitigate risk, benchmark scores for post-migration analysis, and inform your content population strategy.

A post-migration SEO audit will help you identify any changes to the indicators you measured before replatforming. It will also identify any technical errors or warnings that can be addressed immediately or by ongoing SEO hygiene work. Finally, it will provide organic traffic, keyword ranking, and competitive positioning insights, providing a basis for ongoing marketing and content strategies.

Allow time for updates to take effect

Google can take weeks or even months to fully process site changes, so you want to avoid any delays caused by errors. While minor fixes can be made quickly, the actual impact on SEO metrics may take longer to recover from.

Be sure your migration agency runs full QA checks on all elements of SEO, checking for 404 errors to fix these before your new website goes live. This is built into our tried-and-tested migration process here at Swanky.

As mentioned above, even with smoothly run migrations there is usually a temporary dip in your site visibility whilst Google processes website changes.

3. How do I protect my international SEO rankings during a migration?

If you have an international store that’s translated into several languages and hosted on multiple domains, this can add an additional layer of complexity to a migration project, especially in terms of SEO.

Swanky has helped international brands such as Wilkinson Sword, Catit and One Retail Group to migrate multiple international stores to Shopify, so we’re well positioned to guide retailers through the international SEO challenges of replatforming.

Here are some of the factors you will need to consider for international store migrations.

International domain structure

There are various ways to approach international domain structure. As a general rule, subdirectories are preferable to subdomains. Subdomains carry their own domain authority so each new domain has to start their ranking from zero, whilst subdirectories benefit from the domain authority of the site as a whole.

Translations

Whilst many brands opt to use machine translation for international stores in order to cut costs, poorly translated content can harm customer satisfaction and impact SEO rankings.

It’s advisable to optimise your content in each language to enhance user experience and achieve higher SERP rankings for relevant keywords in each domain. We discuss this in detail in our guide to multilingual SEO success.

Metadata

Metadata can often be overlooked, especially in website translations. However, keyword optimising your metadata will boost the visibility of your pages and imagery in SERPs.

Hreflang tag attributes for international SEO

Hreflang tag attributes are used to specify the language and geographical targeting of a webpage. If you have multiple versions of the same page in different languages, you can use hreflang tags to tell search engines like Google about these variations. This helps them to serve the correct version to their users.

Shopify themes automatically include hreflang tags to improve SEO for multilingual stores. These tags help search engines understand which language version of a page to display to users based on their location and language preferences. A Shopify theme’s built-in hreflang functionality includes:

• Automatic implementation: If you use Shopify Markets or a compatible third-party translation app, these will generate hreflang tags for your translated pages.

• Correct URL structure: Shopify assigns the right hreflang annotations to URLs, ensuring search engines recognise alternate language versions.

• Prevention of duplicate content issues: By signalling the correct regional version of a page, hreflang tags help prevent duplicate content penalties.

The built-in hreflang attribute implementation in Shopify themes ensures a solid foundation for automatic language and geographical targeting, with pop-ups appearing for those in a different region.

That said, while the automatic hreflang tag implementation suits most use cases, if you require a particularly complex hreflang set up, typically in the context of multiple stores, or depending on your translation app, custom hreflang configurations may be required. This can easily be added to your Shopify theme by a developer.

4. Why can migrating to Shopify have a positive impact on SEO?

Whilst the migration process itself may carry risks for your SEO, Swanky often observes a significant boost in our clients’ organic traffic following a migration to Shopify.

As we’ve already seen in this article, Shopify themes come with out-of-the-box SEO features designed to help you enhance your content. Let’s explore some more of these features and examine how they can benefit SEO.

Built-in canonicalisation for optimised indexing

A canonical URL is the preferred version of a webpage that search engines should index and rank. It helps prevent duplicate content issues when similar or identical pages exist under multiple URLs.

For example, a product might be accessible via:

• example.com/products/shirt
• example.com/collections/sale/products/shirt

A canonical tag (rel=”canonical”) tells search engines which version is the main one, ensuring SEO value isn’t diluted across duplicates. This improves rankings and helps brands avoids penalties.

Shopify themes have built-in canonical URL functionality, automatically generating canonical tags for products, collections, and blog posts to indicate the preferred version of a page to search engines. Advanced users can modify these tags in the theme’s Liquid code if necessary.

Responsive design for cross-device UX

Shopify themes are designed to be fully responsive. They automatically adjust and display correctly on any device – desktop, tablet, or smartphone – resizing and reformatting content dynamically.

As Google prioritises mobile-friendly websites in search rankings, Shopify stores are primed to perform well in mobile-first indexing.

Meanwhile, a responsive design ensures a seamless and consistent shopping experience to users across devices. Shopify optimises images and layouts to maintain fast loading speeds for different screen sizes. This reduces bounce rates, increases engagement and further helps to improve search engine visibility through better Core Web Vitals.

This built-in responsiveness helps store owners provide an accessible and user-friendly shopping experience without extra coding or customisation.

Built-in site speed features

Shopify also includes built-in features to optimise site speed, ensuring faster load times and better SEO performance. Examples include:

• Optimised hosting: The platform provides fast, reliable cloud-based hosting with a global CDN (Content Delivery Network) to reduce load times worldwide.

• Automatic image compression: Shopify optimises and resizes images to ensure they load quickly without sacrificing quality.

• Lazy loading: Many Shopify themes use lazy loading, which defers loading images and other media until they’re needed, improving initial page speed.

• Efficient code and caching: Unnecessary code is minimised in themes and content is automatically cached (images, JS and CSS etc.). This speeds up page rendering, allowing returning visitors to load content more quickly.

• App and script management: Shopify allows retailers to manage third-party scripts and apps efficiently to prevent performance slowdowns.

5. How does Swanky approach ecommerce migrations?

Choosing an experienced, reliable ecommerce agency to support your ecommerce migration will help to protect you from SEO issues during the replatforming process, through robust methodology and best practices.

Swanky has completed over 60 migrations to Shopify, from platforms such as Magento, WooCommerce, Netsuite SuiteCommerce, Neto, and custom solutions.

Leveraging our extensive knowledge of the Shopify platform and its integrations, we’ve honed a highly-structured, standardised process to minimise risk. We take the following steps to ensure a smooth transition to a new store:

• Discovery: We start with a detailed discovery into your current store setup and content structure.

• Tooling: Our team handles the seamless validation and migration of all the integrations in your chosen tech stack, making sure they are all configured correctly.

• Risk mitigation: We conduct comprehensive sandbox testing and strategy, with no disruption to end consumers.

• Data management: We ensure accurate migration and validation of product, customer, order, and subscriptions data, as well as redirects.

• Customer experience: Your dedicated Project Manager will work hard to ensure continuity during the migration, minimising any impact on customer interactions.

• SEO checklists: Our SEO experts will implement comprehensive pre-launch checklists for SEO management.

This process has resulted in some standout post-migration SEO uplifts, including:

• a 42% increase in monthly organic traffic within three months of launching on Shopify Plus for an ex-Magento petcare retailer; and

• a 62% increase in monthly organic traffic within three months of a furniture brand migrating from a custom platform to Shopify Plus.

Are you planning a migration to Shopify?

As a Shopify Premier Partner, with vast experience moving brands of all sizes to Shopify, Swanky can offer a secure, tried-and-tested migration service that will safeguard SEO and allow you to continue growing on a new platform.

If you’re considering migrating your ecommerce store to Shopify, get in touch with our solutions team today to discuss your project.