Shopify is an ecommerce platform you use to set up an online shop, manage products and stock, and handle payments. You choose a theme for the design and extend the shop with apps. That makes Shopify a CMS built specifically for online shops.
What does Shopify handle for SEO?
According to the Shopify Help Center, every store automatically generates a sitemap.xml with links to products, the primary product image, pages, collections and blog posts. If you leave the page title empty, the theme builds one from the store name and the title of the page. You fill in the page title, meta description and alt text yourself for each product, collection, page and blog post.
Example
Say a coffee bean shop only adds a name and a price to each product. The title in Google then becomes something like “Ethiopia Sidamo | Bean Shop”. With your own title and description, covering the flavour, the roast and the grind, you give searchers and AI assistants more to work with.
Common mistake
Stacking apps. Several apps that each add structured data, redirects or filters can contradict each other. After installing an app, check what has changed in the HTML.
Outseen has a standard approach for online shops on Shopify. What Shopify handles and what you do yourself is covered in Shopify SEO: what Shopify handles and what you need to do.