Best Apps for Shopify Blogs

Would it be nice to have access to have an intuitive feature-focused and user friendly plug-in app that enables inserting a Table of Contents into your Shopify blogs, articles and web pages without a lot of effort? How about a blog formatting app, instant search app and SEO optimization app, all designed to power up your Shopify store?

There are some highly-rated tools available today that make your Shopify blogs more visually appealing and your content more convenient for readers looking for particular information and your SEO efforts more productive. Following are some of the best apps that get outstanding reviews by users.

Table of Contents App

Jump Links

The Jump Links is the only app available to add a Table of Contents to your blog. We are using it on this very blog post in fact :) It helps with content navigation could be called a customer convenience tool.

Often, Shopify blog and article readers want to go straight to the information they need and not spend a lot of time searching through titles and content. Jump Links app meets the needs of these readers and improves the SEO of the blog at the same time by efficiently creating a clickable Table of Contents (TOC). The TOC is a valuable addition to every blog but especially the longer ones.

Read this blog post for more information on the SEO benefits of a Table of Contents.

The Jump Links app produces a list of headings automatically extracted from blog, article or webpage text. It gives readers a quick overview of the main topics in list form and each entry is clickable. But it does more than just make information searching faster and easier for users by directly sending them to the information desired. Even the most attractive blog needs marketing, and that is another role of the Jump Links app. The availability of internal jump links (aka anchor links and content links) improves content navigation and SEO which leads to higher customer engagement.

You can effectively and easily get SEO benefits by enhancing your existing content with a Jump Links TOC:

• Clearly and concisely organize your content at the top of each blog post to provide an overview of the blog’s main sections, giving readers a positive professional experience from the start when landing on your site
• Users can find information of interest at a glance
• Reduces the bounce rate
• Keywords in clickable headings promote better discovery and ranking by search engines
• User convenience leads to higher user engagement as they go directly from the search engine results to the right information, making them less likely to return to search results
• Increases probability of other blogs linking to your blog or article posts which in turn increases authority

The features of Jump Links include, but are not limited, to the following:

• Analyzes all types of content to create a personalized TOC, including blog posts, articles and web pages
• Table of Contents is auto-inserted
• Compatible with a variety of themes and styles
• Included themes make it possible to easily change how the TOC appears
• Ability to create custom themes
• Customizable options that include title color, background color, border color and link color
• Choose to include the TOC automatically based on activated content type
• Straightforward controls that make it easy to format the exact location and configuration of the TOC
• Optional use of bullet points which are configurable as numeric-style or decimal-style
• Prioritization based on a hierarchy of important headings identified as H1-H6
• Select specific headings for the TOC, or let the plug-in app choose headings automatically
• Seamless browsing and increased accessibility
• Optional Smooth Scroll

Jump Links runs on its own server, so you have no worries about your page speed being compromised. The Jump Links development team is readily available to directly interact with customers interested in requesting new features.

The app is easy to install with a couple of clicks, and once installed, simple to run. You can expect the addition of new features based on customer feedback, and they will be automatically made available as the app is upgraded. There is one low monthly fee which enables full access to all of the app features.

Blog Formatting Apps

Three of the most popular and useful blog formatting platforms designed to work in Shopify are purchasing a Blog Theme, or paying monthly for Blog Studio or DropinBlog.

Purchase a Blog Theme (one time expense)

This is our preference. inSTUDIO43 developed the blog theme .co|co for Shopify that is designed to connect an online business with the blog section. The company inSTUDIO43 develops html, Shopify and WordPress templates, and the .co|co template is one of the themed templates in the Shopify line. Installation is just a matter of uploading the coco zipped file via the Shopify dashboard. The .co|co theme includes a variety of styles, so you can choose the one that best fits, and offers customizable colors you control on the site. You can share blog posts, promotions, and products with customers or display things like FAQs or product reviews.

Some of the features include the following:

• Homepage Slider Banner and Pages Slider Banner
• 5 product layout options
• 2 collection layout options
• 13 page layout options
• 3 theme styles
• Upload your own logo
• Control your site colors
• Multiple section options
• Pop-up integrated
• Fully responsive

The company has unlimited support and is available 24-7 with a maximum response time of 24-hours. You purchase a license type which determines how many physical or digital end products for sale and how many business social media sites can utilize the licensed asset and conveys other rights.

