Are SEO Booster Apps worth the investment?

Shopify Apps
1

Hi, I’m curious if you think SEO “Booster” Apps are worth the investment.

Thank you!

2

Hello @PEnglish88 !

This is Lana from Shopify.

That is a really good question!
SEO can be approached in many different ways. If you are looking to use an app, I can confirm that other merchants have found this helpful in the past. They are particularly useful as some of them have features such as the ability to detect and fix broken links, periodic SEO audit reports that are emailed to you and even highlight some of your SEO problems and show you how to fix them. I have links to some of our top rated SEO apps for you here:

  • SEO Booster - SEO Marketing

  • SEO Manager

  • Plug in SEO

If you are only getting started with SEO, some of the apps might not be ideal as they do have monthly subscription payments - so if you wanted to get more familiar with SEO before you commit to an app, I have a great course from our Shopify Compass on SEO for Beginners. I would recommend the course even if you have knowledge beyond that of a beginner, - it is free and you will find that it is very helpful to find your footing in the world of SEO.

Outside of paying for apps, you could also look into organic SEO growth. A great way of achieving organic growth would be through creating blog posts on your store related to your business or your products. For example, if you sell jewellery, you could have a section for blogs with titles such as ‘The Best Ways to Take Care of Gold Jewellery’. The blog post can be full of keywords that people would typically search for in Google relating to those products, and as that blog post is found it will go up in SEO ranking, meaning that your store will come up as well. A helpful tool to come up with blog post ideas and titles is AnswerthePublic.com. You will be able to type a keyword such as ‘Jewellery’, and it will come up with many variations of titles/questions/topics related to that keyword.

For more help wit SEO, you can also check out our help docs on Improving Search Engine Optimisation.
Let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks! -Lana

1 Like
3

Thanks Lana!

4

Hi - just wanted to add a bit more :slightly_smiling_face:
I have worked with search technology and SEO for over 20 years but still a bit new to Shopify.

Most of the most important aspects of SEO cannot be automated. Many have tried over the past many years. SEO is a strategic marketing tool. You can’t (successfully) fully automated PR, Branding, TV-advertising, business development and such either.

Having said that, there are many tools - embedded as apps or external tools, that can help you in your work with SEO. I use a good handful too on a daily basis.

You can group SEO into the following tasks:

  • Keyword and competitor research
    This is the most important to begin with. If you do not understand how your target audience search, what the search intention is (explicitly expressed or not - what will make them happy to find) and how your competitors is acting on the market you are litterally optimizing blindfold. I mostly use Ahrefs.com for this sort of research.

  • Technical optimization
    Shopify is a very goo starting point. The platform performs well on many of the most important key factors of technical SEO. But not all. You can improve the likelihood of being found in Google by adjusting and adding a few more things, such as better Schema-data, AMP-format and special output formats. Also, even though Shopify is a great starting point you can easily ruin it (SEO wise) with a bad theme, code or apps. In general Keep It Simple. The more you add the slower your site gets, its more likely to create Core Web Vitals issues and mess up in Google.

    SEO Apps can be helpful in making sure you do all the right things. Unfortunately in my experience they are not always completely accurate. They tend to simplify things too much. Never rely on just one tool. Use external tools too to validate data. I often use the webcrawler Screaming Frog for this.

    Apps can also be very helpful in setting up additional formats and data such as Schema and AMP optimize how video is embedded (to not slow down our site), structure content and create content relative linking between the most important pages (internal link building).

  • Content optimization - SEO strategy
    Based on your keyword- and competitor research you can form you content strategy. This is really important. You need to map out your keywords to the right content. For some searches a collection page may be best, for others a product page, a FAQ-page or a blog posts. It depends on what we call the “Search User Intend”. Also, this will determine the kind of content, formatting and elements you need. For example, for some searches users expect lots of images or video. For others, more extensive texts or guides. Google knows this too. If you match what Google know users want then you will rank better.

    Apps can, to some degree also be helpful with this but again, don’t rely entirely on them. Use external tools to validate to be sure.

  • User engagement optimization
    Google also detect various kinds of user angement - bounce rates time spend on site and such. Even if Google did not exist you should optimize this. More engagement give more sales. But its good to understand what user engagement data Google value the most and at least optimize that.

    Even though some apps can play a role in optimizing user engement you still need to understand how to utilize them in order to gain value.

  • Links
    Links from other websites is a very important ranking factor. Simply said - the more links, som other websites with strong authority the more likely it is you will rank for relevant keywords. It’s the engine in your car.

    Even though some tools may promise you will get lots of links in general that wont do much for you. It takes lots of manual work and a deeper understanding of what works to gain valuable authority.

Anyway, this was just a really short rund down on the most important aspects of SEO. The important point is - no tools can do all SEo for you. Good tools can help you but no matter what apps you pick you will need to do a lot of manual work to gain great results in search.

Good luck with it all - and feel free to ask me if there is anything more you want to know about SEO :slightly_smiling_face:

5

Hi There,

The effectiveness of SEO Booster apps can vary. Generally, SEO is a long duration process of trial and error, that requires consistency and patience. It often depends on what you are trying to achieve with your strategy.

As Lana mentioned, one great way to boost the SEO of your store is to have consistent, high-quality and optimized blog posts. This gives the search engine crawlers more content to index and shows activity on your storefront.

Blog Pilot automates the blog post creation and management process for you, posting once per week automatically. We offer a free trial as well!

https://apps.shopify.com/blog-pilot

Happy to answer any questions you might have about blogging and SEO. Feel free to reply to this comment or shoot us a message directly!

6

As cool and interesting AI for automation of content is the fact remains that it is still very controversial and associated with some serious risks in SEO that everyone should be aware of.

One of my most skilled colleagues wrote this summary on the status in the market right now. I recommend anyone who consider AI/Texts to read this first:

https://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/blog/google/lets-talk-ai-and-google/

7

Hi @PEnglish88 ,

Understanding the interplay between Shopify and Google SEO can indeed be challenging. The indexing issues you’re facing may be related to Shopify’s SEO structure, but there are strategies to enhance visibility beyond just the collection level.

SEOPro could be particularly useful in addressing your concerns. It conducts an in-depth SEO audit of your Shopify Products and Collections, identifying and helping you rectify issues such as missing keywords or inadequate SEO optimizations that could be affecting your Google visibility. Furthermore, SEOPro offers bulk optimization tools for meta titles, descriptions, and alt texts, which can significantly improve your store’s SEO performance with less manual effort.

Full disclosure: We are the developer of this app.