Introducing — Image Sitemap for Shopify

Finally, transparency for image SEO on Shopify.

Click here to view my app in the Shopify App Store.

Image SEO is an area for Shopify merchants that can be greatly improved. In short, I built the first app of its kind that solves all issues related to building, processing and submitting comprehensive image sitemaps in real-time. The app also provides essential reporting about indexed images—something that has been eluding Shopify merchants for some time. *Scroll down for a informative video with screencast.

I should start by saying that I think Shopify is the best. It’s the best by a long shot. Shopify did for E-commerce what Google Analytics did for reporting. It’s that good. Simple, efficient, intelligently constrained, extensible.

A handful of my clients have been after me about image sitemaps. They have been having issues with transparency around their indexed images. These clients are medium-sized shops with over 1,000 images in their product catalogs. It turns out that Shopify provides an image sitemap, but only specifies a single image per product to be indexed — and includes no additional metadata. Obviously this is not ideal.

The other big issue is that Shopify merchants are unable to get data about indexed images from the Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) due to some technical/security snafus. If you’re selling $1M+ online, it’s unfortunate to be missing such important data.

Google Search Console for Shopify image data

The Case For Automation

Because my clients have a lot of images in their catalogs, it means that building a comprehensive image sitemap to include every image —with associated metadata — can result in a scary amount of XML to manage. For example: 3,000 images will compile into something like 20,000+ lines of XML code.

I suggested two options to my clients:

1. Pay an intern to build and manage a more comprehensive image sitemap. That would probably look something like an excel doc that somehow outputs XML, or something much more manual. Then said person could update that new image sitemap (including all removals, text changes, SKU changes, image changes, etc.) and re-submit it hourly? Daily? This seems like the most error-prone scenario I can imagine—one that would involve a never ending search to copy and paste URLs of all kinds.
2. Automate something.

Option #2 was the obvious choice, and just too interesting to keep for only a few clients. Alas, I built Image Sitemap for Shopify. It truly is the first of its kind for Shopify, and provides image indexing data that is not currently available to merchants.

Product overview with screencast

My app does a few important things:

• Provides 100% transparency & reporting for indexed images
• Compiles a new image sitemap that includes EVERY image in your shop
• Updates this new comprehensive image sitemap after every catalog change
• Instantly re-submits any updates to Google for re-indexing, all in real-time
• Identifies ‘Blackout’ products — for which there seem to be no indexed images at all
• Monitors the average image height of indexed images—this is very useful to understand how Google sees the page, and also shows which quality of images are making it into Google
• Analyzes file name similarity, which is a major predictor of successful indexing with Google

Image Sitemap for Shopify — Screenshot

Pricing starts at $4/month.

Click here to view my app in the Shopify App Store.

Follow me on Twitter. Find me on LinkedIn.