Top 14 Shopify SEO tools to boost your store's visibility [2024]

Shopify SEO tools can help you optimize your online store, increase visibility in search engine results pages, and attract more customers to grow your ecommerce business. But with over 8,000 apps in the Shopify App Store, which tools do you choose? What do you really need for effective Shopify SEO, and how do you sort through so many options to select the most essential Shopify SEO tools?

We've put together a list of 14 top tools to increase your Shopify store's SEO performance. Our selections range from sitemap tools that help Google index your site to speed optimization tools that make your store load faster for customers. For each app listed here, we cover app descriptions, feature overviews, and pricing, including free and premium tiers where applicable. Use our guide to select the best Shopify SEO tools to help you maximize your site's search engine performance.

Main takeaways from this article:

• Shopify SEO tools enhance site indexing for search engines and offer comprehensive solutions for end-to-end SEO optimization, including automatic performance evaluations and improvement suggestions.

• Specialized tools focus on image optimization for faster downloads, speed optimization for quicker site loading, and tag page optimization for editing metadata in Shopify subcollections.

• SEO management and booster tools continuously monitor site performance, support improvements, and provide optimization reports for metadata, site speed, and navigational structure.

• Google search ranking tools, along with SEO rank-tracking, allow for effective tracking and monitoring of a website's position on Google search results, aiding in strategic planning.

• SEO reporting and analytics tools deliver insights into website performance, customer behavior, and competitor analysis, facilitating informed decision-making and strategy adjustments.

• Tools for SEO content enhancement and PPC campaigns aim to improve SEO content quality and drive organic traffic, while comprehensive site audit tools support regular and thorough site evaluations.

Shopify SEO refers to the various practices and strategies implemented to enhance the visibility and ranking of a Shopify store in search engine results.

Why is Shopify SEO important?

Think of Shopify SEO as your very own digital billboard — but far more sophisticated. It's an effective way to rank on search engine result pages when shoppers search for products that you sell. By perfecting your Shopify SEO, you make your store more visible, placing your products right in front of potential buyers. 

It involves optimizing your site's structure, product descriptions, meta tags, and various other aspects — all aimed at attracting more organic traffic. Essentially, a strong Shopify SEO strategy can propel your store to the forefront, boosting visibility and sales.

Below, we've picked the top Shopify SEO tools from 14 different categories of apps. For each Shopify SEO tool discussed below, we cover what it does, its features and benefits, and its pricing plans. Here are the categories we'll discuss and our picks for the best Shopify SEO tools in each category:

1. Sitemap management: Magical XML/HTML Sitemap

2. SEO optimization: Plug In SEO

3. Image optimization: VF Image Resizer & Optimizer

4. SEO indexing: 20North Instant SEO Indexer

5. SEO management: SEO Manager

6. Speed optimization: Hyperspeed

7. Tag page SEO optimizer: Optizen

8. SEO booster and speed optimization: SearchPie

9. Google search results ranking: Google Console

10. SEO reporting and analytics: Google Analytics

11. SEO content and PPC campaigns: Google Keyword Planner

12. SEO rank tracking: Ahrefs

13. Comprehensive SEO optimization: Yoast SEO

14. Complete SEO site audit: Screaming Frog SEO Spider

We include both free Shopify SEO tools and premium ones. Let's look at what each of these apps has to offer:

1. Magical XML/HTML Sitemap: Sitemap management tool

Sitemaps improve your SEO rankings by mapping your site's structure so search engine robots can crawl and index your pages efficiently. They tell search engines which pages on your site are important, when your pages were last updated, whether your pages have alternate language versions, and other key information. Sitemaps also help human visitors navigate your site, which boosts your rankings by generating more visits to your pages. Having a sitemap becomes especially important if your site has a large amount of content, is new, has a significant amount of rich media content, or is listed on search engine news tabs. Sitemaps have a limit of 50,000 URLs, so if you have a large ecommerce store with lots of content, you may need multiple sitemaps to index everything.

Magical XML/HTML Sitemap is among the top-rated Shopify SEO apps that lets you automatically build and publish customized sitemaps. This app generates sitemaps in HTML, guiding human users, and links your XML sitemap to Google, guiding Google's web crawler. You can customize your HTML sitemap's layout and style and create rules for displaying new content.

Price:

Starter plan: $1/month with a 14-day free trial.

2. Plugin SEO: SEO optimization tool

Plug In SEO provides automated tools to evaluate your site's search engine performance, identify areas for improvement, and implement them. It audits your site and then provides step-by-step suggestions for how to fix any problems that are identified. Premium packages include tools for:

Targeting keyword data in your page titles and descriptions.Fixing broken links that can block search engine indexing.Structuring data on your site with JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data), a format that tags content on your site to make it easier for search engines to crawl.

Price:

• 14-day free trial.

• Small store: $29.99 a month for up to 200 pages, with basic SEO and blog checking, title and description management features, JSON-LD structured data tools, broken link tools, and search trends reports.

