Search the phrase “Shopify SEO” and you’ll get ten thousand versions of the same checklist. None of it is wrong. All of it is written for a store with twelve products and one founder doing everything.
The catalogue becomes the problem
At twelve products, every page can be hand-written. At four hundred, it can’t. That is a structural problem, not an editorial one.
Internal linking stops being optional
On a large store, your category architecture is your SEO. Which collections link to which is where rankings are won and lost at scale.
Search intent splits into four
Category, product, comparison and brand searches each want a different page. One content strategy can’t serve all four.
Where we’d start
Fix the architecture first, then templates, then intent-mapped content. Backlinks come last.