Shopify doesn't centralize SEO controls in one dashboard. You'll find SEO settings split across the admin panel, with the most critical pieces in product and collection editors where you set meta titles, descriptions, and URL handles. The Online Store > Preferences section controls your homepage title and meta description, plus default social sharing images. Theme-level SEO lives in your theme code, where developers implement structured data, canonical tags, and performance optimizations. For individual pages, edit any product or collection and scroll to the Search engine listing preview section. Click Edit website SEO to customize the title tag (70 characters max), meta description (160 characters), and URL handle. Shopify auto-generates these from your product titles, but the defaults are rarely optimized for click-through rate or keyword targeting. The URL handle is particularly important because Shopify doesn't let you change it later without breaking the link, so get it right on first publish. Technical SEO requires theme customization or apps. Shopify handles basics like XML sitemaps and robots.txt automatically, but you'll need to edit Liquid templates for schema markup beyond the basic Product schema Shopify injects. Page speed optimization means compressing images before upload, minimizing app bloat, and sometimes custom coding lazy-load scripts. We've seen stores run 15+ apps that each add render-blocking JavaScript, tanking Core Web Vitals scores. The Blog section under Online Store has its own SEO fields per post, but Shopify's blogging platform is notoriously weak. Many serious content operations run WordPress on a subdomain and use Shopify strictly for transactions. Navigation menus affect crawl depth and internal linking, managed under Online Store > Navigation, which indirectly impacts how Google discovers and prioritizes your pages. Shopify's URL structure forces /products/ and /collections/ prefixes, which you can't remove without hacky workarounds that break during platform updates. This isn't ideal for exact-match domains or ultra-competitive keywords, but it's a tradeoff for the platform's ease of use. At Ottawa SEO, we focus on what we can control: title optimization, content depth on collection pages, and aggressive technical audits to strip out redundant apps and code.