The Top 3 Shopify SEO Plugins

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In today’s eCommerce landscape, it takes much more than simply having a great product and a compelling creative to generate revenue.

While the majority of eCommerce store owners tend to gravitate towards Facebook and Google ads, they also turn a blind eye to the power of search engines.

For most store owners, the logic makes sense: Facebook and Google ads allow for quick and scalable strategies as well as rapid testing for product-market fit and understanding how certain audiences respond. SEO is viewed as being a much more long-term strategy, but this doesn’t necessarily discount its value.

Ads are kind of like paying to turn on a faucet, whereas SEO (eCommerce SEO included) is more like drilling for oil. Ranking for a single high-value keyword could potentially bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue alone. Ranking for a solid keyword profile can also help you dominate your niche and become an authority for a specific product.

Many eCommerce store owners use Shopify for their platform because of the platform's easy to use SEO interface - many eCommerce owners have even gone through a website migration from WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and other eCommerce CMS to Shopify. And although Shopify can make it easier to optimize your website for SEO, implementing a full SEO strategy can be very time-consuming and it’s easy to get lost in the sauce of multiple strategies to effectively rank your landing and product pages. That’s where the magic of Shopify SEO plugins come. Developers have recognized the opportunity to build simple plugins that automate many of the mundane tasks that accompany SEO and offer them at very reasonable prices, or free.

The following article covers three of the best Shopify SEO plugins to help your site tap into new floods of traffic and rank for high-value keywords in your industry.

Win the Image Search with SEO Image Optimizer ‑ SEO by Booster Apps

The plug-in’s description references a study of U.S. web-based searches that found that the world’s second-most used search engine after Google is actually Google Images. Moz found that roughly 26.79% of searches happen on Google Images, nearly five times as much as YouTube, Bing, and Facebook combined.

Does this sound surprising to you? To most people, it probably is. But to the savvy eCommerce store owner, it sounds like a huge under-capitalized opportunity.

The SEO Image Optimizer aims to help Shopify owners take advantage of Google Image search engine results pages by ranking their product images more efficiently.

The best part of all – it’s a simple set-and-forget plug-in, and there is very minimal to zero work needed to help the plug-in do its magic.

Pricing:

There are two different pricing models for the SEO Image Optimizer: Free and Pro ($24.99 per month):

Free

• Alt-Text Optimization
• Unlimited Image Sync Quota
• New Images Checked Once per Week
• The Free plan will always be available

Pro

• $24.99/month
• Free Plan features plus
• Complete SEO Optimization
• Meta Tag Optimization
• Autopilot SEO Fixes
• Fix Broken Links
• Google Snippets
• Auto JSON-LD

What People are Saying

The SEO Image Optimizer plug-in comes with a highly rated 4.7 stars based on over 3,200 reviews on the Shopify site. It’s also used by over 153,000 Shopify stores and has processed over 1.4 billion images.

With thousands of satisfied customers, the SEO Image Optimizer seems to be a no-brainer for any eCommerce store owner. A few of the positive highlights include:

• A huge time-saver: the automatic optimization saves people from having to do it manually.
• Free is more than enough: many reviews pointed to how the free version has everything one would need.
• Effortless set up: many reviews focus on how easy it is to set up, and how the payoff the plug-in ultimately provides is well worth the minimal effort in setting it up.

Although the vast majority of reviews sway positive, there are a few minor complaints people have had. A few of the negative reviews have touched on include:

• No customer service response: A few users complained about no customer service, but the developer promptly responded to their review and did their best to resolve the issue.
• Minor glitches: A few users complained about the plug-in negatively impacting their site, to which the developer responded that the app “only interacts with the head portion of your theme and has many fallbacks in place to prevent any issues from arising.”

Overall, the SEO Image Optimizer comes with reputation and thousands of satisfied users and will be a great addition to your overall eCommerce SEO strategy.

Conquer Mobile Shoppers with Fire AMP by MLveda

Nearly 200 million people in the United States shopped, browsed, or researched products using their mobile device in 2018, which is roughly 60% of the entire population of the United States.

Mobile shopping isn’t a new trend per se and many eCommerce store owners have to build mobile-friendly sites. If you’re reading this, chances are you’re using Shopify, which highly encourages mobile-friendly stores as the standard.

Search engines have taken note of the rapidly increasing number of people who prefer to shop on their smartphones and tend to give preferential treatment to stores that make for a better user experience. Shoppers can be absolutely ruthless with their attentions and wallets if a store is too slow to open or awkward to use.

This is why Google and other companies have enabled Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, that allows for websites to load much faster on mobile devices. These AMP pages are essentially the fast-line to getting in front of interested users searching from their phones.

That’s where Fire AMP comes in. The plug-in enables the easy and fast creation of AMP pages by offering one-click creation of Google AMP pages for any Shopify store. A few of the benefits of the plug-in include:

• Better search engine ranking and SEO: Websites that are optimized with AMP are likely to be rewarded with higher rankings than their slower, unresponsive competition.
• Increased visibility: AMP results come with a special AMP symbol, which tends to improve click-through rates since the pages stand out more from their competition. As AMP becomes more popular, more users will associate faster and easier to navigate pages with the AMP symbol.
• Easy set up: the plug-in is made to seamlessly create AMP pages, saving users the time of having to do it manually.

