Every Shopify store has a sitemap, and it always sits at yourstore.com/sitemap.xml. It is a file that lists the pages, products, collections and blog posts of your store so search engines can crawl and index them. Shopify generates it automatically and keeps it current, so you cannot edit it by hand, but you can influence what goes into it.
What a Shopify Sitemap Does
A sitemap does not make a page rank. It makes a page findable, which is the step before ranking. For larger catalogues in particular it shortens the time between publishing a product and seeing it in search results, because a crawler no longer has to discover every URL by following links.
This article shows where to find your sitemap, how to read it, and how to use it as a diagnostic tool for the technical health of your store.
Finding Your Shopify Sitemap
Example of a Shopify Sitemap
Optimizing Your Shopify Sitemap
How to use the Shopify Sitemap: Once you have located your store’s Sitemap, you can use it to improve your store’s SEO in several ways:
- Submit your Sitemap to search engines: Submitting your Sitemap to search engines like Google and Bing will help ensure that all of your store’s pages are indexed and included in search results.
- Identify and fix crawl errors: By reviewing your Sitemap, you can identify any crawl errors that search engines may be encountering when trying to index your site. These errors can be caused by broken links, redirects, or other issues.
- Optimize your store’s structure: By reviewing the structure of your Sitemap, you can identify any areas of your store that may be difficult for search engines to crawl, and make changes to improve the overall structure of your site.
- Monitor changes: You can use the Sitemap to monitor changes to your site, such as new products, pages, blog posts, or collections, to make sure that search engines know about these changes.
- Improve internal linking: By reviewing the links within your Sitemap, you can identify opportunities to improve internal linking within your store. This helps search engines understand the hierarchy of your site, and it makes your store easier to navigate.
A sitemap works best next to the rest of your on-page setup. Our guide to optimising a Shopify store for SEO covers titles, meta descriptions, URLs and image handling, and page load times influence how much of your store a crawler gets through in one visit.
Conclusion
Key takeaways
- Your sitemap is always at yourstore.com/sitemap.xml, and Shopify keeps it up to date for you.
- The parent file links to separate sitemaps for products, collections, pages and blogs.
- Submit it once in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, then use it to spot crawl errors.
- Hidden or unlinked pages stay hard to find even when they sit in the sitemap, so internal linking still matters.
Read next: Shopify SEO: tips, tools and techniques, tools for managing a Shopify store, or our Shopify theme and app development services.
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Lars Henning
- 42 ARTICLES
- 42 ARTICLES
