Shopify ships with foundational SEO infrastructure that covers the minimum requirements for most e-commerce stores. Out of the box, you get editable title tags and meta descriptions for products, collections, pages, and blog posts. Images support alt text, the platform auto-generates XML sitemaps and robots.txt files, SSL certificates are included on all plans, and canonical tags are added automatically to prevent duplicate content issues. The platform is also mobile-responsive by default, which satisfies Core Web Vitals requirements reasonably well on most themes. The limitations show up when you need more control. Shopify forces a /products/ or /collections/ prefix in URLs that you cannot remove without app workarounds or headless setups. You cannot customize URL structures for category hierarchies beyond the single collection level. Schema markup is basic, usually limited to Product and BreadcrumbList unless your theme or apps add more. You have no native control over crawl budget through meta robots tags on category pages, and pagination handling is rigid. Internal linking is largely theme-dependent, and most themes do not optimize for topical relevance or hub-and-spoke architecture. For stores under 5,000 SKUs targeting straightforward keywords, Shopify's native SEO is typically sufficient. We run multiple Shopify stores in the Ottawa SEO portfolio that rank competitively in local and niche markets without heavy customization. The platform's speed, security, and structured data baseline do most of the heavy lifting. Where Shopify struggles is large catalogs with complex taxonomies, multilingual SEO beyond Shopify Markets, or brands competing in saturated verticals where every technical edge matters. In those cases, you either layer on apps like Yoast SEO, SEO Manager, or custom Liquid code, or you migrate to headless Shopify with a custom front-end that gives full control over rendering and markup. For most Canadian SMBs, the native feature set plus two or three quality apps covers 90% of what enterprise SEO would deliver at a fraction of the cost.