SEO-Friendly Shopify URLs 2025: The Best Guide for Retailers

As a Shopify store owner, you may often share your website with friends and targeted customers. However, do you know that you can modify your Shopify URL to improve your SEO rankings?

This article provides a detailed explanation of various Shopify URL structures and demonstrates how to create unique URLs for different countries and regions, which is particularly useful for stores targeting multiple countries. Moreover, this article provides four tips to help you make your URLs more SEO-friendly.

Different Shopify URL Structure Types

Shopify offers several types of URL structures. To make it clear, we categorize them into four types in this article. They are product URL structure, collection URL structure, blog URL structure, and others.

As an online store owner, you might be a bit confused when you hear these terms. But don’t worry, we will now elaborate on how to manage Shopify URL structure.

In your Shopify store, each product has its own unique URL. Customers can access the product page using the provided URL. Shopify has come up with the idea of “product handle”, which is a simplified version of a product title. A product handle is introduced to generate product URLs. Unlike product titles, product handles remove all spaces and special characters and replace all capital letters with lowercase letters. What it does is make product URLs more user-friendly and improve their SEO rankings in search engines. 

Let’s take a simple example to see what a product URL looks like and how a product handle works. Let’s say the product is the “Mercedes F1 Model”. According to the rules of handling, the product name will be modified into “mercedes-f1-model”. Consequently, the product URL will look like “yourstorename.myshopify.com/products/Mercedes-f1-model”. 

In this product URL, “yourstorename” is your store domain, “products” indicates that it is a product URL, and the following is the product handle. You can easily customize the URL by using customization options such as URL redirects, a custom domain, or other third-party applications.

If you organize a collection of products in your Shopify store, you will have a unique web address for it, known as a collection URL. Categorizing your products into distinct collections in your store makes the store’s structure clearer. For customers, it will be easier to locate the products they are looking for if you create multiple collections in your Shopify store. Some customers would like to compare product A with product B. By having a specific collection URL, customers can check out the prices and differences on that collection page. 

The default collection URL is https://yourstorename.myshopify.com/collections/collection-name, where “collection-name” follows the collection handle rules that are the same as those for product handles, including rules for cutting spaces, special characters, and capital letters. “/collections/” tells that this URL is a collection URL. Overall, the collection URL structure significantly enhances the browsing experience for customers and facilitates a more organized approach to managing a Shopify store.

You can have your blog links inserted in your Shopify store. The blog URL structure is crucial, as Shopify’s blogging platform is designed to support multiple blogs within a single store. Therefore, your blogs can be seen as categories within your website. For example, “/blogs/return&exchange”, “/blogs/news”, and “/blogs/service”. 

To access the specific blog, the entire URL has to be entered. If you navigate to “…/blogs/”, you will not see the list of blogs you have in your store.

Apart from product, collection, and blog URL structure, there are more related to more specific functionality. For example, you can create your “Contract” page, “About” page, and more. For these pages, the name of a page follows “…/pages/”. Let’s take the About page as an example, your “About” page URL will look like “yourstorename.myshopify.com/pages/about”. Bear in mind that you cannot remove or customize “/pages/”. 

How to Set up Unique URLs for Specific Countries or Regions?

It may be necessary to create unique URLs for different countries and regions if your target customers are located in other countries or regions. To enhance their shopping experience, creating unique URLs for your targeted areas is recommended. Paying in non-domestic currency can be a problem for some countries; therefore, Shopify Payment is highly recommended, through which you can set a specific currency for each regional URL to the local currency.

There are three ways to establish regional URLs. Let’s say we are creating a website for German customers.

1. Top-level domains: “store-name.de”

2. Subdomains: “de.store-name.com”

3. Subfolders: “store-name.com/de-de”

You also need to select the most effective SEO strategy for your store in each region. After setting up your international domains, it is crucial to navigate your customers to the appropriate URL.

How to Make Shopify URLs SEO-Friendly?

Due to Shopify’s highly flexible feature, there are many ways to make your Shopify URLs more SEO friendly and improve your website’s ranking in search engines.

1. Keep URLs short but descriptive: make sure that you don’t have unnecessary and unrelated words in your URLs. Your URLs should be descriptive and representative of your products. If needed, you are recommended to use hyphens to separate words, which makes it easier for customers to read.

2. Include keywords: irrelevant words do not help your SEO ranking. Remember to use only keywords that accurately describe your products. You want your website to appear at the top when people search for your products.

3. Implement 301 redirects: it happens very often when you change your URL, so do remember to set up a 301 redirect to redirect from the old URL to the new URL. 

4. Use subfolders for other countries and regions: if your store is facing customers from many different countries. You may want to set up subfolders for different languages, for example, German, French, Russian, and so on. This can significantly improve your website’s ranking on search engines in other countries.

How Do I Customize My Shopify Link?

1. Log in to your dashboard and find the “online store” option. Then, you will see the “Navigation” in the menu.

2. You will see a list of navigation areas; choose the one that you wish to customize. A window will pop up, allowing you to change your Shopify link URL or link title.

3. Customize your Shopify link and include keywords that represent your products. This process is crucial, as it significantly impacts your SEO ranking in search engines. Relative keywords can improve the visibility of your website.

4. Once you finish your customization, remember to save the changes. 

FAQ

Outro

Customizing URLs is a very common way for Shopify store owners to enhance their websites’ SEO. Based on Shopify’s default framework, there are many techniques to manage the URLs. There are four types of URL structures on Shopify, including product, collection, blogs and pages. You can also create unique URLs for different countries and regions for internationalization purposes. You may customize your Shopify link according to the instructions mentioned above to increase your business’s visibility in search engines.