So, you finally got your first Shopify store up and running.
You’ve found the right products to sell, set up an email list, and learned everything there is to know about the Shopify platform.
But even though you work hard, no one comes to your store.
You need traffic, and the best Shopify SEO apps on the market right now are what you need to get it.
What’s SEO?
Before you can make sales on your Shopify store, you need people to visit it.
There are many free ways to get people to visit your store, but SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of the best ways to get free organic traffic.
Search engines use a set of rules called an algorithm to decide what to put at the top of search results. This algorithm is made up of more than 100 parts, and even Google engineers don’t know what they all are.
Here are a few things that are important for SEO.
- Backlinks that point to your site
- On-page optimization for keywords you want to rank for
- How fast your site’s pages load
- Mobile-friendliness
- How good and long the page’s content is
- Having a secure website (HTTPS instead of HTTP)
These are just a few of the most important things Google looks at in 2019.
Can Shopify help you improve your SEO?
First of all, you’re in luck because Shopify already has a lot of things that are good for SEO. This gives you an advantage over people who use other platforms.
But you still have work to do. Shopify can be made even better for SEO, for sure. Using a Shopify SEO plugin is one way to do this.
Getting links that lead back to your Shopify store is another way.
If you don’t optimize your Shopify store for search engines, you’ll fall behind the millions of other Shopify stores that do.
Not only that, but all the free traffic you bring to your store means you have more money to spend on paid ads to bring in even more people.
The Best SEO Apps for Shopify
Some SEO factors won’t get better just by adding an SEO plugin to Shopify.
For instance, if you want to build more high-quality backlinks, you’ll need a good plan for doing so.
Also, even the best free Shopify SEO app won’t magically make your store full of high-quality content that tells Google your store is full of useful information.
But Shopify SEO apps can definitely help with things like page speed and on-page SEO, which will go a long way toward increasing organic traffic.
Here are the top 5 Shopify SEO apps that will help you rank higher on Google in 2023.
Plug In SEO
Plug in SEO is just great. It’s like having your own SEO assistant who lets you know when there are problems.
Plug in SEO is currently on the stores of more than 90,000 Shopify users. That says a lot about how useful it is, so it was easy to put it on this list of the best Shopify SEO apps.
The most important thing about this app is that it checks for SEO problems on its own. Once it’s on your store, it will run tests automatically on a regular basis and tell you how your SEO is doing.
But that’s not all. It will also give you free code snippets and instructions to help you fix the problems yourself. If you send an email to the developers, they may even send you free extra help.
Here are some of the checks that happen when a test is run.
- SEO problems: The app will check your whole site and all of your product listings to make sure that nothing is hurting your site’s SEO.
- Speed: Is there something on your website that slows it down?
- Blog: If you don’t have any content for your blog, this plugin will suggest paid ways to get blog posts ready for your store.
- Broken links: This check makes sure that all the links on your site are still working and up to date.
- Keywords: Have you optimized your pages and metadata for your keywords?
Pricing
There are two ways to set the price for this plugin.
There is a Free Forever plan that gives you access to unlimited SEO, blog, speed problem checks, fix instructions, automatic email alerts, and email support.
But the Plus plan is where the real gold is.
For $20 a month, you get automatic SEO improvements, how-to videos, title and description editing (including bulk edits), premium support, powerful SEO control, and structured data with full JSON scripts.
You even get the plugin installed for free on your Shopify store, which is a great bonus for store owners who aren’t as tech-savvy.
You can try the Plus tier for free for 7 days if you want to. If you don’t like the extra features, you can always go back to the Free plan.
But I think it’s worth spending a little more on those extra features. Think of it as an investment. That extra $20 a month can help you get more visitors, which will lead to sales that are much more than $20.
You could save a lot of time just with the automatic SEO improvements, giving you more time to work on other parts of your business.
This Shopify SEO plugin works with Google, Bing, Langify, Locksmith, and any other search engines your potential customers might be using.
Ultra SEO
Don’t get me wrong, Shopify is a great platform for online stores. But they don’t have many ways to change titles and descriptions.
Changing the meta tags on your product pages isn’t easy.
Mega tags are, in short, those hidden HTML tags that are on every page of a website. This is what Google uses to show the title and description snippet when your site comes up in a search result. What I mean is…
Getting people to click on your product descriptions is all about making the most of these meta tags. If you can’t change these, Google will automatically pull text from your page based on what it thinks is most important, but it might get it wrong sometimes.
Ultra SEO is the way to get full control over all of these choices.
Features
Ultra SEO gives you a dashboard with all the tools you need to change everything about the meta tags for your product.
You can change the text below.
- Title
- Description
- Keywords that you want to target
- Name of the author
- The preview that shows up in search results
To use the plugin, just click on the “More actions” tab when you are editing a product listing on your Shopify store.
On average, the meta tags will show up on Google one week after you change them. With a ‘Characters remaining’ text, the app also tells you how many characters to use to get the most out of them.
You can go over this limit, but if you do, Google might shorten your text.
Ultra SEO can be set up with just one click, and you’ll never have to code anything.
Pricing
At $10 per month, this Shopify SEO plugin is very cheap.
You also get a free 7-day trial so you can try it out before paying for it.
