Shopify Markets became available in 2021 and has since undergone significant improvements in terms of international SEO. However, it still has some limitations on the default setup that merchants should consider.
Shopify Markets is a cross-border management tool that helps you identify, set up, launch, optimize, and manage your international markets easily from a single store.
Shopify Markets allows merchants to easily:
You can't easily edit and have dedicated and unique SEO title and meta description tags by country. This is not an ideal experience for a user searching on Google locally, for instance from the US, if your store is optimized or has references to Australia. Title tags and meta descriptions get duplicated across the different sites, which can be seen as a sign of low-quality content by search engines.
Luckily, with the help of Shopify dev experts, you can add a rule on your liquid theme to include references to your local country stores in the title and meta description tags, avoiding duplication and improving the user experience from local country search engine results.
In any international SEO strategy, it is vital to consider local language translation, country language differences, such as American/British English, and even product seasonality in the case of the Northern and Southern hemispheres, so each dedicated store should offer a localized experience.
Shopify Markets provides an automatically localized subdirectory structure and hreflang tagging setup, but you can't directly edit the different content elements of the website. To overcome this issue, there is a free Shopify App, Shopify Translate & Adapt, that allows you to edit the different elements of the website so merchants can make changes on each of the international stores.
Conclusion
Shopify Markets is a great tool with an easy setup, but it has some limitations on the default setup. Merchants should consider hiring a Shopify expert agency to guide them with their international SEO strategy and dev implementations.
