Why most Shopify SEO advice falls apart past £100k a month

Search the phrase “Shopify SEO” and you’ll get ten thousand versions of the same checklist. Write good title tags. Compress your images. Add alt text. None of it is wrong. All of it is written for a store with twelve products and one founder doing everything.

Once a brand crosses roughly £100k a month, that advice stops being the work. The catalogue is bigger, the team is bigger, and the problems that actually move revenue have almost nothing to do with the checklist.

The catalogue becomes the problem

At twelve products, every page can be hand-written. At four hundred, it can’t. Either the team ships near-duplicate descriptions at scale, or they freeze and stop launching properly. Both are SEO problems, and neither is solved by a title-tag tip.

Internal linking stops being optional

On a small store, Google can crawl everything from the nav. On a large one, your category architecture is your SEO. This is also where most migrations quietly destroy traffic.

At scale, your category architecture isn’t a navigation decision. It’s your single biggest SEO asset.

Where we’d start

Fix the architecture first, because everything compounds on top of it. Then templates, so the catalogue can grow without diluting. Then intent-mapped content. Backlinks last, because pointing authority at a broken structure wastes it.