How to audit your Shopify store’s SEO with TinySEO?

Running a Shopify store requires making regular changes, which can quietly introduce new SEO issues that you may not notice by simply browsing your site. Whether it’s missing metadata, broken links, or indexing issues, it can affect your store’s visibility in search engines and AI models.

To audit your Shopify store’s SEO with TinySEO, install the app from the Shopify App Store and open the Site Audit feature to scan your store for 30+ common SEO issues.

Audit your Shopify store with TinySEO

Site-wide SEO audit

Page SEO checklist

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What is the TinySEO site audit?

The TinySEO site audit is an automated tool that scans every page in your Shopify store’s sitemap and checks it against 30+ SEO best practices.

It gives you a detailed breakdown for each check, so you can filter by what needs attention and review the exact pages or areas on your site that are affected.

If you have important pages you want to optimize first, you can also view a page-level report for any of the scanned URLs. It will show you issues with metadata, schema markup, alt texts, linking pages, and more.

Why is running a site audit important?

Running a site audit helps you fix common SEO issues that you may not notice, especially if your store has dozens or hundreds of pages.

• Catches issues before they affect SEO. Issues like broken links or noindex tags on important pages can affect your rankings because search engines can’t access the content. A site audit helps fix everything at once.
• Find issues you can’t spot manually. It detects issues that you can’t see with the naked eye. A site audit lists all of them in one place.
• Keep up with store changes. As your store changes, every new app, theme update, or other change can bring unexpected problems. A site audit catches those issues early.
• Save time. Instead of spending hours looking for issues that could affect each page’s search visibility, TinySEO lets you find what needs fixing immediately.
• Helps understand SEO. If you’re not familiar with SEO, a site audit works as an actionable guide on how to improve search engine visibility even for beginners.

How to run a site audit with TinySEO?

Running a site audit with TinySEO is simple. Just open the Site audit feature on TinySEO, start a scan, and you’ll get a detailed report of what exactly you need to fix.

1. Run the site audit

To begin auditing your site, head to TinySEO > Site audit and click Start audit.

Once the audit is completed, you’ll get a quick overview of how many pages the tool scanned, how many links it checked, and how many issues it found.

Below, you’ll find 30+ checks and the number of issues found by each check. Start by filtering them by “Needs attention,” so you only see what needs fixing.

2. Go through each check with identified issues

To see which pages are affected, click the issue you want to start fixing. Here, you’ll find a list of affected pages and other important information for that issue.

For example, the Duplicate Title Tag issue will show you the affected page, the meta title, and where the duplicate is found.

If you find it more convenient, you can click More Actions and click Download PDF or Download XLSX to get a list of issues and affected pages in one document.

Go through the issues one by one and prioritize the most important SEO tasks. We’d recommend starting from issues like broken links, pages blocked by robots.txt, missing canonical tags, and unintentional noindex tags, which affect crawlability.

3. Re-scan the site

Once you fix the issues TinySEO found, click Run new scan to check whether no new issues have come up. Regularly re-scan your website for any issues to maintain good SEO health. 

How to fix every issue found in a TinySEO site audit

Many of the issues detected by TinySEO can be fixed with the same app, like metadata editing, compressing oversized images, and more. Other tasks you can fix manually. Let’s review how to solve each TinySEO site audit check issue.

Title tag and meta description issues

Meta titles and meta descriptions are important to fix because they affect how your site appears in search results. If the metadata is missing, too long, too short, or duplicate, you can easily fix it based on recommendations. Here’s how:

1. Open TinySEO > Improve SEO > Update metadata.
2. Find the page you need to optimize.
3. Optimize the meta title and meta description and save the changes.
4. Alternatively, use the Bulk mode edit to optimize all metadata in one place.

Missing H1

The TinySEO site audit checks if your page title, marked as <h1>, is present. It lets search engines understand what your page is about.

