At IndeedSEO, We have established our own internal structure for how we conduct SEO on Shopify and deal with a lot of Shopify customers. Over time, we have therefore begun to truly feel for the tools and apps we would want to use. Although Shopify’s app market may not have as many choices as WordPress plugins, there are still plenty of Shopify SEO apps & tools in your hands to simplify your life.
We will discuss some of our preferred tools to employ with the platform in this post. This covers several Shopify tools and apps local to their environment as well as standard SEO tools we always find ourselves employing with our customers.
What Are The Best Shopify SEO Tools?
Explore the best Shopify SEO tools recommended by a Shopify SEO specialist to enhance your store’s visibility and performance.
The best Shopify SEO tools are:
▶ Ahrefs
Shopify SEO Tool Best For Keyword research, backlink analysis, competitive research
Of all the Shopify SEO tools we couldn’t live without, Ahrefs is certainly up there. Ahrefs provides a great suite of SEO tools that includes keyword research, backlink analysis, rank tracking, competitive research, content gap analysis and much more. This is a tool that we use daily for our Shopify clients at IndeedSEO.
One of the strongest components of Ahrefs is its keyword research functionality. Let’s say we’re doing keyword research for a client in the apparel industry and they’ve identified Bombas as a competitor. Since we’re most interested in our Shopify site’s category pages, we want to find keyword opportunities where Bombas’s category pages rank well. Finding these keywords could be highly beneficial as they are more likely to convert since Google has identified the keywords as transactional.
▶ Schema App Total Schema Markup
Shopify SEO Tool Best For Structured Data
Structured data on Shopify can actually be quite the headache. One of the issues with structured data is that there are many fragmented sources that will try to implement structured data on your store. Oftentimes, both the theme and various third party apps will add schema to the site.
This isn’t the ideal way to implement structured data. Ideally, your structured data will be consolidated so that only a single instance of each schema type is available. This helps better outline exactly what the content of your page is about.
Fortunately, the Schema App Total Schema Markup is a great Shopify SEO tool and makes adding structured data very easy. Once you install the app, it should automatically add the following structured data to your site:
- Organization: Home page
- OfferCatalog: Category pages
- Product: Product pages
- BlogPosting: Blog posts
The OfferCatalog schema is a really nice touch as it allows for markup to exist on your category pages which most sites don’t really have. This marks up every single product on your category pages and gives Google additional information such as their name, price, and availability.
▶ Crush.pics
Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Image compression
Shopify stores certainly make extensive use of photos, which is not surprising. Generally speaking, photos will be more plentiful the more SKUs you carry in the store. Of course, a common recommendation to improve site speed is to optimize images. However, when you’re dealing with larger Shopify stores, this can be quite difficult to do at scale.
Crush.pics is a great Shopify SEO tool that automatically compresses all of your site’s images. Simply install the app and Crush.pics should start compressing all of your Shopify domain’s images. It will also automatically compress all new images that are uploaded to the store. Using this app is a great way to apply at least some level of compression to all images that are used on the site.
▶ Lazysizes Library
Shopify SEO Tool Best For Lazy Loading
Using delayed loading is another way you may maximize the photos on your Shopify website. Lazy loading is the phenomenon whereby images of a page load just once a user has navigated to the viewport. This helps save a user’s browser bandwidth as all of a page’s images don’t load immediately, so they’re only served what they need to see.
Instead of using an app to implement lazy loading, we like to use the lazy sizes library. This library works extremely well with Shopify and is generally very straightforward for a developer to implement. By using lazy sizes, you can easily implement lazy loading functionality on your Shopify store.
▶ Shopify URL Redirects
Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Redirects
Shopify makes redirecting URLs easy out of the box. To implement redirects, you don’t need to download any special app to do so. Instead, you can do this natively in Shopify by navigating to Online Store > Navigation > View URL Redirects
In this tool, you’ll be able to see all of the redirects that have been implemented on Shopify.
This is fantastic for cleaning up old and outdated URLs. For instance, if you have recently migrated from another platform, you might consider using the URL redirects tool to ensure that your old URLs are properly mapping to your new ones. You can even bulk upload URLs to redirect using a CSV file.
Please note that to implement redirects on Shopify, you must completely delete the URL first. This means that if the page is still active on Shopify (even if it isn’t published), you cannot implement the redirect. You must first delete the page.
▶ Google Search Console
Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Crawl analysis, Keyword research
Throughout the years, Google Search Console has been a tried and true tool for SEOs everywhere. Search Console offers a wide variety of reports that can be useful for both technical and contextual SEO. Since store owners will gain value from all of its different reports, Search Console is an essential Shopify SEO tool.
