Today starting an e-commerce store is easier than ever. Shopify provides one of the best tools for this, and you can start selling using your own online store with a snap of your fingers. But to have a successful Shopify store, you need to spend time on search engine optimization. SEO is a vital part of any business online discovery. There are a lot of apps that can help you in this mundane but crucial task. But before we dive into those, let answer one simple question – what is Shopify SEO, and how does it work?

What is Shopify SEO?

As we already said, SEO is a search engine optimization that helps your discovery online. It includes an array of techniques with one common goal — to sync your particular web page to different terms, goods, and services people search for online. Shopify SEO takes this concept and applies it to the reality of an eCommerce platform. It has many different niches and unique things like keyword density, page speed, on-page product ads, backlinks, meta tags, alt tags, rich snippets, and much much more. Of course, this is a tall ask to maintain all of this manually. This is where different Shopify SEO manager apps, SEO booster plug-ins, JSON-LD for SEO tools, apps that manage traffic to your store, and others come in.

What are the Best Shopify SEO Apps?

One of the biggest benefits of using Shopify for your eCommerce business is that it has a robust list of plugins and apps via the Shopify App Store to help you boost and track various aspects of your business. In particular, some of these apps can really help improve your site’s SEO performance in various ways, which can make a big difference in terms of your site’s visibility in online search engines.

Rather than having to do everything manually, these apps will make sure that every aspect of your SEO is working optimally and will make specific recommendations to you based on their analyses. There are also some handy free tools outside of the Shopify store that you can implement to upgrade your site’s SEO.

If you’re looking to boost your SEO for your Shopify store, these apps can save you a lot of time and money. The quicker you implement tools like this to improve your sites’ SEO performance, the more likely you’ll improve your organic growth.

In this article, we’ll review some of these useful tools – both in and out of the Shopify App Store – to help you boost your on-page SEO, and we’ll make some recommendations for apps that can help you check your off-page SEO as well.

Best On-Page SEO Manager Tools for Shopify

Your on-page SEO is essential for ranking high in organic search, as we’ve written about extensively before. But, if you don’t exactly know what you’re doing, or if you want to make sure you haven’t missed anything, trying to figure it out yourself can be time-consuming and confusing. There are many aspects to on-page SEO that might not be entirely clear or intuitive. Without utilizing a guide or analytical tool, you may end up damaging your Shopify page’s SEO value rather than helping it. One of the best ways to quickly – and correctly – improve your on-page SEO is to make use of some of the great free tools available to you.

First, let’s look at some of these free tools available for you on the internet, then we’ll dig into some apps you may want to download via the Shopify App Store.

Tools for Keyword Research for Shopify SEO

You may be stuck deciding upon the right keywords to target in your SEO efforts, but several tools can help you make the most effective use of keywords relatively easily. The key is figuring out exactly which keywords your ideal customers are likely to use when searching for businesses or services similar to yours. If you’re armed with that information, you’ll be able to have a huge impact on organically attracting more customers.

Here are three free tools you can start using immediately to choose the best possible keywords.

Ubersuggest

This free app via SEO guru Neil Patel’s website will help you with various useful things, from the ability to do deep research on your competitors’ websites to keyword suggestions and even content ideas for blog posts and other articles.

Where Ubersuggest really shines, however, is that it’s great for helping you generate long-tail keyword ideas. Rather than simply relying on Google’s suggestions in the search bar (which are nonetheless helpful but limited), Ubersuggest will give you a long list of suggested keywords based on the main keyword you enter.

Ubersuggest also has some off-page SEO tools available, such as backlink data, allowing you to see the exact content in your industry or local area that competitors are linking to. You can then approach each of these sites and ask people to link to you.

There’s another item of value here – Neil Patel’s site itself, which is full of handy blog posts and guides to the most current and effective SEO strategies. Neil is one of the most (if not the most) widely respected SEO experts in the industry, so his insights are precious.

Answer the Public

Answer the Public is a very cool tool that uniquely uses Google’s autosuggestions. It actually builds out a visualization that maps out a huge list of long-tail keywords that stem from your focus keyword.

This tool is handy for content marketing and blog post topics since it organizes keyword ideas based on types of questions, such as who, what, why, when, and where. It’ll even churn out comparisons (vs., and, or) and some other instrumental formats. If you want to continue to create content that ranks really well, you’re going to need to create content that anticipates the questions that prospective visitors and consumers will be asking beyond your focus keywords.

Google Keyword Planner

The Google AdWords Keyword Planner is a tool right under your nose that you might now be used to its full potential. This handy tool found directly within the AdWords platform can help you find new keywords using words, phrases, websites, and categories. It can also provide great insights on search volume trends and historical data of different keywords.

Shopify SEO Apps and Plug-ins

In addition to these handy tools available to you on the web, you can also integrate some beneficial SEO tools directly into your Shopify store via something called a Plugin. A plugin, which is downloaded within your Shopify admin page itself, is an app that will work directly with your Shopify store to extend its capabilities. There are a wide variety of free and paid plugins available for a large number of different functions. Still, for this article, we will focus on the best SEO plugins that you may want to download and use within your page.

