Kyle Risley is senior lead, SEO, at Shopify.

It’s a common situation: You’ve been meaning to optimize your product pages for search engines, but you’ve put it off and now you have a lot of pages you need to clean up. Instead of editing each page individually, which can be time-consuming, you can use an SEO bulk editor.

With Shopify, you have four options for bulk editing: Shopify’s built-in bulk editor, CSV upload, third-party apps, and API integration. In this article, I’ll go over when to use each of these methods, as well as the benefits of using a bulk editor and how to maintain SEO with bulk edits.

When to use a bulk editor

There are a few situations in which it makes more sense to use a bulk editor:

Managing a large catalog

If you manage a large product catalog, bulk editing is a necessity. Manually editing your product pages is just too time consuming in this case. If you decide to use CSV import/export for your bulk editing process (more on that later), you can save even more time by using generative AI integrations. These can help you automate SEO tasks like writing optimized product titles and descriptions. Even if you’re not using AI integrations, it’s way faster and easier to review and update 20 cells versus opening and editing 20 pages.

Security

One use case for bulk editing via CSV in particular is outsourcing work while maintaining security. Let’s say you hire an SEO consultant to optimize your product pages. Even though Shopify offers robust permissions that allow merchants to specify which areas of a site a user can view and edit, you may feel more comfortable using a shared spreadsheet with your product data.

Migrating from another platform

One of the most common pitfalls with a CMS migration is you don’t retain your SEO titles and descriptions when you migrate. That’s because your old content management system probably uses slightly different locations and names for your data, and your new CMS might not know exactly where to look for things.

Product CSVs—the same ones used for bulk editing—can be useful for exporting descriptions and title tags from your old CMS. Before you import, match the column names with Shopify’s expected column name values. Then import them into Shopify, using matching formulas in Google Sheets or Excel to make sure the new values match the old values. This ensures nothing gets left behind in a migration. 

If you’re migrating to Shopify, which typically involves URL redirects, you’ll manage that process via CSV anyway. Why not copy over your product data at this time as well, so you don’t need to upload everything manually? 

Bulk editing methods

• Shopify’s built-in bulk editor
• Shopify CSV upload
• Third-party apps
• API integration

Bulk editing itself is pretty straightforward once you’ve chosen which tool to use. Here’s an overview of four bulk editing methods, with a detailed explanation of each below:

Shopify’s built-in bulk editor

Shopify has a native function called bulk editor that allows you to edit fields for multiple products at once. This is a good option if you want to edit a smaller number of products (less than 50) and you don’t need to use spreadsheet features like AI text generation (more on that later).

The bulk editor does have some notable limitations:

• You can only bulk edit product pages. You can’t bulk edit other page types like blog posts.
• You can’t use the bulk editor for URL redirects.

Shopify CSV upload 

If you need to edit more than 50 products at once, you might want to do your bulk editing in a CSV file. Shopify has a sample CSV file you can open in your preferred spreadsheet software. Export your product data, then bulk edit it in that file and re-upload it. 

This is a free and relatively straightforward—if not elegant—way to audit your site without using a paid site crawler like Screaming Frog because it allows you to see your entire site in one file. And even if you do your SEO audit with a paid tool, you can still use the CSV to implement the changes recommended by the audit tool. For example, if you have 150 title tags marked as too long or too short, bulk editing them in a CSV file is the way to go.

One of the biggest advantages of using a CSV file to bulk edit is that you can integrate external AI text generation services (e.g. Google Sheets AI function, custom AppsScript, or Sheets plug-ins) to write new titles or descriptions. 

Note: When working in your CSV, do not edit the “URL Handle” column unless you want to change the product URL. Shopify uses the handle as the unique identifier for the product. If you change it in the spreadsheet, Shopify will not update the existing product. Instead, it will create a new duplicate product and leave the old one as is.

Whether or not bulk editing via CSV file will work for you depends on what you want to edit. Shopify can support both default metafields (available out of the box, defined by Shopify) and custom metafields (defined by the merchant). But it can’t support metaobjects or non-product pages like collection pages or blog posts.

If you use custom metafields, I recommend following these steps to ensure the column header values map exactly (the syntax is sensitive):

1. Create the custom metafield
2. Export the data
3. Make changes
4. Re-upload the data with your changes

Third-party apps

In the cases where Shopify’s built-in CSV import/export feature doesn’t work, you can use a third-party bulk editor app, such as Matrixify. 

Here are some common reasons to use a third-party app:

Bulk editing page titles and descriptions for collection pages

If you have just a handful of collection pages, it’s not much work to edit them manually. But if you have a large product catalog, you might also have a lot of collection pages. (In fact, creating more collection pages is one of my favorite SEO “hacks” for merchants.) Editing multiple pages at once can be a huge time-saver, but it requires a third-party app.

Bulk editing titles and descriptions for blog posts

If content marketing is part of your SEO strategy, you might find yourself wanting to bulk edit blog page titles or SEO meta descriptions. This is a great reason to use a third-party app, since Shopify’s native integrations don’t allow for bulk editing of blog posts.

Bulk editing metaobjects

Metaobjects can be useful for enriching pages with critical data like size charts, ingredient lists, or blog authors—all of which can help with SEO. If you need to edit a large number of metaobjects at once, use a third-party app. 

Easier for bulk URL edits

If you need to make bulk changes to URL handles, third-party apps offer a much simpler experience than Shopify’s native CSV upload. Shopify uses the URL handle to identify products. Changing that field in the CSV causes the system to create a new product, rather than updating the existing one. Many third-party apps match by product ID, allowing you to safely update URLs without the risk of duplicating products. 

API integration

For more advanced use cases, a direct API integration is likely more convenient. If you need to integrate your updates with other software or based on your own custom rules, that would be most easily achieved with a direct API integration. This way you can push the direct updates you want to make without collating them into a file.

Advanced users can write scripts to edit the SEO title, SEO description, title, and “descriptionHtml” values for all products and collections directly via the Admin API. For SEO title and SEO description, there is an SEO object within the API definitions. You can edit these values using the productUpdate and collectionUpdate GraphQL mutations.

Best practices for maintaining SEO during bulk updates

Bulk editing is a bit of a double-edged sword. The same scale that helps you quickly implement changes can harm you if you make a mistake. Let’s say you accidentally bulk edit SEO titles in a way that makes them less relevant to users’ queries. If you do this for a handful of pages, the impact will be minor. But if you do it in bulk, then the impact is much larger.

Here are some best practices to consider:

Always save a backup

Before you upload a CSV or run a bulk command via an app, ensure you have an unedited export file saved on your computer. If your bulk edit results in errors or incorrect data, you can re-upload this backup file to revert your store to its previous state instantly.

Understand terminology

To avoid mistakes when bulk editing, make sure you understand the different terms used to describe the SEO data you’re working with. For example, if you use Shopify’s sample CSV file, the column labeled “title” is the product title. “SEO title” refers to the meta title, “SEO description” is the meta description, and “description” is the on-page product description.

Note that if you don’t update the SEO title and SEO description, these will default to the product title and product description.

Avoid editing URLs

Don’t edit URLs unless you really need to. It can be tempting to bulk edit your URLs so that they match the on-page title or each other, but there’s no real SEO benefit and it can lead to more problems in the long run. When you edit a URL, you’ll need to create a redirect or run the risk of users clicking on the old URL and getting an error message.

Fill out every field

Leaving fields empty is one of the biggest mistakes I see with bulk editing. You’re unlikely to preview every change you make, so you may accidentally leave fields empty. This can cause data to revert back to the default and harm your SEO.