If a title is missing, here’s how to add it:

1. Go to Shopify Admin > Online Store > Edit theme.
2. Open the page you want and click the section where you want to add H1.
3. On the left sidebar, click Add block > Title > Save.

Invalid heading structure

An invalid heading structure means that your heading levels are out of order. For example, an H2 heading is followed directly by H4 instead of H3. TinySEO shows you the exact place where heading order breaks.

To fix the heading structure, follow these steps:

1. Open the page with the invalid heading structure in Shopify Admin.
2. Edit the content so that the heading structure is consistent.
3. Save the changes.

Empty heading tags

An empty heading tag happens when the HTML includes the heading tag, like <h2></h2>, but doesn’t contain text. The TinySEO site audit shows you where exactly the tag is. All you need to do to fix it is to follow these steps:

1. Open the page with an empty heading tag in Shopify Admin.
2. Click the Show HTML (</>) icon under the Description section.
3. Find the empty heading tag and delete it or add text. To remove it correctly, you should delete both the opening (<h2>) and the closing (</h2>) tags.
4. Save the changes.

Thin content

Thin content refers to pages that have very little text. Here are a few tips to optimize these pages:

• Product pages – make sure the product description includes relevant details that users would find useful, such as use cases, instructions, or even an FAQ section.
• Collection pages – these pages usually have little text. Add a short description for users to understand what the collection is and naturally add relevant keywords.

Canonical tag missing

Canonical tags tell search engines which page to prioritize when the content is similar in two or more URLs. If you’re familiar with coding, you can add a canonical tag by following Shopify’s canonical tag guide.

But if you don’t want to touch code, you can either ask a developer for help or get an app like the Canonical Tag URL Wizard from the Shopify App Store.

Noindex tag detected

The noindex tag isn’t necessarily an issue, but we recommend double-checking the detected pages. It finds the pages that are hidden from search engines and excluded from the sitemap, which can be intentional or accidental.

You can leave the noindex tag for internal pages or staging content. But if the noindex tag is added to product pages or blog posts, consider removing it so users can find them on search engines.

You can manage indexing through TinySEO automatically. Just follow these steps:

1. Open TinySEO > Improve SEO > Manage pages.
2. Click View next to the page type you want to review.
3. Locate the page you want to manage indexing for.
4. Click Activate to enable indexing or Deactivate to disable it.
5. Save the changes.

Missing viewport meta tag

The viewport meta tag is important for pages to be rendered properly on mobile devices. If the TinySEO site audit finds pages without it, follow these steps:

1. Go to Online Store > Actions > Edit code.
2. Open the theme.liquid file.
3. Check if the file contains the following tag under the <head> section:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

If it’s not present, add it and save the changes. It will automatically apply to all pages.

Mixed content (HTTP/HTTPS)

Pages that are served over HTTPS but link to HTTP resources, such as images or scripts, can trigger browser warnings.

To fix them, go to Online Store > Actions > Edit code. Here, look for http:// links and change them to https://. However, first check if the https:// version loads properly by opening the URL, so you don’t break resources.

Blocked by robots.txt

When pages are blocked by the robots.txt file, it tells search engines not to crawl them. If the pages that TinySEO detects should be visible in search results, you need to update the robots.txt file.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Open Shopify Admin and go to Online Store > Actions > Edit code.
2. Search for the robots.txt.liquid file.
3. Review the rules that could be blocking the pages from being indexed.
4. Save the changes.

If you’re not sure how to edit the file, follow our Shopify robots.txt guide for more information.

Broken links

TinySEO detects broken links, which return a 404 error. It can frustrate visitors and hurt SEO, so you need to fix them by redirecting them. You can easily create redirects or redirect rules with TinySEO:

1. Open TinySEO > Improve SEO > Fix broken links.
2. To fix individual broken links, click Create URL redirect.
3. To set redirect rules, click Redirect rules > Add redirect rule. TinySEO will create redirects automatically.

