The Shopify App Store contains a great many apps with the word “SEO” in their name. They promise, between them, to optimise, to boost, to fix, to grow, and to rank. The shop owner, anxious about being invisible and pleased that a solution might be purchasable, installs one or two. The Goblin would like, gently, to interrupt this.
The short answer.
For most small shops, most of the time: no. You do not need an SEO app. The things that move the needle for a small Shopify shop — title tags, meta descriptions, collection-page text, alt text, internal links, honest product descriptions — are all editable natively, for free, with no app at all. An app does not do these things better. At most it reminds you to do them, and a reminder is a strange thing to pay a monthly fee for.
What the apps actually offer.
Strip away the marketing and most SEO apps fall into three groups.
Group one: things Shopify already does. An app that “lets you edit your meta tags” is selling you a field that exists in Shopify for free. An app that “generates a sitemap” is selling you a file Shopify creates automatically. The Goblin finds this group close to insulting.
Group two: audit and scoring tools. An app that scans your shop and gives each page a score out of one hundred. These are not useless — they can surface a missed alt text or a long title — but they tell you that something is wrong far better than they tell you what to do about it. A score is not advice. A red mark next to “meta description” does not write the meta description.
Group three: genuinely useful, narrow tools. A small number of apps do one specific thing that Shopify does not do well natively. The Goblin will name the categories below.
What is, occasionally, worth an app.
- Image compression. If your shop is slow because of enormous unoptimised photographs, an app that compresses them automatically can earn its keep — though resizing images before upload is free and works as well.
- Bulk redirect management. If you are restructuring a large shop and need to manage many redirects at once, a dedicated tool is more pleasant than Shopify’s native handling. For a small shop making occasional changes, the native tool is fine.
- Structured data, for some shops. Rich results — the star ratings and prices that appear in some Google listings — rely on structured data. Many themes now include it; if yours does not, a focused structured-data app can add it. Check what your theme already does before you assume you need this.
Notice how narrow this list is, and notice that each entry is conditional. The Goblin is not against apps. He is against the reflex — the assumption that an SEO problem is solved by purchasing an SEO app, when it is almost always solved by writing.
The cost nobody mentions.
Every app you install adds code to your shop. Some apps add a little; some add a great deal; some leave their code behind even after you uninstall them. The collective weight of a dozen apps is one of the most common reasons a small shop becomes slow, and speed is itself a ranking factor.
There is a particular irony the Goblin sees often: a shop owner installs four SEO apps to improve their ranking, and the four apps together slow the shop enough to harm the ranking. The apps were not, individually, lying. They simply did not mention that their cumulative cost was the very thing they promised to fix.
The Goblin’s rule.
Before installing any app with “SEO” in its name, ask one question: what specific thing will this do that I cannot do myself in the Shopify admin? If you can answer it clearly — “it compresses my images automatically” — the app may be worth its fee. If the answer is vague — “it optimises my SEO,” “it boosts my ranking” — close the tab. Vagueness, in an app’s description, is usually vagueness about whether it does anything at all.
The honest, slightly unpopular position is this: SEO for a small shop is mostly writing, and writing cannot be installed. The apps that help are few, narrow, and easy to name. The rest are selling the feeling of having done something, which is a real feeling and a worthless one.
An audit is, in a sense, the opposite of an app: instead of a score and a monthly fee, you receive a person’s judgement, once, in plain English, telling you the specific things to write and the specific order to write them in. The Goblin would say that, of course. He has, at least, laid out his reasoning.
— The Goblin, who has never been sold an app he could not refuse.