Shopify metafields and their impact on SEO

Although metafields have been around for many years, it's within the last few years that we see metafields becoming more widely used.

So it's not surprising when I get questions about metafields and if they impact SEO. In short, metafields can impact SEO depending on how you use them.

First, let's clarify that metafields is not the same thing as meta tags.

Metafields are Shopify's term for custom fields. They allow you to add important pieces of information unique to your store.

Meta tags are usually referring to technical SEO fields that go in the HTML header of your website code. Examples include meta titles, meta descriptions, open graph, robots tags and more.

The confusing part is that metafields can be used internally or externally.

You may use metafields internally to store unique part numbers or adding customer data like their birthday.

External use usually involves displaying content that frequently changes depending on the page. For example, the country of origin, materials, ingredients, and similar products on different URLs.

When you use metafields internally, those usually won't impact your SEO. That's because they are usually not publicly available for search engines like Google to see the data.

However, if you use metafelds externally, those can impact SEO.

Let's say you're using metafields to dynamically show the author of a blog post. The name entered into the metafield is visually on the page and in your HTML. Thus search engines can and likely will use that metafield value.

To put it another way, if the metafield value is visually on the page or in your HTML source code, it can impact SEO.

As you can see, metafields can be used in a lot of cool ways. Managing the metafield data can get cumbersome if you let it run away. Keep a balance between dynamically adding content to your site and being able to make updates.