Smart SEO
In the last section, we talked about how important meta tags are for your Shopify store’s SEO. Meta tags are a great thing to use Ultra SEO for.
But you know what’s even better than being able to change your meta tags?
Not having to enter any meta tags by hand at all.
Smart SEO comes into play here. This amazing tool makes it a lot easier to improve your store’s SEO. It does this by using flexible JSON-LD structured data.
Smart SEO is by far the best Shopify SEO app when it comes to how well it works.
The plugin’s creators even say that you can cut 80% of the time you spend optimizing your store.
Features
Smart SEO will make meta tags and alt tags for all of the products on your store without you having to do anything. You might ask, “How does it do this?”
This plugin gives you a useful tool that lets you make templates for generating metadata. When you add new products and pages to your store, Smart SEO will use this template as a set of rules to make new tags.
As you can see in the image above, these templates can be made by following simple scripting rules. There’s no need for long lines of code that are hard to understand.
Smart SEO is able to do this because it can integrate JSON-LD instead of using languages like liquid and javascript.
If you don’t know what JSON is, don’t be scared. It’s easy to use, and as the screenshot shows, the plugin gives you examples of tokens to choose from.
Smart SEO will also make alt tags automatically, so you don’t have to wait hours or days.
One of Shopify’s most important features is that you can’t manage your sitemap. But this Shopify SEO plugin has a sitemap feature that lets you change your store’s sitemap without leaving the app.
A sitemap is important for good SEO, and this feature keeps you from having to install yet another plugin. You could always find a plugin that makes a sitemap.
The more apps you add to your site that you don’t need, the more likely it is that these plugins will slow it down. This goes against your goal of making your SEO better.
Pricing
You can try Smart SEO for free for 7 days. After those 7 days are up, you can keep using the app for just $4.99 a month. That is a great deal right there.
Think of all the time you’ll save for just $5! If you want to make SEO for Shopify easier, you should add this one to your list.
SEO Audit
This app is a lot like Plug in SEO, but its main purpose is to show you where you stand in terms of SEO rankings.
Benchmark Hero focuses on giving you the most in-depth and detailed site audit to help you figure out why your site isn’t getting traffic. It’s one of the best Shopify SEO apps because it gives you a good look at the SEO health of your store.
During the audit, here are the main things the app checks for you:
- How fast the site could get and what this could mean for sales.
- How trustworthy your store is
- The value of a customer over their lifetime
- How many customers come back again and again
- How people look at your site
- How Google looks through your site
- Simple ways to get better results
This app helps you figure out where your traffic is coming from, how many new customers you’re getting, and how many of your old customers you’re keeping. It does this by giving you information about your customers.
You can’t do that with any of the other plugins on this list.
Benchmark Hero doesn’t have a whole lot of features, but it does what it does very well.
This app is 100% free, and there are no paid options. Try it out, and you might find out something useful.
Bulk Edit Image SEO
So far, I’ve shown you the best Shopify SEO apps for optimizing speed and text.
But there’s one thing we haven’t talked about yet, and it’s a very important part of any e-commerce store.
Images are a big part of your Shopify store, no doubt about it. Images can really hurt your SEO rankings if you don’t keep an eye on them.
That’s because large images will slow down your site a lot. If you don’t give your images the right alt-text and file names, you’ll miss out on a huge SEO opportunity.
Several of the best Shopify SEO apps let you fix this problem by letting you edit your images one by one. But that might not be enough if you’ve already set up hundreds of products on your site.
Here’s where the bulk edit feature comes in.
Features
The main thing that makes this plugin stand out is that you can change the alt-text and file names of many images at once. They let you do this by using templates that you can change to fit your store as a whole.
This means that all of your products’ image SEO formats will be the same.
You can also use a “set it and forget it” feature to have any new images you add to your store automatically updated.
This will save you a lot of time because you can tell the app how you want the alt-text and file names to be, and it will do it for you.
Work once and get paid for life.
Also, you can:
- Put watermarks on your photos to protect yourself from competitors with bad intentions.
- Reduce the size of an image without losing quality.
- Change the size, crop, frame, and trim of your product photos, or make them all square.
- After a bulk edit, you can look at changelogs to see all the changes made to images.
- Changes you don’t like can be taken back.
Pricing
This app is the best free Shopify SEO app for optimizing images because it has a starter option. But you can add more to your services with a total of 5 tiers:
- Starter: Free
- Standard: $9.99 per month
- Advanced: $49.99 Premium: $19.99
- Enterprise: $99.99
All plans allow you to make as many changes as you want to your Alt Text, minimize options, PNG to JPG edits, making your images square, and email support.
The main difference between the plans is how many image edits you need each month and how long your images are backed up. Except for the Starter plan, all of the other plans offer advanced edits and image and theme optimization.
They offer custom pricing if you need to change more than 25,000 images per month.
Conclusion
In 2023, it’s a no-brainer to optimize your store for SEO. With all of the best Shopify SEO apps available for low prices (or even for free! ), you have no reason to be behind in this area.
Together, the five apps in this post will take care of everything you need to win at Shopify SEO in 2023. You’ll be ready for anything, whether it’s site speed, meta descriptions, image optimization, or pages that are ready for mobile use.
Even if you know nothing about SEO, you can still get the most organic traffic to your store. We just reviewed a new Shopify product app that came out recently. Here is our review.