The following Plugins and Apps can be accessed via the Shopify App Store and can help you supercharge your Shopify store SEO:

SEO – All in One & Automated

If you want your Shopify site to rank higher in organic rankings for all search engines, you’re going to need to make sure you’re maximizing every element of your website to boost your SEO credentials. The “SEO – All in One & Automated” is a great tool for you if you’re not really sure where to start. It will help make all of your images SEO-friendly, help you set up meta tags, and even checks your Shopify store for any SEO-related issues to check.

In addition, the plugin features advanced meta settings and even mobile-friendly checking to help you check for broken links on your site. Keep in mind, while you’ll get 7 days free, you will need to pay $8.99 per month to continue using the service, which is well worth it.

SEO Manager

Another great tool that you can try out free for 7 days, SEO Manager, features a comprehensive supercharged SEO tool that includes an SEO scan, meta content tools, keyword suggestions, Google search console connection, and even search analytics. This app will even help you with JSON-LD structured data, which feeds information to Google in a way that can help you rank better and make it easier for people to discover your brand. SEO Manager will also have an automated feature to identify and fix broken links.

Smart SEO

Unlike the two apps mentioned above, Smart SEO has a full-blown free tier, so there is no time limit to decide whether or not you’d like to use it on your site over the long term. Smart SEO includes comprehensive SEO tools and automation that will automatically generate meta tags, fix broken links, and even manage your sitemap. If you’d like to create your meta tags manually, Smart SEO will give you live “ratings” up to 100 as you edit your tags to ensure you’re creating the best meta tags possible. Smart SEO will also help you create the aforementioned JSON-LD structured data to provide to Google as well.

In addition, Smart SEO features Multi-Language SEO so you can increase your ranking for various languages if you’re targeting non-English speaking customers.

How to Check Off-Page SEO on Shopify

In addition to all the things you need to be aware of with SEO on your Shopify website – meta tags, optimized images, keyword usage, page load speed, URLs, site structure, content, and more, some SEO elements depend on outside forces off of your pages, such as other sites that link to your Shopify store, social media engagement, and more. This is called “off-page SEO,” and some experts believe that it accounts for up to 75% of your Shopify site SEO.

Here are some handy tools to check and monitor your off-page SEO for your Shopify site:

Ahrefs

Ahrefs.com is one of the most well-known sites that provides a toolset for backlinks, SEO analysis, and other digital marketing tools. While this site’s full functionality requires a monthly payment plan that can be pricey, you can use an abbreviated version of their backlink checker for free.

Ahrefs’ backlink checker will provide you with many useful metrics, including a proprietary ranking system including domain rating and URL rating, the number of referring domains, and a complete target of your site’s backlink profile. If you’re researching additional backlinks to pursue, you can use this tool to research your competitor’s backlink profiles as well. You can even see a breakdown of all outbound links for your page, along with a broken link checker.

One really unique feature of the Ahrefs backlink checker is that you’ll be able to see the estimated organic traffic for each linking page and referring domain so that you can get great insights into the popularity of each linking web page.

Backlinko

Backlinko is quite possibly one of the best and most useful blogs and guides to help you with all aspects of SEO, including off-page SEO. Backlinko is designed to be an all-in-one resource to help you with link building, provide actionable insights, and more. Brian Dean, the site’s creator, really focuses on eliminating fluff and being as direct as possible regarding the advice and strategies you need to employ to upgrade your off-page SEO.

Backlinko is trusted and utilized by some of the most authoritative sites in the world, so you’d be served well to follow the advice and strategies laid out there. In addition, if you want to really take a deep dive into the world of SEO and become as much of an expert as possible, Backlinko provides a full SEO training course.

MOZbar

As you’re researching to figure out the SEO profile of other websites, including your competitors, you should install the MOZbar by Moz as a Chrome Extension. This extension appears at the top of your Chrome web browser and will provide you with instant metrics while visiting any page or SERP results.

For efficient off-page SEO, this is a handy tool, as you can create custom searches, compare link metrics within SERP, and find and highlight keywords directly on pages. You can even expose page elements via an overlay, including general attributes, link markup, and more.

Conclusion

SEO is a constantly evolving, complicated, and time-consuming practice. But staying on top of your Shopify page SEO and applying all the best practices can help boost your business page’s ranking – and therefore your company’s visibility – in a dramatic way. You have to assume that within the highly saturated and competitive environment that is online marketing and sales, every one of your competitors is doing everything they can to outrank and outperform your business in SEO and SERP.

Utilizing the tools we’ve listed and described above will certainly help you improve your SEO. Still, if you want to constantly stay on top of your SEO game while having enough time to focus on other important elements of your business, you would best be served by hiring some experts who live and breathe SEO daily. That’s where Catapult Revenue comes in. We’re avowed SEO geeks, and we absolutely love to apply our expertise to Shopify business pages to watch them organically skyrocket in the search rankings. We’d love for you to be our next SEO success story, so contact us, and we’ll show you what we can do for your online business presence!