Blog Studio

The Blog Studio app enables the creation of fully formatted and customizable articles on your Shopify Store. Developed by ShopPad, the core functionality is intuitive drag-and-drop, allowing users to edit their older articles or build new articles by choosing pre-built elements. This app is great for helping with the creation of blogs and will work with any Shopify template. Best of all, you are not required to know how to code.

Beyond the intuitive drag-and-drop interface, features include the following:

• Create new articles or edit existing ones
• Choose from among numerous built-in components that include headlines, pricing, bylines, “how it works” maps, video, profiles, images (parallax and animation), buttons, achievements, testimonials, more than 600 fonts, and a variety of styling options; new components are frequently added
• Configure tags, authors, SEO title and meta descriptions
• Upload a featured image for each blog
• Use advanced editor for the direct editing of raw code, giving you the ability to fine tune your article
• Save customized templates to use on future articles
• Quickly and easily duplicate, create, delete, and change the visibility of your blog articles
• See how your articles will appear on a desktop computer and mobile and tablet devices while you are writing
• Option of integrating Blog Studio and Mesa for Shopify no-code workflows that include actions like syncing articles across multiple stores, posting an article when a new Shopify product is added and more

Another nice feature of using Blog Studio is that the articles are fully responsive and mobile ready, saving you the headache of making your content accessible, legible and usable across devices. Mobile-ready means the article is ready to be viewed on any size screen.

DropInBlog

DropInBlog was built to integrate the features of Shopify’s built-in blog and WordPress to enable creating an SEO friendly blog. It is a product that gives non-WordPress site users a solution for embedding a blog on a website that is using a platform that does not automatically come with a blog function installed. Incorporating WordPress features is particularly useful because Shopify does not permit hosting a WordPress blog on your main domain. So you get the advantages of WordPress without needing WordPress. It installs on your Shopify site with one click and lives in a subfolder on your main domain.

The goal of DropInBlog is to help Shopify users install blogs for content marketing purposes – drive more traffic via SEO. It does not claim to be a visual editor. It is a straightforward blog platform.

DropInBlog has many built-in features focused on SEO with the most impressive including the following:

• Installed blog automatically uses your Shopify store’s layout, fonts, colors, and other formatting, but you also have the ability to customize or to use a template and build from there
• Can embed products into any post with one click, and customers can add the products to their shopping cart
• Easily add YouTube and other videos to blog posts
• Import and redirect older Shopify blog posts
• Able to schedule future posts
• Offers image management
• Can highlight to share
• Manages multiple authors and categories
• Can get immediate feedback on SEO via DropInBlog’s SEO Analyzer scores with no plugin required

Since DropInBlog runs on your Shopify domain, security is enhanced. Because you do not plug-in WordPress blogs, you do not have to worry about things like staying current with security patches. Instead, your blogs are as secure as your Shopify site.

Related Blog Posts App

Related Blog Posts is a free Shopify app that lets you suggest your other blog posts on your Shopify blog for better SEO and engagement of potential and current customers. Reader engagement is important to marketing and probably one of the hardest things to achieve. It is too easy for readers to click away.

This app strives to:

• Keep readers on your site as long as possible by recommending additional articles you have published inside your store that are most likely to be of interest based on the blog just read (add the recommendations at the end of the blog)
• Increase reader engagement by pointing to interesting information that has value for the reader, demonstrating your interest in helping readers meet their needs
• Boost SEO by creating quality internal links and improving Google’s crawlability of older blog posts

Some of the customization options include the ability to:

• Set the number of related posts to display to improve readership
• Use the blog post’s feature image to increase the click-through rate
• Decide which blogs to display the recommendation on
• Exclude posts if they use a specific tag
• Exclude posts from showing as a related post
• Choose blogs to display on articles or events
• Style the related posts to your satisfaction
• Handle multiple blogs, meaning related blog posts will only appear for the same blog

This app was created by the Shopify Marketing Expert agency Digital Darts and is free.

