Shopify multiple storefronts SEO: running multiple brands on one Shopify store

The store this series describes

One Shopify store on a standard plan, not Shopify Plus. One theme. One catalogue of art: mostly prints made on demand, plus personalised and commissioned pieces. Three brands, each with its own domain, audience and look:

• DiviArts Studio — wall art, at diviartsstudio.com. The primary domain.
• Fern & Nest — nursery and baby, at shopfernandnest.com.
• Forever Artify — custom watercolour commissions, at foreverartify.com.

Every product belongs to exactly one brand. Each domain is an alias domain on the same store, so it serves the storefront under its own name, and the theme reads the hostname to decide which brand to show. Nothing here is hidden: each storefront’s footer links to the other two.

Everything in this series can be checked on those three domains. View the source of a product page for its canonical tag, or open /robots.txt on each.

The series

One post at a time, in the order we did the work. Each links to the guide that explains the general case, so the posts stay about what happened on our store.

1. Why we run three brands from one Shopify store, and what Shopify gives you for it
2. Setting up Umbrella on a live store: brands, domains, the theme line, per-brand sitemap and robots.txt — coming next
3. Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for three brand domains — coming
4. The CDN setting that overrode our robots.txt for AI crawlers — coming
5. Product structured data per brand: offers, shipping and returns per variant — coming
6. Google Merchant Center for three brands, and the return-policy mismatch — coming
7. Microsoft Merchant Center and Bing Shopping from the same store — coming
8. Blog posts on a multi-brand store: the canonical trap — coming
9. GA4 and Google Ads across brand domains without mixing audiences — coming
10. Pinterest for a multi-brand store: one tag per brand, one claim per domain — coming
11. The Meta pixel and Facebook, per brand — coming
12. Order emails that know which brand sold — coming
13. Marketing email per brand — coming

The checklist we used

The whole setup on one page, in the order it has to happen. Each item links to where it is explained; the ones without a link are posts still to come.

On Shopify

• Add each brand’s domain under Settings › Domains and turn its redirect off, so it serves the storefront instead of bouncing to the primary. Redirect or alias.
• Re-enter any absolute links in your navigation as relative paths, so a brand’s menu does not send shoppers to the primary domain.
• Decide how a product is assigned to a brand, and assign every product. Anything unassigned belongs to the primary domain.
• Brand the theme by hostname: logo, colours and copy per domain.

Sitemaps, canonicals and robots.txt

• Count the URLs in each domain’s /sitemap.xml. If the counts match, every domain is listing the whole catalogue. Why they match.
• Check the canonical on a product page from a second domain. Why it names the primary.
• Publish a sitemap per brand, a canonical that names the owning brand, and a robots.txt that points each domain at its own sitemap. This is what Umbrella does; the setup steps.
• Fetch robots.txt from outside your network with curl, not only in the Shopify admin. A CDN or proxy in front of the store can answer instead of it.

Search engines

• One Search Console domain property per brand domain, and submit that domain’s own sitemap to it. Search Console with several domains.
• Bing Webmaster Tools for each domain. It can import sites from Search Console.
• Structured data on product pages whose url matches the canonical, with shipping and return details that match your policy pages.
• Assign a brand to every blog article as well as every product, or articles are credited to the primary domain.

Shopping feeds

• Google Merchant Center: one feed per brand domain, with each brand’s links on its own domain. Merchant Center with several domains.
• Make the return and shipping policies on each storefront say what the Merchant Center settings say.
• Microsoft Merchant Center for Bing Shopping.

Analytics and ads

• Decide how analytics tells the brands apart before collecting data, not after.
• If ad accounts or audiences are shared with anything else, write down which lists each campaign excludes.

Social and email

• Pinterest: a tag per brand, and each domain claimed.
• Meta: a dataset and domain verification per brand.
• Order confirmation, shipping and abandoned-checkout emails that show the brand the customer bought from.

What this series does not claim

These posts describe what we configured and what each file says. They do not say what a search engine did as a result, because no setup controls that, and a post that implied it would be wrong. Where we report what Search Console or Merchant Center showed afterwards, it is reported as what they showed, with the date. Our terms say the same about the app.

If you run several brands on one store and want to see what your domains publish today, send us the domains. Or start with the first post.

Read part 1