Spent the last few months auditing Shopify stores and the same three issues show up over and over — none of them are about keyword stuffing or backlinks.

1. Duplicate product URLs from collections.

Shopify generates a unique URL for every product-in-collection combo (/collections/x/products/y). Google sees this as duplicate content and splits your ranking signal across multiple URLs instead of consolidating it. Canonical tags fix this, but most themes don't set them correctly out of the box.

2. Image alt text left as the filename.

"IMG_4021.jpg" tells Google nothing. Every product image is a missed opportunity to rank in image search, which is a real traffic source for ecommerce — especially for visual products like apparel and home goods.

3. Slow largest contentful paint on product pages from unoptimized hero images.

Google's Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor, and product pages are usually the worst offenders because of oversized hero images. A 2-second LCP improvement can meaningfully move your rankings, especially in competitive niches.

The hard part isn't knowing these exist — it's finding which ones are actually hurting your store, and in what order to fix them. That's the exact gap I built RankPilot to close: point it at your store, get a prioritized fix-list instead of a generic checklist.

Happy to look at anyone's store and tell you what I see, no pitch.