The “Performance” report seen in Search Console is among the most often accessed one. This report displays the keywords users are using to locate your website together with the corresponding number of clicks and impressions each term generates. This can be really valuable information to have, especially for revenue-generating pages. For instance, in the Performance report, you can filter down to URLs that contain “/products/” in the URL slug.
Very quickly, you’re able to see potentially valuable keywords that are mapped to your pages that generate revenue for your site. As well, you can pull a similar report for category pages by filtering down to see pages with “/collections/” in the URL. These are fantastic keywords that you can then track and optimize for.
Another report of Search Console that’s worth pointing out is the “Coverage” report. This is a fantastic section of Search Console that shows you which URLs Google is crawling and whether or not it is including them in the index.
▶ Screaming Frog
Shopify SEO Tool Best For Technical SEO Analysis
What “best SEO tool” list is complete without Screaming Frog? It’s a go-to in the arsenal of the vast majority of SEOs. However, there’s a very good reason for it. It can help identify technical SEO issues and opportunities in so many different ways.
Why is Screaming Frog such a great Shopify SEO tool? Here are some of the ways we use it:
- Perform a site crawl to identify duplicate content created by Shopify such as product pages that use the /collections/.*/products/ URL path. Identify if there are any internal links to these duplicate pages and work with a developer to eliminate them.
- Analyze the crawl to see how many internal links are pointing to key pages such as your site’s product pages. Consider implementing elements such as “Related Products” internal links if you’re not finding a lot of internal links.
- Connect Screaming Frog to PageSpeed Insights to get benchmark site speed data. After you’ve made changes, compare your benchmark metrics to the new ones.
- Analyze the anchor text used to link to key pages such as your product and category pages. Sometimes category pages might not be using descriptive text to reference product pages.
- If you’ve migrated to Shopify, use Screaming Frog to confirm that all of your old URLs correctly 301 redirect to the new ones.
- Crawl Shopify’s sitemap.xml file. Identify non-indexable pages and consider deleting and redirecting any outdated ones.
▶ STAT
Shopify SEO Tool Best For Rank Tracking
In terms of a rank-tracking solution, STAT is one of the best on the market. STAT is unparalleled in terms of the ranking data that it collects. STAT will track your keywords daily, which gives you a lot more insight into how your rankings are trending over time. Additionally, you can use keyword segmentation, to isolate your rankings by different groups of keywords.
For example, with a Shopify site, you might create keyword segments within STAT that track your different categories of products over time. If your store sells running shoes, you might set up keyword segments for categories such as “women running shoes”, “men runnings shoes” and “trail running shoes”.
Using STAT, you could then see ranking trends over time for those specific categories. Here’s what our “women’s running shoes” segment might look like. We can see that in general, rankings for these keywords have been trending upwards.
STAT is more of an enterprise-level tool so it comes at a bit of a cost. If you’re a smaller business, you might consider using another rank-tracking solution such as Moz Pro, Ahrefs, or SEMRush. You may also be able to access STAT data through an agency partner (we use STAT at IndeedSEO for example).
▶ Google Analytics
Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Website analytics
Of course, you’re going to want to track more than rankings. Both organic traffic and organic revenue should serve as core KPIs for your Shopify SEO campaign. In general, there’s no easier way to track this data than by using Google Analytics. As the most popular Web analytics platform, Google Analytics provides you with robust data that you can use to measure the success of your campaign. As well, Google Analytics is completely free to install and use.
One of our favorite KPIs to track is YoY organic traffic. For instance, if you want to see how your store performed the week of Black Friday as compared to the previous year, you can easily do so using Google Analytics. Simply create a segment for “Organic Traffic” and then use a comparison timeline to compare organic traffic to the previous year. Using an example, we can see how this website generated a lot more organic revenue as compared to the week of Black Friday during the previous year.
▶ Rewind Backups
Shopify SEO Tool Best For Website backups
As we all know, SEO isn’t just changing words on a page anywhere. It requires coordination with multiple teams from design to developers. When new functionality is added to your site such as schema, UX changes, or new page designs, things don’t always go as planned. This is why you must have some sort of backup solution. Even just knowing that you have this will make implementations feel like much less pressure as you can always revert the site to its previous state. While it’s not strictly an “SEO” tool, this Shopify app will make your life a whole lot easier and much more stress-free.
Once installed, Rewind Backups is pretty easy to use. You can choose the different types of pages you wish to restore including blogs, pages, and images. Overall the existence of this app on your store will give you peace of mind that’s well worth it.
Conclusion
Explore the best Shopify SEO tools and effective Shopify SEO strategies to enhance your store’s visibility and rankings.
Using the Shopify SEO tools and apps above, you should be well-equipped with the technology you need to start improving rankings on your site. While no single tool can immediately improve your SEO without research and implementation from an analyst, they can help give you insights that you might not have had otherwise. If you have any questions on the best tools or our Shopify SEO services, feel free to reach out to us!
