Free Shopify SEO Tools: Five That Cover Most of What You Need

What the free tools actually cover

Free tools cover diagnosis very well and production very badly. They will tell you what is wrong, what you rank for, how fast a page loads and whether your markup is valid. They will not write the 40 collection page intros you are missing. That split is worth holding in your head, because it decides when free is enough and when it stops being enough.

This page is about the first job. If you are a small store and you are willing to spend a few hours a month, five free tools give you the same raw information a paid auditor starts with. The information is the same. What differs is whether anyone acts on it.

If you are weighing whether to do this yourself at all, our guide to paying for Shopify SEO help lays out what the paid options involve. And if you want the full list of things to check once your tools are running, the Shopify SEO checklist is the companion to this page.

Google Search Console: the one you cannot skip

Search Console is Google's own report on how your site performs in Google Search. It is free, and it is the only source of real data. Every other tool estimates. This one reports.

What it shows you

Which searches your pages appeared for (impressions), which ones got a click, the average position, and which pages Google has or has not indexed. It also lists problems Google found while crawling, like pages blocked from indexing or product pages with broken markup.

Setting it up on Shopify

Add your domain as a property and verify it. The domain-level option is the better choice because it covers every version of your address in one place. Then submit your sitemap. Shopify generates it for you at /sitemap.xml on your own domain, and it updates itself as you add products, collections, pages and posts. You do not build or maintain it. You only tell Google where it is. Our glossary entry on Google Search Console covers the terms in more detail.

The three reports to open first

Performance, filtered by page. Look at your collection pages. These are the pages that should earn the most. If a collection has plenty of impressions and almost no clicks, the title and description are not doing their job.

Pages, then "Not indexed". Read the reasons. Some are normal, like the duplicate product URLs Shopify creates under collections. Others, like "Crawled, currently not indexed" on pages you care about, are a signal the page is thin or looks too much like another one.

Performance, filtered by query, sorted by impressions. Find searches where you sit at position 8 to 20. These are the cheapest wins on your site, because Google already thinks the page is relevant.

Shopify itself: the free tool most owners underuse

Shopify already does a good deal of the technical work for you. Knowing what it handles tells you what you do not need to pay anyone for.

Handled automatically. The sitemap file, canonical tags on product pages, and a robots.txt file with sensible defaults. Themes also output basic product markup, which is what lets Google show price and availability.

Edited by you, in the admin. On every product, collection, page and blog post there is a "Search engine listing" section. That is where you set the page title and the meta description. Write them yourself. If you leave them blank Shopify builds a title from the product name, which is fine as a placeholder and weak as a pitch. Our guide to writing Shopify meta titles and descriptions goes through the wording.

Also in the admin. Alt text on every image, the URL handle on every page, and the Navigation menus that decide which pages get internal links from your header and footer. If you rename a URL, Shopify offers to create a redirect from the old address. Say yes every time.

The URL redirects tool. Found in the admin under Online Store, then Navigation, it lets you map an old path to a new one. If you delete a product or retire a collection, redirect it to the closest live page. A deleted page with no redirect is a dead end for both visitors and Google.

Shopify's built-in analytics are free too and worth a look for one reason: they show what people searched for on your own store's search box. Those are words customers use that you may not have written anywhere on the site.

PageSpeed Insights: the speed check

PageSpeed Insights, from Google, tests one URL at a time and reports how fast it loads on a phone. Paste in your home page, your best collection and your best-selling product page. Three tests, ten minutes.

Read two sections. The first is the field data at the top, which comes from real Chrome users visiting your site over the last 28 days. It only appears if you have enough traffic. The second is the lab test below it, which simulates a mid-range phone on a slow connection. The lab score moves around from run to run, so run it twice and ignore a swing of a few points.

On Shopify, slow pages most often come from three things: oversized images, a heavy theme, and apps that inject their own scripts. The report names the scripts, which is the part that matters. If one of the biggest items on the list is a script from an app you stopped using, you have found your next job. We cover finding which apps are costing you in how Shopify apps slow your store.

One caution. A perfect score is not the goal. Pages that load fast enough for a customer on a phone to start reading within a couple of seconds are fine. Chasing the last ten points tends to cost more in design compromise than it returns in rankings.

The Rich Results Test and the schema check

Structured data, also called schema markup, is code in the page that tells Google what a thing is: a product, a price, a review rating, a question and its answer. The Rich Results Test, also free from Google, reads a page and tells you which kinds Google can find and whether they are valid.

Test one product page. You should see a Product result with a name, an image, and an offer containing a price and availability. If you run a reviews app, you may also see an aggregate rating. If the test shows errors or warnings, open them. A warning for a missing optional field is usually harmless. An error on price or availability is worth fixing, because that is what Google uses to show your product accurately.

Test a page with a real question-and-answer block as well. The FAQ markup story is more limited than it was, and we cover the honest version in our page on Shopify FAQ pages for AI and Google.

