Edge SEO is in its initial stage, and not many are using it. It provides a significant advantage in technical optimization for eCommerce sites like Shopify, which have been a difficult nut to crack for SEO experts. Before we jump onto the four new capabilities of Edge SEO that works with Spotify. Let’s understand the importance of Edge SEO.
There is no doubt that Spotify is a great eCommerce platform as it allows users to create their website with all relevant eCommerce options that make selling your products easily. SEO webmasters have always complained that Shopify is challenging to customize and optimize since it uses inhouse coding language known is “Liquid”. This is now changing with the R&D on technical SEO there are a lot of capabilities emerging which makes it feasible to optimize Shopify and opens up a door to provide affordable SEO packages to Shopify users and assist them in growing their business.
What is Edge SEO?
Edge SEO is based on Edge Computing, which aims to reduce the gap between users and the data source so that latency can be minimized and bandwidth usage can also be kept to as minimum as possible. Edge SEO uses technologies like Cloudflare workers which is a serverless application. It helps in executing scripts without touching the underlying infrastructure. Edge SEO solutions are super helpful as it allows website owners, non-developers, and other teams like marketing which may not be technical sound to execute technical SEO components easily. Most of the solutions can be deployed by a single click. It’s like you don’t know much about coding and SEO; however, WordPress plugin you can still do a lot without the need to go in technical details. One word of caution here web development teams should be kept in the loop for any deployment, so it doesn’t interfere with the existing structure.
Since Edge SEO technologies like Cloudflare workers and CDN now allows us to get past Shopify coding restrictions. Let’s discuss what the capabilities and possibilities are.
- Robots.txt File Modification – This is the most common topic when it comes to technical SEO of Shopify. Although it doesn’t have a direct impact on rankings, being able to modify the contents of the Robots.txt file can help in curbing index bloat. You can also limit Google Crawl to specific paths. There is no strong reason to make too many changes to the .txt file; however, tools like Spark and Sloth can be used to add additional lines which can be helpful.
- Modifying URL Structure in Shopify – Edge SEO and orange cloud integration allows you to play around with URL structure in Shopify sites. For ranking, URLs should be “Clean” which means they are readable and should not contain unnecessary extensions like .php or long domains connected to root directories. Please note it’s easier said than done. You should look at the pros and cons before actually changing the URLs that might add to site load speed. Do make sure after any changes you are redirecting the previous URLs to new Spotify URLs to add backlinks and historical stuff for ranking.
- Collection of Shopify logfiles info – Technical SEO requires a lot of analysis and research and websites; log files provides an excellent data source for SEO experts and consultants. However, Shopify sites don’t allow it, as they are work on the principle of shared hosting. The tools such as Filter Chains, public cloud storage Amazon S3(Simple Storage Service) bucket, or Loggly can help data in a log file format that can be used for analysis. This is risk-free in terms of data security as it doesn’t affect the Shopify’s shared hosting norms and data is from Google Search so it can be relied upon.
- Hreflang Implementation – The Hreflang is the most impactful element for international SEO. The majority of SEO professionals and website owners rely on this element to ensure the ranking is not affected by the site, which has a global presence and users. Typically, Hreflang on Shopify requires a job to run to map or synchronize data, Hence, there is always a lag or replication time of few hours, and this can result in Search Engines like Google to report the error and hence impacting the availability of the site. Edge SEO offers a manageable solution. Sloth tool can be used to convert Hreflang into Cloudflare Worker code and deployed through CDN. Deployment of the cache on Cloudflare means that the change will get reflected within seconds instead of hours.
Conclusion –
Edge SEO tools and capabilities can work wonders in optimizing Shopify sites. However, as you start using them make sure to keep the web development team in the loop for any updates to avoid any conflict or issues with existing coding and structure of the site.