There’s no denying that Shopify has grown in popularity over the years. We’ve seen an increase in the number of businesses using Shopify as their eCommerce platform of choice.
Not only has the platform attracted small to medium-sized businesses, but major retailers such as Staples and Dressbarn are also using it.
Shopify is clearly attracting sites with higher technological requirements.
Many of these larger Shopify stores use Fast Simon technology for faceted navigation, category page personalization, improving internal site search, and other purposes.
In this column, we’ll look at a Fast Simon integration, some of the issues that arose, and some tips for making yours go more smoothly.
A Case Study of Adding Fast Simon to Shopify
Fast Simon is a shopper interaction tool that uses artificial intelligence to help increase conversions and average order value by automating some CRO tasks. It also integrates with WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Magento.
We had a client implement Fast Simon in December 2020, and while there appeared to be improvements at first, we can see that organic traffic and visibility dropped dramatically by May 2021.
While the timing of the Fast Simon implementation did not exactly coincide, we still wanted to look into the issue further.
When we investigated other sites that used Fast Simon, we discovered that many of them appeared to have experienced a drop in organic visibility in the last couple of years.
Here is the organic traffic timeline for Motherhood Maternity, for example:
And here’s Steve Madden’s organic traffic:
We observed similar SEO trends for other sites that use Fast Simon.
Of course, correlation does not imply causation, and it’s unclear when these sites implemented Fast Simon.
However, all of this, combined with our client’s ranking declines, compelled us to look further.
We liked the UX improvements Fast Simon made to the site and wanted to see if there were any changes that could be made to strengthen our client’s technical SEO foundation.
As a result, we began to make Shopify SEO changes for our client, keeping in mind that there may be better ways to optimize the platform.
Fortunately, by following the process outlined below, we were able to significantly improve our rankings.
Read How to Identify The App Used In A Shopify Store.
1. Enable the Prerendering feature
One of our main concerns when we first started working with the website was that a lot of the key content on their website was being loaded via JavaScript.
For example, when JavaScript was disabled, the following was loaded on a category page:
We were able to confirm that the content was not being rendered server-side by reviewing the raw HTML.
While Google can crawl JavaScript, it is necessary for Google’s second wave of indexing to parse the JavaScript in order to properly index the content.
While Google has improved its ability to crawl JavaScript, there was some doubt about whether Google was able to obtain complete indexes of their pages.
In addition, when we looked at Google’s rendering tools, we noticed that the content of a single page was being loaded in very long Script> tags, which gave us pause.
Fortunately, when I contacted Fast Simon’s support team, they were extremely helpful and were able to implement content prerendering.
This means that the JavaScript-loaded content is also server-side rendered in raw HTML.
The “isp_search_result_page_container_prerender” div contains this content.
This means that we can be confident that Google will be able to crawl and index a snapshot of the page’s HTML. It provides us with additional security in the event that Google has problems crawling and indexing some of the content loaded via JavaScript.
If you have a store that uses Fast Simon, I strongly advise you to use prerendering.
Their support team is extremely capable, and they were able to implement this quickly for our client.
2. Prevent Faceted Navigation Crawling
Because Fast Simon employs faceted navigation, SEOs must take this into consideration.
Faceted navigation can significantly increase the number of indexable pages. As a result, Google may crawl and index a large number of duplicate pages.
While Fast Simon currently employs canonical tags that point to the root category page, these tags are merely hints, not directives.
Fortunately, you can now modify Shopify’s robots.txt file to prevent these duplicate pages from being crawled.
In most cases, this approach may be preferable to canonical tags because Googlebot will obey the robots.txt commands and will not crawl the content.
If we disable Google’s ability to crawl the content, we should see a decrease in indexation here.
For example, when we tested pages created by Steve Madden’s faceted navigation, we discovered that they can be crawled:
Ideally, Steve Madden would create a robots.txt command that prevents these pages from being crawled. This may free up the crawl budget by preventing Google from crawling low-priority pages and allowing it to spend more time on the most important ones for SEO.
This is especially important if Google is devoting a significant portion of its crawl budget to parsing JavaScript.
Looking at Fast Simon sites, it appears that the default parameter used in the faceted navigation is “?narrow.” As a result, we were able to prevent the crawl of these pages by including the following command:
/collections/narrow is not permitted.
Of course, if you have custom parameters, you may need to modify this robots.txt rule or add additional rules to ensure that those parameters are not crawled by Google.
3. Confirm that Google is permitted to crawl pagination
Another change you should make is to ensure that Google can crawl the site’s pagination. With Fast Simon setups, we sometimes see that this is actually blocked.
Targus, for example, uses the “?sort by” parameter in their pagination: https://us.targus.com/collections/laptop-backpacks?sort by=creation date&page num=2
However, by default, a rule in Shopify’s robots.txt file prevents this from being crawled.
This means that Google is technically not permitted to crawl the pagination.
Googlebot will be unable to use pagination to navigate deeper into the website’s hierarchy. In addition, link equity will not be distributed through pagination.
Fortunately, the solution is relatively simple.
Simply change the “?sort by” parameter in the pagination to something else.
We suggested to our client that they create a new URL parameter, similar to what Fashion Nova has done: https://www.fashionnova.com/collections/jeans?page=2
The other option is to remove the “Disallow: /collections/sort by” command from the robots.txt file.
If you do this, make sure your faceted navigation cannot be crawled, as we’ve seen setups where the faceted nav also uses “?sort by.”
The End Results
We have seen significant improvements in ranking positions since implementing these changes.
The client’s organic visibility was declining at the time of the campaign’s launch in July 2021. This peaked in August 2021, when approximately 4.4 percent of our tracked keywords ranked on the first page.
Since these changes, we’ve seen a significant improvement in rankings, with 10% of our tracked keywords ranking on the first page.
The timing of the implementations, as well as the initial traffic losses, indicate that websites that use Fast Simon technology must be aware of the necessary adjustments.
By utilizing prerendering and allowing the crawl of the pagination while blocking the crawl of the faceted navigation, you should be able to provide a stronger technical foundation for Google in your Fast Simon setup.
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Learn more from Shopify and read Top 10 Shopify SEO Apps and Tools to Boost Organic Rankings.
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