What this tool cannot tell you is whether a page deserves to rank. Valid markup is a reason Google can understand the page. It is not a reason Google will prefer it.

Match the tool to the question

Most people do the opposite. They open a tool, see a wall of numbers and try to work out what to do. It works better in reverse: decide what you are trying to find out, and open only the tool built for it.

"What do I already show up for?" Search Console, Performance report.

"Why is this page not showing up?" Search Console, the URL Inspection box at the top. Paste the address and it tells you if Google has indexed it, and if not, why.

"What do I change on this page?" Shopify admin, the Search engine listing section and the page's own content.

"Why is this page slow?" PageSpeed Insights.

"Is my product markup working?" Rich Results Test.

"Did what I changed work?" Search Console again, four weeks later, on the same page.

That last step is the one almost nobody does. Google needs a few weeks to recrawl and re-rank. If you edit ten collection pages on the first of the month, write down the date and the page list. Without that note, a good month and a bad month look identical and you learn nothing.

A free crawler for the whole site at once

Search Console shows what Google saw. A crawler shows what is on your site right now. The most commonly used free option is a desktop crawler with a free tier that handles up to 500 URLs, which covers most small Shopify stores. Webmaster tools from some SEO software vendors are also free for sites you can verify you own.

Point one at your home page and let it run. Then sort by the things that can be fixed in bulk: missing page titles, duplicate titles, titles over about 60 characters, missing meta descriptions, images with no alt text, and pages that return an error code. On a store of a few hundred products, a list like that is a week of editing work, and it is the exact work most owners put off.

Two Shopify quirks show up in every crawl. First, products appear at two addresses, the main /products/ path and a longer one under /collections/. Shopify points the second to the first with a canonical tag, so this is normal and not an error. Second, filtered and sorted collection pages can create many near-duplicate URLs. Good themes handle this. If your crawl returns thousands of URLs for a store with a few hundred products, look there first.

For a look at how the URL pattern affects your site, see Shopify URL structure and SEO.

What free tools cannot do for you

Be honest about the gaps, because they are where stores stall.

They do not tell you what to write. Search Console shows searches you already appear for. It cannot show you the searches you have no page for. Finding those takes research, or a person who does it for a living.

They do not do the work. A crawl that lists 300 weak product titles is a to-do list, not progress. The tools are free. The hours are not.

They do not measure AI answers. Search Console reports on Google Search. It does not show whether ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini name your store when someone asks for a recommendation. For that, you test by hand, or you use a service that tracks it. Our page on getting a Shopify store named in ChatGPT explains the basic manual test.

They do not link your pages together. Internal links between collections, products and articles are one of the biggest levers on a Shopify store, and no free tool will plan them for you.

If those gaps are your actual bottleneck, the question is not which tool to add. It is who does the work. The Shopify SEO guide walks through the full set of jobs so you can decide which ones to hand off.

A one-hour monthly routine

You do not need a dashboard. You need a habit small enough that you actually keep it.

Minutes 1 to 15. Search Console, Performance report. Compare the last 28 days to the previous 28. Note your top 10 pages by clicks and any that dropped.

Minutes 15 to 25. Pages report. Check whether the number of indexed pages went up as you added products and posts. Open any new "Not indexed" reason you have not seen before.

Minutes 25 to 40. Pick the five collection or product pages with the most impressions and the lowest click rate. Rewrite their title and description in the Shopify admin. Write the date in a notes file.

Minutes 40 to 50. Run PageSpeed Insights on your home page and one collection. If a score fell sharply, think about what you installed or changed since last month.

Minutes 50 to 60. Test one new product page in the Rich Results Test. Then stop.

That is the whole routine. Done every month, it beats a flashy tool opened twice a year. And if you find after three months that the routine produces a list you never get through, that is useful information too. It tells you the bottleneck is hands, not data.

How RunOctopus handles this

The free tools tell you what is wrong. They stop there, and the writing is what most store owners never get to.

RunOctopus is a done-for-you service. Its AI, Ollie, researches your business, then writes and publishes pages directly on your own website. A team plans, writes, reviews and publishes alongside Ollie. It works with Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce and Wix.

There is nothing to install, nothing to approve, nothing to upload and nothing to schedule. You do not approve each page. Pages go live on their own. In the first week you get 8 long-form articles, 6 pages and a custom interactive tool built for your niche. After that it is 175+ pieces of content a month, written, published and linked. You also get reports on where ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini name your business.

There is a 90-day promise: more visibility on Google and in AI answers within 90 days, measured against the 90 days before you joined, or every dollar back. For scale, an agency doing this work charges about $3,209 a month (2026 average, 439 providers) and publishes 4 to 12 pieces.

You can see what Ollie would do for your store before you decide anything. Paste your address into the free site read. Ollie reads the site and shows the plan. No account, no call.