If you have two or more Shopify stores for the same business serving different countries or languages, you may be losing traffic and sales from poor SEO.
The hreflang tag tells search engines like Google what version of the page from what store, to serve users. The tag also prevents duplicate content created from similar content being on multiple stores.
The problem in Shopify is you must have the exact same collections, products, pages, blogs, and articles in each store—all with the same URL handle. If one store doesn't contain all of the same products, or any URL handle for a store varies between another store, standard hreflang tags in Shopify are bad for SEO. The majority of Shopify stores do hreflang tags with a {{ canonical_url }} value, which point to non-existent pages (404s).
The way to historically solve this problem is to have the exact same store setup and URLs across all stores. If you have stores in different languages, that is bad for SEO, and bad for the user experience, because your URL handles should be in the same language as the store.
Your stores can now have perfect hreflang tags to increase sales from organic search.
Without the app, your customers may be taken to the wrong store when coming from Google or Bing search, which can lead to confusion in international shipping and poorer conversion rates.
By using the app, organic conversion rates may increase as visitors are served the correct store for their region and language in search results.
