Home / SEO Tools Cost Calculator / By team and site
Does a Shopify store need a separate SEO tool?
Summary
Not at the start. Shopify generates canonical tags, sitemap.xml and robots.txt on its own, its themes produce title tags and product schema, and you can edit titles, meta descriptions, URLs and image alt text from the admin. A paid tool starts to pay off when the catalog is large enough that you want to crawl the whole store, or when you want to see which queries a competitor ranks for. The free version of Screaming Frog, for example, stops at 500 URLs per crawl.
A catalog grows past 500 URLs faster than you'd think
Shopify's sitemap links to every product, each product's main image, collections, pages and blog posts, and it updates itself as you add them. Because collections, pages and posts sit alongside the products, a store passes 500 crawlable URLs before it reaches 500 products.
That number matters because it's where Screaming Frog's free version stops. The free version also can't render JavaScript or save crawls. A license is $279 per user per year, drops to $265 per license if you buy five or more, and removes the 500-URL limit. After that, the ceiling is your computer's memory and storage.
What you'd be paying twice for
Several things people buy SEO apps for are already built in. Shopify's help center lists auto-generated canonical tags, sitemap.xml and robots.txt files, theme-generated title tags that include the store name, and product schema that enables rich snippets. Stores with several languages or international domains get sitemaps for each domain automatically.
Search Console, which is free, shows how often the store appears in Google and how many clicks it gets. The data you can't get from Shopify or Google is data about other stores, such as a competitor's keywords or backlinks, plus a daily log of your own rankings for chosen queries.
The platform bill is a separate line
Shopify's US prices are $29, $79 and $299 a month for Basic, Grow and Advanced on yearly billing, or $39, $105 and $399 paid monthly. Plus starts at $2,300 a month on a three-year term or $2,500 on a one-year term. Shopify's sitemap help applies to the Basic plan or higher, so automatic sitemaps come with the cheapest plan. A Basic store on yearly billing plus one Screaming Frog license runs $348 plus $279, or $627 for the first year.
Work out your own number: the SEO Tools Cost Calculator finds the cheapest published plan for your sites, tracked keywords and users.
Sources
- https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/promoting-marketing/seo/seo-overview
- https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/promoting-marketing/seo/find-site-map
- https://www.shopify.com/pricing
- https://www.shopify.com/plus/pricing
- https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/pricing/?wmc-currency=USD
- https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
Figures come from each vendor's own pricing pages and documentation. We have not tested these tools hands-on, and no ranking here is paid for.