10 Free Shopify SEO Tools for Driving Traffic to Your Website

The eCommerce space has grown extremely competitive—especially since the COVID-19 Pandemic. 

Today, new competitors enter the market every day and fight for the same group of customers as you do. 

Performing eCommerce SEO can definitely help to draw potential customers to your Shopify store. In fact, the success of your Shopify store hinges largely on its SEO performance.

But when it comes to Shopify stores, performing “normal” SEO isn’t going to cut it alone. And the reason for this is simple — Shopify SEO is different from “normal” SEO in many aspects.

Moreover, SEO takes its sweet time to get hold of top-ranking positions on the Google SERP (search engine results page).

So if you’ve just launched your Shopify store, even locally (maybe just in Sydney) and need a headstart in the competition, you must take advantage of the Shopify SEO tools. 

But how exactly do Shopify SEO tools help to drive targeted traffic to my online store?

In this article, we’ve answered that question and shared a list of 10 free Shopify SEO tools to start using right away.

Why do you Need Shopify SEO Tools?

If you want your potential customers to discover your Shopify store organically, appearing in the first (or at least the top three) organic search results is essential.

A recent study by Sistrix revealed that the first organic search result in Google has an average of 28.5% click-through rate. The second position result has about a 15% CTR, while the third organic search result receives an average of 11% CTR.

As you can see in the above image, the average CTR falls sharply beyond the third search result position, reaching a mere 2.5% CTR in the tenth search result.

So if you want to attract the highest potential customers possible, you need to figure out a way to secure one of the top three organic search positions for your Shopify store.

And to win the top organic search result positions, you need to put a lot of effort into performing SEO. 

For starters, you need to find the right keywords & optimise every product page, improve website loading speed, track your existing keyword rankings, optimise conversion rate, and do dozens of other things to win that first organic search result position.

Now, it is nearly impossible to manage all these SEO tasks manually and still manage to rank on top of the SERPs.

And this is where Shopify SEO tools come to the rescue. 

Shopify SEO tools can simplify or automate most SEO tasks. But beyond that, some Shopify SEO tools can even help to identify exactly what needs to be done to rank your pages on the first page of Google search results.

Top 10 Free Shopify SEO Tools to Employ for Driving Traffic to your Website

Here are the top 10 best free SEO tools for Shopify that can help you win the top organic search result positions so that more potential customers can find your online store.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool by Google that lets you monitor your website’s visibility in Google search results. 

Using Google Search Console, you can see how often your Shopify store appears in the Google search results. 

And if you make any improvements or changes to your Shopify store, Google Search Console tells you if it’s good or bad for your search engine rankings and traffic. 

Imagine what you can do when you have that kind of data.

It not only informs you if anything is hurting your search performance & visibility but can also provide actionable insights to resolve the issues. 

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that goes hand-in-hand with Google Search Console. The new Google Analytics 4 helps to track your website traffic and even provides in-depth insights about its online performance.

While Google Search Console ensures that your house is aesthetically appealing, functional, and easy to find for visitors, Google Analytics keeps track of where your visitors are coming from, how long each visitor stays and in what part of your house. 

In simple words, Google Analytics can help to better understand the overall performance of your SEO efforts, learn about your visitors’ behaviour, and provide invaluable insights for developing new strategies to boost your organic traffic and sales.

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is another free tool, but in order to use it, you need to set up a Google Ads account first. 

It helps webmasters and advertisers research keywords, discover new keyword ideas, and get historical data & traffic forecasts. 

If you’re unable to decide which keywords to target on your Shopify store or looking for additional keywords to target, Google Keyword Planner can be incredibly useful for your Shopify store.

It can help to discover the right keywords to target that have sufficient search volume and low competition so that it’s easy to rank among the top three organic positions in SERPs.

Google Merchant Centre

Google Merchant Centre is a free tool that is developed specifically for eCommerce business owners to list their products on Google Shopping and manage how their product inventory appears on Google. 

By performing Google Merchant Centre optimisation, you can show your products across Google Search, Google Shopping, Youtube, and the web to reach interested customers.

The tool lets you upload your products’ information, pictures, and pricing to be displayed for relevant Google Shopping search queries. 

This can open doors to attract new customers, increase sales, and grow your overall business.

Smart SEO

Smart SEO is one of the best Shopify SEO tools on the Shopify app store. It comes with tons of useful features that help to optimise your Shopify store SEO, automate certain SEO aspects, and accelerate site speed to a great extent.

Using Smart SEO, you can create meta tags and alt tags automatically, identify & fix broken links, and maintain a neat sitemap. 

Apart from this, the instant page feature of Smart SEO can boost your page loading speed by preloading the content with a simple click. This, in turn, elevates your Shopify store load speed and user experience significantly.

On top of this, Smart SEO comes with a multi-language support feature that automatically optimises your Shopify store for every language you support. So whenever a customer searches for products you sell in a different language, your Shopify store will show up in the Google search results.

