Case study · Shopify SEO
HipHeads: A Shopify SEO Overhaul, Verified Page by Page
A two-phase cleanup and SEO overhaul of a Shopify store selling hair tie bracelets, headwear, and NCAA-licensed accessories, closed out with a before-and-after crawl of 121 URLs.
- Client: HipHeads, LLC
- Location: Florida
- Year: 2026
- Live site: hipheads.com
- Built with: Shopify, Liquid theme, Shopify Admin API, Smart SEO, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools
The Problem
The store had outgrown its navigation, carried broken links and inconsistent URL handles, and had a theme that appended " – Hip Heads, LLC" to every page title, which pushed more than a hundred titles past the 60-character limit and undid any on-page work at the rendered HTML layer. Product images had no alt text, there was no structured data, and 52 pages had no Open Graph image.
What We Did
- Phase 1: rebuilt the global header as a full-width mega menu with NCAA team categories, collapsing to an accordion on mobile; audited and repaired broken links; cleaned URL handles and page titles.
- Phase 2: wrote and applied handles, meta titles, meta descriptions, and focus keywords for 346 products, 53 collections, and 19 pages through the Shopify Admin API, with automatic 301s for every changed handle.
- Added alt text to all 1,308 product images.
- Edited the theme to remove the title suffix, fix http links, and add fallback Open Graph images; wrote new snippets for WebSite + SearchAction, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage, and an enriched Organization schema.
- Set the homepage title and meta description, verified Google Search Console through DNS, submitted the sitemap, and set up Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Re-crawled 121 audited URLs and diffed titles, meta, schema, Open Graph, and H1s against the pre-project audit.
Results
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Titles carrying the theme suffix bug | 119 | 0 |
| Titles over 60 characters | 101 | 2 |
| Pages missing an Open Graph image | 52 | 0 |
| Pages with no H1 | 11 | 5 |
| Product images with alt text | 0 | 1,308 of 1,308 |
Outcome
The two remaining long titles are natural product names, and the five pages without an H1 are Shopify-controlled or scheduled for archive. Schema now appears everywhere it should: WebSite and Organization on the homepage, BreadcrumbList on every collection and product checked, Product markup on all 30 product pages sampled, and FAQPage on the FAQ page.