• Medium store: $49.99 a month for up to 2,000 managed pages, two detailed monthly speed and SEO reports, and all the basic SEO features from previous plans.

• Large store: $79.99 a month for unlimited managed pages, detailed speed reports, and SEO reports.

3. VF Image Resizer & Optimizer: Image optimization tool

Image files can consume significant amounts of file space on your server. This can slow downloads for visitors, shortening visits and earning penalties from Google. To optimize your images for SEO, your files must also be named correctly and accompanied by alt-text descriptions for users who can't load them and search engine crawlers trying to index them.

VF Image Resizer & Optimizer provides an all-in-one tool for sizing and optimizing your image files to make them ideal for SEO. This SEO image optimizer plug-in:

• Uses AI to help you resize your images to a uniform size, scale them, crop them, and add watermarks.

• Compresses your images to speed up page loading.

• Optimizes your image file names with alt-text descriptions.

VF Image Resizer & Optimizer supports all image formats, including JPG, GIF, PNG, HEIC, and WEBP.

Price:

• Free: Edit up to 200 images and pay an additional $1.99 per 100 images with one-week backup, unlimited alt-text optimization, access to all features, and email support.

• Starter: $4.99 a month; lets you edit 800 images, plus 100 extra images worth $1.29

• Basic: $8.99 a month and $0.79 per 100 images for up to 2,000 images a month with unlimited alt-text and file name optimization, plus everything in the free plan.

• Professional: $18.99 a month and $0.49 per 100 images for up to 6,000 images a month with unlimited alt-text and file name optimization, plus everything in the basic plan.

• Advanced: $38.99 a month and $0.29 per 100 images for up to 20,000 images a month with unlimited alt-text and file name optimization, unlimited file compression, plus everything in the previous plans.

4. 20North Instant SEO Indexer: SEO indexing update tool

When you update files on your site, Google's web crawler needs to index your updates. This process may take days or weeks in some cases.

20North Instant SEO Indexer speeds up this process by letting Google know about your updates right away. Google will recrawl your site immediately and update your indexing right away.

Price:

$4.99 a month, with a seven-day free trial.

5. SEO Manager: SEO management automation tool

SEO involves many moving parts. Manually keeping track of all of them can be time-consuming, and it's easy to miss something.

SEO Manager helps Shopify webmasters automate their key search engine optimization procedures. It provides:

• Real-time SEO performance scans of your entire site, with actionable tips for making improvements.

• Integration of Google Trends and Google Analytics to help you discover keywords.

• Templates for automating your titles, descriptions, and image alt-text descriptions.

• Automatic addition of Schema structured data markup to help search engine web crawlers index your site more efficiently.

• Real-time repair of 404 "page not found" errors that can block search engine indexing, plus the ability to keep track of repairs by logging, managing, and importing, and exporting repair data.

SEO Manager is designed to be easy to install and user-friendly for Shopify store owners of any size.

Price:

$20 a month with a seven-day free trial.

6. Hyperspeed: Page speed optimization tool

Slow-loading pages can frustrate visitors and shorten visit times, costing you search engine rankings as well as customers. Even a few seconds of waiting can make the difference between high-ranking pages and low rankings.

Hyperspeed helps Shopify webmasters improve page-loading speed on mobile and desktop devices and optimize the key factors Google uses to measure page speed, known as Core Web Vitals. It provides:

• Acceleration of initial page loading through deferred loading of elements users don't immediately need to see the page (lazy loading), loading of critical CSS users need to see above-the-fold content, and deferral of JavaScript downloading while pages are loading.

• SEO image optimizer support with unlimited compression.

• App cache speed boosting to reduce delays caused by loading third-party Shopify apps.

• Automated monitoring of speed impact from new images and apps.

• Minimization of unnecessary elements in CSS and JavaScript codes that can slow page loading (minification).

Price:

$49 a month with a seven-day free trial.$468 a year for a 20% discount.

7. Optizen: Product subcollection tag page optimization tool7. Family funny sayings

Shopify lets you organize your products into categories called collections that help customers find what they're looking for. You can divide collections into subcollections. However, Shopify doesn't have native tools to optimize subcollections for SEO.

Optizen fills this gap by providing tools to help you optimize your subcollections. It lets you:

• Optimize subcollection tag pages to unlock additional keywords and traffic.

• Edit meta information for subcollection tag pages, including titles, descriptions, H1, and content.

• Add tags for page variants, such as product pages in different colors and sizes.

Price:

• Optizen AI Free: Free

• Optizen AI: $9.99/month for full control over product SEO, SEO title, H1 page titles, product descriptions, image alt text

• Optizen Pro: $19.99 a month or $200 a year for a 17% discount, including custom content for product pages below the product grid only, editing for SEO meta information on tag pages, and selection of tags for indexing.

• Optizen Enterprise: $29.99 a month or $300 a year for a 17% discount, including everything in Optizen Pro plus variant tagging and image thumbnail matching.

8. SearchPie: SEO page booster and page speed optimization tool

SearchPie combines a number of the features of some of the previous SEO tools while offering additional features. It focuses on improving local search results and visibility and increasing site-loading speed. It offers:

• Up-to-date SEO performance reports.