Multi-Store Hreflang Tags App

Multi-Store Hreflang Tags

The Multi-Store Hreflang Tags app is for people who have multiple Shopify stores for the same business, and the stores are serving different countries and languages. A hreflang tag and an HTML link <link> tag attribute informs search engines which language or regional URLs to present in search results based on the language and country preferences the searcher identified. You want the search engine to send readers to the site where content is presented in their own language. You could call this search localization. The hreflang tag also prevents the search engine from penalizing you for duplicate content on multiple stores.

There is a reason the Multi-Store Hreflang Tags are necessary. Most Shopify stores do hreflang tags with a {} value which refers to the original version of a blog first published on another site. If you have two or more similar pages that are each eligible to rank for certain keywords or key phrases, the search engine does not know which of the two URLs it should send traffic to. The canonical URL tells the search engine which one to show in search results.

The issue in Shopify is that you need the multiple stores to be identical in terms of products, pages, collections, blogs, blog tags and articles, and they must have the same URL handle. If there are differences, the tags will point to 404s or non-existent pages. The search engine will end up crawling non-existent pages, meaning you lose organic traffic. Since stores in different languages cannot be identical, SEO suffers from the use of standard Shopify hreflang tags.

Multi-Store Hreflang Tags tackled this issue, so you can increase sales from organic search through optimal hreflang tags. People doing searches are taken to the right store for their region and language.

The app enables:

• Improving the user experience by using URL handles in the same language as the Shopify store
• Integration with Shopify’s native language translation that is used by most language apps that include Weglot, Translate My Store, and Langify
• Installing the app on each store with in any language for SEO purposes
• Automatic or manual installation of liquid, Shopify’s templating language that connects an HTML file and a data store
• Instant mapping of products to each other based on SKU values
• Instant mapping of articles, collections, blogs, and pages with the same URL handle
• Works for all content types

There is a monthly charge for this app.

Site Search Apps

Smart Search & Instant Search

Smart Search & Instant Search by Searchanise is a well-tested app that enables Shopify merchants to optimize the website search experience. The smart tools create a customer experience that guides the customer across all the product search and discovery touchpoints by letting you create a customized smart search and filters plus product or services recommendations. The goal is to increase conversion rates.

Customers begin typing in the search bar and a dropdown menu makes product, categories, and content pages suggestions in a single widget. The suggestions or recommendations are based on the words typed by the user. The all-in-one app routinely gets high ratings from users.

App features include the following:

• Seamlessly integrates into the Shopify store’s search bar
• Spell check and typo autocorrection
• Instant search suggestions that delivers a detailed product preview that includes price, thumbnail, vendor, label, product type, in-stock status and reviews
• Suggestion dictionary
• “Did you mean” feature to help the customer get some type of search result
• Multilingual search support of more than 6,000 languages
• Keyword-based redirects to encourage customers to buy more than the product of interest
• Ability to hide products based on availability or tag
• Up and cross-selling widgets via recommendation blocks
• Profound analytics and detailed reports for tracking effectiveness
• Ability to add “Quick View” and “Add to Cart” buttons
• Integrates with Yotpo Reviews, Shopify Product Reviews, Judge.me, langify, Stamped.io and Wishlist Plus

Smart Search & Instant Search have auto filters and also give you the ability to add product filters to promote quick results for customers.

• Vertical and horizontal filter menu
• dynamic filters that include price, product types, vendor, size, color and more
• Unlimited number of customizable filters
• Filter by tags and metafields

You can optimize search results with rule-based product merchandising and add Upsell and Cross-Sell Widgets. Analytics reports give you deep insights into how your customers search on your store site. The app is optimized for mobile. This is the most reviewed search app for Shopify and Shopify Plus. It has one-click implementation and two pricing options. The Starter plan is free and covers 25 products. The very affordable PRO 1 plan is billed once a year and covers up to 500 products.

Instant Search & Filters

Instant Search & Filters is a search and merchandising app that increases the likelihood a shopper using search will purchase an item. It is a set of modules with each module performing a unique job. You can choose to only use AI Search & AutoComplete or use this option plus add a set of filters and merchandising options.

The search analytics provides a wealth of information in reports on search terms your customers used, search terms producing no results, search impact, search per platform and keyword conversion. You can get an Autocomplete Report, Product Report, Filter Usage Report, Collection Conversion Report and Product Recommendation Impact Report.