Images missing alt text

Image alt texts, or alternative texts, help search engines understand what the images in your content contain. To fix missing alt texts, you can use the TinySEO bulk editor:

1. Open TinySEO > Improve SEO > Update ALT texts.
2. Locate the page with images that don’t have alt text added.
3. Add alt texts to all images on the page and click Save.

Oversized images

Large images can slow down your page load time. Since speed is a ranking factor on Google, you need to ensure good performance with optimized images. To compress oversized images, you can go to TinySEO > Improve speed > Optimize.

Here, refresh the image list and TinySEO will detect oversized images. Click Start now, and your images will be automatically compressed.

Internal nofollow links

The nofollow tag tells search engines not to pass ranking value through that link. While external links are supposed to be nofollow in many cases, internal links are worth double-checking to avoid wasting link equity.

To remove nofollow from internal links placed in page text, you need to open the page where it’s detected. Then, click the Edit HTML (</>) icon, press Ctrl + F, and look for “nofollow.”

Remove the “nofollow” from the rel="external nofollow noopener noreferrer" tag by the internal link and press Save.

Orphan pages

Orphan pages are pages that are only reachable through a direct URL or a sitemap. They have no internal links pointing to them.

You can fix orphan pages by adding internal links that lead users to them. For example, you can mention them in related collections or the footer.

Missing Open Graph title, description, or image

If your Open Graph information, including the og:title, og:description, and og:image, is not included, then social media platforms will have to pull information automatically. This may turn out to be inaccurate and unoptimized for social platforms.

The Open Graph is responsible for how your page looks when you share it on social media. The og:title, og:description, and og:image are usually set automatically. If they’re not, contact your theme developer to review if the information is set up correctly.

Long URL or Messy URL

TinySEO audits your site URLs for common issues. It marks URL handles that are over 70 characters long or include special characters or “-copy” suffixes.

To optimize URL handles, follow this guide:

1. Open the page you want to edit in Shopify Admin.
2. Scroll down to the Search engine listing section and click the Edit icon.
3. Optimize the URL handle.
4. Click Save.

Missing schema markup

Schema markup (JSON-LD) helps search engines understand your content better and can enable rich results, like ratings, reviews, prices, breadcrumbs, or availability.

On Shopify, basic schema is usually added automatically. If TinySEO is showing that it’s missing, you can add it without coding using these steps:

1. Open TinySEO > Improve SEO > Set up JSON-LD.
2. Fill in the general information, return policy, and shipping data. Click Save.
3. Press Add Theme extension and enable the app embeds for all JSON-LD types.
4. Save the changes.

Duplicate schema types

If the TinySEO site audit is showing that your pages contain duplicate schema types, check whether any of your installed apps may be overlapping. You can contact our customer support team straight from the app so we can look into the issue.

Page too large

If any of your pages are too large, Google may not crawl or index them. That’s because Googlebot usually crawls only the first 2MB of uncompressed HTML.

To fix this, you need to remove unnecessary scripts, sections, or code that may be bloating the app. Here are a few practical things you can do:

• Disable third-party scripts where they’re not needed: Go to TinySEO > Improve speed > Manage scripts and toggle off the app scripts where they shouldn’t load.
• Uninstall apps you don’t use: If you have more than 5 apps, go to Shopify Settings > Apps and check whether there are any that overlap in features or you no longer use.

How to view page-level SEO reports?

If you want to optimize a specific page instead of fixing site-wide issues, then you can view TinySEO’s page reports. All you have to do is run a site audit and then click More actions > View all pages.

Click the page you want to optimize. TinySEO will show you the number of issues identified on the page. You can filter them by Needs attention, and the tags beside page elements will show you the exact issues.

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About the author

Kristina Jaruseviciute

Kristina is a Content Lead at TinySEO responsible for informing and educating readers on all things Shopify-related. She covers a broad range of topics around SEO, AI visibility, website performance, and conversion rates to help merchants stand out in a competitive landscape.