A New SEO Game Changer Has Been Added to Shopify

Innovations / January 02, 2020

For a loooooooooong while now SEOs have been pulling their hair out when trying to work with multilingual Shopify sites. The “best-case scenario” for splitting languages was to separate the site in different subdomains, one per language. It’s a risky move that is most often not managed properly by some agencies, or even some clients. Luckily for SEOs, Shopify has kept an open ear, has been hearing our concerns and is bringing a new solution to the table.

Here comes native translation. An SEO’s dream solution to help manage multilingual websites in Shopify.

Shopify has been deploying a BETA feature to some Shopify Plus partners and clients. It’s that specific feature that can remove the need for sub-domains, thus having all the content (regardless of the language it’s translated in) under a single domain in their separate subdirectories. You can access the official documentation here.

Why Are Subdomains An Issue?

Don’t get me wrong, subdomains are an amazing way to host different content under the same brand name. We most often use them when building landing pages for paid campaigns or lead magnets for large-scale content initiatives.

The issue is that subdomains, as mentioned in the previous section, are still considered as separate website entities and do not benefit from each other. Which would mean that most of the SEO work done on subdomain X wouldn’t influence the organic performance of the Y subdomain; even if they are both on the same root domain.

Some people may say: “There MUST be a way to mitigate that effect and make sure both subdomains are ‘connected’, no?” And the answer to that is “Yes, but it’s complicated.” For sure, there are many solutions available to the bravest and boldest clients and SEOs out there. Canonicals, HREFLANG tags, appropriate redirects, cookie-based redirects, etc; SEOs are a crafty bunch and are no short of ways to circumvent the system, but that takes time.

All in all, subdomains were, for a long time, the only viable solution for a Shopify client was to move every translated language under its own subdomain. It is always a big risk and even with the best preparation, it was still possible for a site to lose some organic traction.

Why Is It A Game Changer?

Even if search engines are getting better and better at associating subdomains to a root domain, we’ve always been recommending to use subdirectories to separate a website in different languages. For a long time, search engines were seeing subdomains as “separate sites” with little to no influence between each other, regardless of their root domain. Recent developments (such as Google Search Console’s “domain” feature) have been generating quite some noise in the SEO community, but no official word from Google on that end.

So when a client comes to us and asks “I’d like to have an online store that sells in multiple languages.” we always suggested them to move to a more custom or more flexible solution such as a dedicated Magento site or a customized WordPress sites using the WPML extension. We very rarely recommended our clients to use Shopify to sell in multiple languages since (until very recently) the only way to do so was to split the site into different subdomains.

Now, with this new Shopify feature, clients can safely add subdirectories for language-specific stores! No need to worry about separate sites nor authority distribution between all languages, everything can be managed under the root domain!

So… What’s The Catch?

Well… There are a few requirements you need to fulfill in order to be eligible for this new feature:

• You need to be a Shopify Plus client
• You still need to manage translations through a third-party app
• You will need to add code snippets to the theme you want to translate

While there’s only a handful of requirements to meet, they are no small achievements in of themselves. Being a Shopify Plus client usually costs a minimum of $2,000 per month and scales up to $40,000 per month (depends on the revenue of your store)*

*The above prices are estimations based on our experience. Bloom doesn’t own any Shopify Plus stores.

Your store also becomes dependent on a third-party app, whether you choose Langify or LangShop (which are the only two apps compatible with this feature at the time this article is published) No app means no translation, which means no language-specific subdirectories. Both apps also have a monthly cost associated with them, which contributes to your monthly Shopify fees.

At last, but not least, you may want to learn how to manipulate your “.liquid” Shopify files. These files are the “code” Shopify sites are based on to generate pages. Why so? Because you will need to add some snippets of code here and there to allow your users to freely switch languages. If you’re not comfortable with this, it’s 100% worth the shot to hire a freelance developer to do it for you or you could always try your luck with both Apps’ support staff.

Langify helped us A LOT with most of our clients migrations plans to different languages. We don’t have favorites, but you know…

Closing Thoughts

So all in all these are pretty good news for SEOs with Shopify clients. It gives us an additional layer of flexibility and greatly reduces the risks of managing many language-specific online stores.

If you do have a Shopify Plus store and are also looking for competent people to help you out during the switch, feel free to send us an email or visit our services pages for more information on how we can help you make a successful transition.