Audio Tool App

Audio Player

Audio Player simplifies adding audio content to your website through a responsive easy-to-use coding-free widget you add. This tool is used by people who want to promote their new music releases or enhance the website visitor’s experience with music or other audio options. Using the music widget helps to create a mood for your users, diversifies the user experience and increases user engagement.

Audio Player offers a set of Elfsight Apps. You can add all types of audio content to your website using Elfsight Music. The Player is an easy-to-use tool that enables creating a playlist. The Audio widget for marketing adds additional website music player operability.

Following are some of the top features of Audio Player:

• Enables sharing your favorite music releases or new releases, creating an audio library and presenting audio shows. You can also add podcasts
• Supports sources that include YouTube, SoundCloud, Vista, Vimeo, Google Drive, Amazon and more
• Can upload an unlimited number of tracks by URL or from your device
• Can use Player to create a playlist, loop and shuffle audio files, enable autoplay and choose where you want the widget located on the webpage
• Use Audio marketing solutions to add the option for customers to download your audio tracks first-hand from the website, direct people to a specific purchase page at an online marketplace where you distribute audio content and add marketplace icons to your website player
• Can choose different design styles that include recoloring elements to match your website colors, add a dark color scheme and/or add the author’s name, title and progress bar

The Audio Player Elfsight apps are easy to install, understand and use. There are four pricing plans. Lite is free. Additional pricing options include Basic, Pro and Enterprise, and all are very affordable on a monthly basis.

SEO Optimization Apps

SEO Manager

SEO Manager is exactly what the name implies – an SEO tool. It helps your Shopify store rank better in search engines, like Google, by making it easier to identify, understand and implement SEO measures. By simplifying the SEO strategy, the app gives you more control of how search engines see the store and provides feedback on the search engine optimization efforts. The step-by-step approach of the app guides you through its many features while also offering help documents.

The many features of this app include the following:

• Reduce 404 errors by identifying broken links and automating the process for fixing them with the process including 404 error logging, 404 error management, 404 export/import and real-time 404 repairs
• Edit titles and descriptions
• Title templating
• Keywords field and Focus/Keyword suggestions
• SEC issues scan and scan suggestions
• Image ALT text issues scan
• Index/No Index
• Google page speed integration, Google mobile friendly test, Google knowledge graph support, Google sitemap submission, Google trends integration and Integrated Google Search Console analytics
• Advanced meta descriptions
• Product “unavailable after” meta
• Redirect on “out of stock”
• Sitemap management
• JSON-LD Data (snippet of JavaScript code) Support
• Works with Google, Google Search Console, Bing and Kit
• Local business structured data

There is one monthly subscription rate.

SEO Optimizer: All-in-one SEO

The SEO Optimizer All-in-one SEO app is also designed to simplify the complexities of SEO in order to improve SEO rankings. There are two core components of SEO which is technical SEO optimization (On-Page SEO) and building reputable backlinks (Off-Page SEO). This app focuses only on On-Page SEO and does not build backlinks.

The app includes the following features:

• Optimize image ALT tags to improve image search traffic
• Ensure the meta title and meta description are relevant and optimized
• Monitor and automatically redirect broken links
• Manage Google Snippets and automatically add JSON-LD to your store
• Reduce the file size of images with the image compression image to decrease the time of page loads
• Use the AutoPilot feature to fix SEO issues based on rules that are customizable
• Use the URL Key Optimization tool to ensure properly structured URLs
• Automatically build, maintain and submit your store’s sitemap to Google so ensure every page is indexed and crawled
• Receive weekly SEO Health Reports in your inbox

The SEO Optimizer All-in-one SEO app has one-click install and an option for a free plan or a feature-rich PRO plan. Customer support is based in the United States.

Shopify Apps Make it Easier to Grow Businesses

These are just some of the apps available to enhance the customer experience and strengthen SEO. Each app offers a unique set of features designed to make it much easier to apply one or more SEO strategies that are often too complex for Shopify store owners to master. You can make a prioritized list of features that will deliver the most value for your Shopify store and decided from that which apps address your needs.