Pricing:

The plug-in costs $7.99 per month and comes with a 15-day free trial.

What People are Saying:

1. Easy set-up: every page must be optimized with the plug-in, but once that’s complete, it operates fairly smoothly.
2. Effectiveness: the plug-in helped speed up mobile pages

However, it’s worth noting that many of these “5-star reviews” contained the text “Great job MLVeda team! I Highly recommend FireAMP app,” so there is a possibility that some of them may be fake.

What people didn’t like: At the time of writing, the plug-in has seven 1-star and two 2-star reviews, the majority of people complained about:

1. The plug-in not working: a few people noted “not being impressed” with the functionality.
2. Limited to no support: Poor customer service or responses.

Unlike other top-rated apps, the customer support team didn’t respond to the negative reviews or attempt to amend the situation.

Overall, the plug-in seems to be a good tool to add to your SEO arsenal. If you're a shop that has a lot of pages and frequently makes new ones, it’s worth it to have this plug-in. However, if you’ve only got a handful of pages, you might be better off creating AMP pages for them yourself instead of paying the $7.99 per month.

Complete Optimization with Plug in SEO by Plug in Useful

Plug in SEO lauds itself as the highest-rated complete on-page SEO app used by over 30,000 Shopify stores and hundreds of Shopify Plus stores.

The Plug in SEO app knows its game as evidenced by its very own optimized name – the app currently ranks #1 in Google for “Plug in SEO.”

The product is looking to establish itself as the go-to plug-in for any beginner, intermediate, or expert-level Shopify store owner and comes prepared with many advanced templates that cater to SEO best practices.

Additionally, the description claims that the company will help provide some guidance via email for no additional charge.

Overall, having an end-to-end plug-in simplifies the process of, well, having plugins. There are dozens of great SEO-focused plugins out there, but all you really need is one that does nearly everything, and then fill in the gaps as needed with niche plugins.

Plug in SEO helps with everything from Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions, Advanced Structured Data (JSON-LD Schema Markup), Blog optimization, 404 broken links, keywords, multilingual SEO, and more.

This out-of-the-box allows Shopify users to take full control of their SEO, but without the manual upkeep. A few nifty features of this plug-in include:

• Email support - while many plugins are set-and-forget, they, unfortunately, treat their customers the same way. It’s great to see a plug-in offer additional email support to make sure shop owners are making the most out of their product.
• Multilingual SEO - this is often overlooked by eCommerce startups because translating content and ranking it almost seems like you’re creating an entirely new site. This plug-in at least takes care of the SEO component, and there are several Shopify SEO plugins that can help translate your content for specific demographics as well.
• Constantly updated with search engines - when you’re running a business, it can be tough to keep up with slight search engine updates. If you overly rely on a plug-in that doesn’t update its features as the search engines change their algorithms, you could end up hurting your site and losing out on low-hanging sales.
• Automatic SEO audits - Plug in SEO also makes reports and email alerts if any issues arise on your site.

Pricing

Free Forever

• Free
• Unlimited SEO, Blog, Speed problems checks
• Fix instructions & code
• Automatic email alerts
• Email help & support

Plug In SEO Plus

• $20/month
• Automatic SEO improvements
• Free install
• Instruction videos
• Premium support
• Structured Data (+ full JSON-LD)
• Powerful SEO control

What People are Saying

What people like:

• Fast support: Users complimented the Plug in SEO customer support team for responding to their questions within an hour.
• Robust explanation articles: there is plenty of education material that helps people understand how and why the app is doing what it’s doing.
• Detailed instructions: the app shows users what went wrong (if anything), as well as detailed instructions on how to fix issues.

What people didn’t like:

• Problems using the app: a few dissatisfied users spoke on how the app didn’t work for them, to which the Founder and CEO of the plug-in responded and attempted to make right.
• The free version isn’t very useful: some folks complained that the free version didn’t offer anything spectacular.
• Unexpected upsells: some users claimed that the developer pushes free users to upgrade to PLUS

Overall, it’s worth looking past the handful of bad reviews and trying the plug-in out for yourself. The support seems great and the features are also helpful. The premium version is $20 per month, which isn’t a terrible cost for an all-in-one SEO plug-in. The support and documentation alone set this app apart from many other Shopify SEO plugins.

Final Thoughts

The above three Shopify SEO plugins are a great set of tools in any eCommerce arsenal. The beauty of having all three of them is that they tackle a specific issue from conquering Google Images, to winning the fast-pass to mobile users, or simply having a site that is constantly performing at its best in search engines.

The best part of all – they could save you boatloads of precious time that would otherwise be spent manually priming your site for search engines. Since these plugins streamline the entire process, you can spend more of your time focusing on the key levers that will get you more sales and dominate your niche.