The best part? — Unlike most other SEO tools for Shopify, Smart SEO offers a completely free plan and a 7-days trial period for their premium plans.

SEO Product Optimiser

As the name suggests, SEO product optimiser is a famous Shopify app that allows you to optimise each of your product pages for individual target keywords.

Unlike most other Shopify SEO tools, SEO product optimiser takes an unconventional approach. It asks you what keyword you want to rank for and provides you with guidance on how to optimise your product pages for respective target keywords.

In addition, the SEO product optimiser also comes with an in-built keyword research tool. Using this tool, you can discover new high-value keywords for each product page on your Shopify store.

It also offers a list of relevant keyword suggestions that have high search volume and low competition based on your product page’s title tag.

What’s even better is that once you choose a keyword to optimise your product page, SEO product optimiser gives you a personalised list of improvement suggestions for that specific product page.

Overall, SEO product optimiser is indeed a great tool to have. It even comes with a completely free plan as well as a premium plan with a 14-day free trial.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a free SEO audit tool that helps to identify technical SEO issues and provides suggestions for improvement.

Using Screaming frog, you can conduct deep audits to analyse your Shopify store and make sure that it is discoverable by search engines. 

It also provides you with an extensive audit report that guides you on how to improve your website for optimum search engine visibility, performance, and user experience.

The free version of Screaming Frog lets you analyse up to 500 URLs on your website, which is more than enough for a small Shopify store. Moreover, you can always purchase the premium plan when it deems necessary in the future.

Booster SEO & Image Optimiser

Images play a significant role in eCommerce websites. They help to boost organic traffic from Google Images searches and increase sales. Yet, the majority of eCommerce business owners struggle when it comes to performing image optimisation on their online stores.

If you’re not sure how to perform Image SEO for Shopify store of yours, you need to consider using Booster SEO & Image Optimiser.

The tool is widely-famous, best-reviewed, and used by over 50,000 Shopify stores around the world. It is loaded with many useful features that allow Shopify store owners to automate meta tags, image alt text, JSON-LD, sitemaps, and much more.

It comes with a free plan as well as two premium plans that unlocks some advanced features for large Shopify stores.

Ahrefs’ Free Tools

If you’ve ever searched anything SEO-related on Google, chances are you might have come across some (or at least one) of Ahrefs’ articles.

For the uninitiated, Ahrefs is a premium, all-in-one SEO toolkit that helps you take your SEO game to the next level. 

Though the Ahrefs pricing starts from $99 for Ahrefs basic plan and goes as high as $999 for its enterprise plan. But, the good folks at Ahrefs have also developed several free tools that you can use to optimise your Shopify store.

Let’s quickly understand how Ahrefs’ free SEO-related tools can help you improve your Shopify SEO:

• Webmaster Tools — It helps you monitor your site’s SEO health by conducting a comprehensive SEO audit and flags if any issues are found.

• Backlink Checker — It lets you perform competitor backlink analysis and you can also check which websites are linking to your site.

• Broken Backlink Checker — It helps to identify broken backlinks to your website so that you can either redirect it or update it with a live link.

• Website Authority Checker — Website authority is a concept that refers to the SEO strength of a website domain. Ahrefs’ free website authority checker lets you calculate these metrics for your website as well as your competitors and identify areas for improvement to improve your website authority.

• Youtube/Amazon/Bing Keyword Tool — These three tools assist you in discovering new keywords that your potential customers are using to search on Youtube, Amazon, and Bing. It provides you with various useful keyword metrics such as global search volume, volume by country, and keyword difficulty for each specific keyword.

• SERP Checker — This tool shows you real-time search results from any location without the need for third-party VPN/proxies and location-specific IP addresses.

• Keyword Rank/Difficulty Checker — Using these two tools, you can see keyword rankings for any website & its web pages (either your own or competitors') and get a near-accurate keyword difficulty metric for each keyword.

Keyword Surfer

Keyword Surfer is a free Google Chrome extension that gives you search volume data directly in the Google SERPs.

On top of search volume data, Keyword Surfer also gives you other keyword-related information such as relevant keyword suggestions, CPC rate, visibility metrics, and on-page SEO data.

The extension also comes with a content editor with NLP guidelines to start creating content as soon as you discover the right keywords to target.

Ready to Get Started?

If you’re looking for ways to improve your organic search traffic, increase your sales, and succeed as a Shopify merchant, you need to make sure that your store is optimised for SEO. 

Hopefully, these 10 free Shopify SEO tools will help you establish a solid foundation that translates into new growth opportunities in the eCommerce industry. 

That said, if you’re not able to manage your SEO in-house for your Shopify or any other platform-based eCommerce store for that matter (i.e. Magento, BigCommerce, etc.), feel free to reach out to us for professional SEO services.