• Bulk updating of meta titles, meta descriptions, and alt tags.

• Page loading acceleration through "instant page" preloading of pages before users click on them, use of the fast-loading AMP HTML framework, and compression of images.

• Automated detection and navigation of 404 errors and long URLs that can interfere with loading and indexing.

• Automatic rich snippets JSON-LD structured data markup for efficient web crawler indexing.

Price:

• Starter plan: Free, including SEO reports, bulk updating for SEO tags, basic site speed. acceleration, sitemap submission, and 24/7 live chat support.

• Premium plan: $39 a month or $374 a year for a 20% discount.

• Enterprise plan: $99 a month or $594 a year for a 50% discount.

9. Google Search Console

As a free service from Google, Google Search Console allows you to monitor and maintain your site's presence in Google Search results. It offers a better understanding of how Google and its users view your website.

This tool helps you with: 

• URL inspection to check specific pages’ crawl, index, and distribution details.

• Performance Reports for tracking website traffic and performance.

• Coverage Reports to identify crawl errors and indexed pages.

• Sitemaps and individual URL submissions for indexing.

• Mobile Usability Report to measure your site's mobile friendliness.

• Core Web Vitals reporting for analyzing user experience on your site.

Price: 

• Google Search Console is free to use.

10. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an indispensable tool for nailing your Shopify store's SEO game. It provides valuable insights into your website traffic, user behavior, and a whole host of other analytical data. This full-fledged digital analytics software allows you to track visitors from all referrers, including search engines and social networks, direct visits, and referring sites. 

Here's what it can help you with:

• Provides in-depth knowledge about your audience demographics, including their interests, geographical location, age, and gender.

• Offers user flow reporting, revealing how customers are navigating through your Shopify store.

• Enables goal setting and conversion tracking, giving you insights into what’s working and what’s not on your site.

• Equips you with campaign measurement to help you track the performance of your marketing endeavors.

• Allows integration with other Google tools like Google Ads and Google Search Console, leading to a consolidated SEO strategy.

Price: 

• Google Analytics: Free.

• Google Analytics 360: Starts at $12,500/month; ideal for large businesses that need advanced analytics.

11. Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is an invaluable resource for Shopify store owners looking to create SEO-friendly content and reach a larger audience. Here's what you can do with this tool: 

• Keyword research and discovery help you uncover new, relevant keyword suggestions for your content and advertisements.

• Keyword metrics provide insight into how often keywords are searched and their overall competition level.

• Uncover trends data on how keyword search volume fluctuates over time.

• Get bid estimates for each keyword to help manage ad costs effectively.

Price:

• Google Keyword Planner is a free tool within Google Ads.

12. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO tool that assists you in understanding what your competitors are doing and how you can outperform them in search engine rankings. Praised for its easy-to-use interface and robust management features, it's a favored choice for many Shopify store operators.

Ahrefs offers a comprehensive suite of features, such as:

• Site Explorer, to help you analyze site backlink profiles and search traffic.

• Keywords Explorer provides insights about keyword difficulty, search volume, and more.

• Rank Tracker Monitors your Shopify store's rankings over time.

• Content Explorer helps you discover top-performing content in your niche for content ideas.

• SEO Toolbar delivers useful data about your pages and search engine results right in your browser.

Price:

• Lite: $99 per month, ideal for small businesses and startups.

• Standard: $199 per month, designed for freelance SEO and marketing consultants.

• Advanced: $399 per month, best for in-house marketing teams.

• Agency: $999 per month, tailored for large agencies and enterprises.

13. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a widely used and comprehensive SEO tool designed to provide a hassle-free SEO experience by handling technical elements and enhancing on-page SEO efforts. 

Some of the core features of Yoast SEO are:

• Readability analysis to ensure your content is simple and effective.

• SEO analysis feature evaluates your keyword use in the content.

• Advanced XML Sitemaps functionality enhances visibility for Google.

• Breadcrumb control ensures easy navigation on your website.

• Canonical URLs feature to avoid duplicate content issues.

Price:

• Free version with limited functionality.

• Yoast SEO Premium: $99 for one year of added tools and functionality for enhanced SEO.

14. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a comprehensive SEO site audit tool that lets you analyze your website on a sophisticated scale and unveil substantial insights to improve your on-site SEO strategy. This website crawler:

• Enables you to crawl both small and large websites efficiently, while you can also save and re-upload crawls for further analysis

• Provides visually appealing graphs and charts to understand your site architecture and uncover SEO insights

• Allows you to visualize redirect chains and loops or crawl a website's link structure to identify and scrutinize redirects

• Offers the ability to view URLs blocked by meta robots, X-Robots, or Robots.txt, and audit directives & their primary sources

• Includes a view that displays link equity or link juice and detail on nofollow & followed links

Price:

• Free Version: Limited features, maximum 500 URL crawl limit

• Paid Version: Starting from £259 per year, unlimited crawl limit with many advanced features

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